Little Jack Horner

“Little Jack Horner
Sat in a corner,
Eating a mincemeat pie.
He stuck in his thumb
And pulled out a plum,
And said, "What a good boy am I!"”
(From the Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes)

This was one of those life’s incidents that the Muse tickled your funny bones and compelled you to write it down:

“Little Jack Horner
Sat in a corner,
Eating a mincemeat pie. . .”

In this case, he was eating a meat pie of a Hamburg variety, commonly known in the USA as a hamburger. He was eating one of those hamburgers you saw currently on a TV commercial, where the actor’s mouth area was smeared with ketchup and meat sauce after he sank his choppers into one. We were on a transit train heading into the city on a lazy Saturday afternoon. The seats were not fully occupied, mostly with one passenger on a two-occupant seat. He was sitting in a corner of a bench seat facing the opposing train door entrance, a seat normally reserved for disabled person or senior citizen. I was sitting on a bench seat adjacent and at a right angle to his. He looked like a boy not much over sixteen. And for all I know, his name could be Jack.

“Eating a mincemeat pie. . . .”

At the next train station, in came a pair of teenage girls about his age. They stood by the door and did not sit down, as there was no seat available that was completely empty. They chatted excitedly and giggled from time to time about a boy they knew, and then they took notice of Little Jack Horner. The mincemeat pie-eater, on the other hand, glanced up from his relentless attack on his pie and looked pleased at the girls’ attention. He tried his best smile but came across constipated as he struggled to smile while trying to restrain his mouthful potpourri of chewed meat, bread, tomato and onion from spilling out of his pursed lips.

“Eating a mincemeat pie. . . .”

The two girls alternated between amused smiles and giggles as they spoke in conspired whispers and threw sideway looks of darts at Jack. All smile drained from Jack Horner. He looked confused and overwhelmed as his brain tried to process the two opposing sensations. The gratifying oral sensation of food that provided him with a sense of security and fulfillment competed vehemently with the empty sinking feeling of rejection from the visual darts the two pretty girls hurled his way. This little drama caught the attention of some passengers sitting nearby.

His face flushed red; Little Jack resumed his attack on his meal with sudden, renewed vigor. He now employed a two-pronged approach and advanced his assault on two fronts, biting off a big chunk of hamburger with one corner of his mouth and stuffing another corner with French fries. He was apparently trying to drown out his embarrassment and presumption that the girls were hitting on him. He felt the ever-widening ocean of division between him and the girls. All hopes of joining up with them for a Saturday night out were out of question.

The two girls took no pity and continued to lob their intercontinental visual missiles of evil eyes at the poor boy. The boy looked bewildered at first and then realized that their presumed targets were directed not to his overstuffed face. They fired and aimed much lower, more to the south of the equator. Little Jack Horner looked down at his lap. I don’t want to make a mountain out of a mole hill; but that was no small bump on the plain of Spain. There, rising six inches from the crotch of his khaki pants, appeared what I recalled from one poem “The cloud-pitched tent of Prester John”, capped with dripping pink mayonnaise. There the girls aimed their hostile glances of darts.

I smiled to myself. My sympathy went to the boy as I recalled an incident of wardrobe misfunction, mind you, not malfunction. Obviously, the pants I wore that day created an erect flap in the crotch area when sitting down. Two ladies standing a distance away gave me the same eye treatment. After I realized that, I stood up and the Viagra effect was gone and the ladies and I had a chuckle about it afterwards.

But his was not a mere flap; something more substantial was lurking unseen beneath to create this three-ring circus tent effect. It is not the length but the strength (hey, it rhymes!) that was impressive. Some may attribute this to the raging hormone of youth, sans Viagra. But I suspected a clearer explanation would be plain for everyone to see.

“He stuck in his thumb
And pulled out a plum. . . .”

The boys chuckled and shove the last bit of his meal into his mouth and got up. Then he grappled and wrestled out from his front side pants pocket a slender Apple iPod Shuffle. When he sat down again, the area around his lap was now as plain as Spain in the rain.

“And said, "What a good boy am I!"”

A verdict of not guilty was returned on the faces of the nearby ladies and gentlemen of the jury, with chuckles and knowing nods of dismissal. With this resounding proof of his "no ill intent or malice aforethought" towards the girls, all eyes were now on the rash accusers. They exit stage left in a hurry at the next stop. As the train began to pull away from the station, the girls were laughing hysterically and seemed to make fun and game out of this incident.

“Little Jack Horner
Sat in a corner,
Eating a mincemeat pie. . .”

As the train rambled towards its destination, Jack pulled out another hamburger from his paper bag and dug in. He now placed his Ipod in his front shirt pocket, put on the earpieces, tuned out the outside world and tuned in into his own.

And then he grappled
And pulled out an iPod Apple,
And said, "What a good boy am I!" “

So folks, everything is not what it first appears to be. Judge not and ye shall not be judged. Depending on the credibility and reliability of the source, believe in 90% of what you see, 80% of what you read and 50% of what you hear.
So how much should you believe in what you’ve just read here about this amusing incident? 85%? Riiiight! Had Einstein believed 100% of what he’d read on all the science books of his days, there would be no “Theory of Relativity”, no breakthrough in science. How much do should you believe that? Nullius in verba!

Personal Carbon Footprints

We have been hearing a lot about this term lately, to the effect that: "We should all do our parts to be environmentally friendly, to leave the least “personal carbon footprints" as possible in our daily life." But in the past week, I have encountered two incidents that were environmentally unfriendly, not to mention humanly unkind.

I was driving my family on a freeway to a friend’s house for dinner. The traffic was moving blithely at a leisure pace. Then I heard a car honking a series of "get out of my way" blasts from behind. I glanced at my rear view mirror and saw a black SUV weaving its way in and out of traffic and trying to get to nowhere fast. As the SUV zipped past me, its tailpipe belching out clouds of black exhaust, its driver kept blasting the car horn as if he was performing a CPR on his gagging car. Then it cut in front of a Toyota to my left, the driver in that Toyota yelled out "Hey, buddy, what’s your hurry? Heaven can’t wait?" A less cordial voice echoed him "Hey, it is better to shit in your pants, if that’s your hurry, than to get us all killed!" The gruffish man in the SUV, a huge monster of a gas guzzler, stuck his middle finger out in appreciation, hurled back a series of retorts sprinkled with the big "F" word as blatantly as his honkings and accelerated, leaving a trail of foul "personal carbon footprints" and smoky bad feelings behind him.

In another incident, I was eating an ecologically friendly dinner of organic vegetarian tofu dish with my family at a restaurant and in came a couple of corpulent proportion, both in weight and fashionable wealth. Their combined bio-mass must have tipped the scale at more than 500 U.S. avoirdupois pounds. I normally form opinions of people not by their appearances but by their behaviors. They parted the crowded restaurant’s traffic wave just as Moses parting the Red Sea. They walked as if they owned the right of way, charging ahead, yielding to no one and taking no prisoners.

In deference to their loud display of haute couture and lofty station in body index, a svelte and graceful hostess, probably an aspiring fashion model, led them to a roomy posh bench seat table close to ours. They mounted the seats as if ascending the thrones, making all the noisy fanfare of their presence by protesting it was not a good location, bad lighting, etc. The queen grilled and pestered the poor hostess with questions and pronouncements that put the Medieval Roman Catholic Church Inquisition to shame and the poor girl close to tears. Distracted by this noisy interruption to their quiet dinner and the rude treatment of the hostess, all the neighbor diners glanced at them askance. They belonged to the class of people called nouveaux riches, they demand respect where respect is not due and any small slight reminds them of where they have been.

Then they held court with a pile of food large enough to feed the Darfur refugee camp for a day or a troupe of fashion models for a month at the height of New York fashion show season (OK, I may have exaggerated a little). Talk about consummate consumption. Just as everyone thought the quiet had returned to the Western Front, then out came a cannon shot that’s heard all over this part of the haute cuisine world. Up shot the Queen of Hearts from her royal perch, red-faced, breaking loose a series of gale-force winds. She hurtled headlong towards the lady room and missing the royal flush along the way, dripping a trail of odorous "personal carbon footprints" behind her.

So, folks, be nice to your fellow man! Try your best to leave small "personal carbon footprints" for the rest of the world. Be environmentally and courtesy aware! Check out some of my social poetry at http://pfjchow.com/Documents/index.html