A Yarmulke, Silly Putty and $.51

As I have mentioned here before, my daughter is my best friend, well, one of two, but the other one I haven't yet met in person. She shares the same wacky and sometimes witty quick wit that I like to imagine that I have. But like me, it is only the people who know us best, who ever see any hint of it. We play off of each other better than Laurel and Hardy....But we are not safe to be in public places together because we never fail to engage in this strange phenomonon that I will describe and we never fail to cauese a disturbance. It usually occurs in boring situations where we are forced to wait.

Today it was at the Dept of Motor Vehicles...and we all KNOW how long and boring that can be. (Actually, I couldn't believe it when I learned that the DMV in our small Pocono town is only open on one day out of the week and only from 10:00 - 3:00!! This is a great contrast to the busy Manhattan suburban city I came from and lived in for most of my life...There, as I told my daughter today, you have to pack a lunch, bring dinner and be prepared to bear your first two children there because once you get on that line, you simply are NOT going ANYWHERE soon!)

So today, as we waited on line we began to talk, quietly at first...but as one or the other of us made witticism after wise crack, we fell into an old pattern: We just had to make a scene...

My daughter once had a doctor which we had to visit frequently when she was about 15 or so and this is the first occurence of one of these "episodes". On our first visit I noted, as we entered, the incredible number of instructional placards distributed in
every free inch of space both on the walls and on the tables. They said things like "DO NOT PLACE YOUR FEET ON THE FURNITURE" "NO GUM CHEWING IN THIS OFFICE" and "PLEASE RESTACK THE MAGAZINES YOU MESSED UP BEFORE EXITING"...We were handed, not the usual two or three pages to fill out, but literally a thick PACKET of forms...which they insisted were to be completed before we could see the doctor. So as I went through the forms, I began to be annoyed at the nosiness and impudence of the questions. Some of them were downright intrusive...stuff they had NO NEED to know. Like: "Where did your parents go to High
School?" And "Did they graduate?" Things like that). At least, that's how it seemed to me...and so I began to make up the funniest and most outrageous answers I could think of - and some of them, I believe, I actually wrote in.

My daughter picked up my cue...and with a wit and intelligence far exceeding her years, began to go on with her own commentary...And eventually our attention turned to the multitude of signs around the office and we began to say things like "Excuse me, but you forgot the one that says,..." and would create an even more preposterous demand than the ones which were already posted. Her jokes built on mine and I completed her sentences with an even funnier possibility as my thoughts began to rapid fire without my volition. Now as this progressed the receptionist peered over her half glasses and wrinkled her numerous frown lines at us as we continued to get louder and even more ridiculous and amusing as we continued....And we couldn't stop. It was a runaway freight train...and we had the overcrowded waiting room in stitches of stifled laughter.

But neither she nor I paid any attention to the people who sat giggling into their magazines...It was just she and I in that universe and we were having a blast. Well, the same thing happened today at the DMV. Now we live in, as I said, a small town,
so in a situation like this, there is a real possiblity of seeing someone you
know...but it didn't matter. Once again, we were in our own world of comedy and I was loving her and she was loving me...both admiring each other's proficiency with the English language and the adeptness of her thoughts which continued in a steady stream until we were called up to the desk to do our business there...and the people around us were either annoyed or guffawing with us.

And the title of my post today? Well, as my daughter beganto pull on a jacket that she hadn't worn all summer, since the last Fall; she reached into her pocket and began to laugh. In her pocket was a yarmulke (from her grandfather's Kosher funeral last November), a container of Silly Putty and 51 cents. She giggled at this odd
disparity and we had begun our inclination toward inanity before we even left the house.