I once spent twenty minutes trying to plug my toaster into a potato.
It didn’t work, but the potato seemed grateful for the attention.
That potato reminded me of my neighbor’s canoe, which he kept in his living room. He claimed it was a “conversation piece,” though no one ever spoke to it. He’d sit in it nightly, reading the newspaper, pretending the rocking was due to “indoor tides.”
Now, the canoe wasn’t the strangest thing about him. That honor went to his deep mistrust of weather vanes. He insisted they were “government spies for the wind.” He told me this during a long debate on whether dish soap could legally be called soup if served warm. Neither of us won; we just went back to eating crackers.
One day, he lent me the canoe for “land practice.” I paddled it across his front yard for an hour. He waved from the porch, nodding as if I’d passed some test. Then he shouted, “You’re ready for the carpet rapids!”
I never did find out if he meant that literally. But I learned an important lesson: never trust a man who paddles without water, unless you also paddle without water. Then you can trust each other completely.
