When my brother was a teenager my dad bought him a motorcycle. One day dad was in the garage doing something to it and decided he was going to take it for a a spin despite the fact that he had not ridden a motorcycle before. As my brother, my mother and I stood at the top of the drive he reved it up and headed downhill toward the street. In the first and only time I heard my dad scream, he didn’t make the turn onto the street and ran right into the side of the neighboor’s car. I laughed so hard and so long I thought I was going to barf. He’s gone now, but this thread made me think about this story from all those years ago.
Once I was sitting with some friends in front of a café in Sabadell, a suburb of Barcelona. (This was the previous trip.) I was jokingly asking about the birdsellers on the Rambla back in Barcelona: why they all seemed to be selling chickens alongside the parakeets, canaries, etc. Who bought them?
At that moment, your classic Crazy Old Lady walked past, decked out in clothes of another era and a big hat, and carrying various appurtenances and carts that seemed to be full of her beloved animals: cats, rabbits, a parrot on her hat… and, in a grocery basket, at least two or three chickens.
No, he didn’t own it. He was a student at our high school. A couple years older than me. This act of defiance was pure poetry back in the day!!!
In a bar one night, a guy was carrying a tray with two beers and two sodas. He decides to take a short cut to his table across the dance floor, that, for some reason, was exceptionally slippery. He started to slide, his feet, working like cartoon feet to stay upright; total failure, he did a face plant dead center on the vacant dance floor, glasses smashed, soda spraying, but he sat up with both beers intact and apparently full. He was drenched with soda and ice, his wrist was cut, shirt torn, he even had glass in his hair but he had a huge grin, 'cause he’d saved those beers.