You Learn Something New Every Day

My mother used to say, when surprised by some revelation, trivial or otherwise, “You learn something new every day.”  I suppose all mothers say that at one time or another.  Today turned out to be chock full of things I hadn’t known.  In several different conversations and observations, this is what I learned today.

That moles are carnivores, and voles are herbivores, that you can catch voles in your garden by setting a mouse trap with a tulip bulb ( I don’t know what you do if it is off season for tulip bulbs), then put a clay flower pot upside down over the trap – they like the dark of course.  Her friend caught nineteen, count ‘em nineteen, voles in her garden that way. 

I learned that a man with a slice of pizza who doesn’t know the glass door is closed, will give himself a hard knock to the head when he tries to walk thru it, but then will go back for napkins, peel his slice off the door and continue on his way.  I learned that two sixty-something women, having observed the “man with a slice”  routine will laugh so hard they can’t even speak, and then both compare it to being ten years old in church with the giggles.

I’ve learned that a fine young man can be a solace to me as a friend; that he expects naught and listens with respect, that I can make him laugh even as I offer sound advice and encouragement, that we have a knack for mutual philosophizing that crosses the age barrier; I learned that his best friend, his only friend, has moved South and he indeed misses him, though he would never verbalize that fact. I learned that he is more vulnerable and more timid than I realized, and that he has a trust in me that I will respect and treasure.

I learned, as my hair was being pulled and snipped and chopped, that a beautiful young women had, in the hair wizard’s opinion, gone “from a ten to a zero”  when he observed her toenails, long and curved and unpolished. “She looked like a salamander!” he kept repeating.  “Such a beautiful girl, I almost told her what a turn-off it was, but it wasn’t my place.”