Blessed are the Monks in Swimming

It’s not every day you get to feel superior to Idina Menzel but I did for a second when I heard her say on the radio that she went to Hawaii to get married to actor Taye Diggs.“Yup it was a destiny wedding,” she said and ha HA! I thought; she said it wrong! She meant a destination wedding, the kind where your friends and family have to cough up a couple of grand for hotel and air fare just to see you lurch around drunk on a dance floor. (That’s sure what I did as a child bride. I didn’t even know what a Sloe Gin Fizz was until that day never mind what a bright pink stain it would leave on that fancy white dress now sleeping its charmed sleep on the top shelf of the linen closet, the mummified remains of little Terry Sheehy late of the Drama Club and Special Chorus, the biggest nerd in the nerdbox.)It didn’t last; the superior feeling I mean. Thirty minutes after hearing Idina make this mistake I was sitting before an industrial bunkbed salesman who was telling me how his company’s wood was so much better than some cheap old crap like oak.“Oak just sits there for 30 years", he said.“Unlike your wood which you can milk?” I said.Exactly!” he said. “They make these spirally cuts on the bark and out comes.... latex!”Latex? I thought. All I know about latex I know from that box of slippery gloves the doctor keeps on his shelf to scare us with. I had just been going for the joke, comparing trees to cows.He thought I was smart. A half-hour before I thought I was smart. The truth is no one is very smart for long; It’s like my little girl used to say in her four-year-old attempt  to recite the Lords’ Prayer: “Thy Kingdom come I will be dumb.”“You’re tellin’ me!” God says to Himself on hearing that one. Are we sure I’m the one who made you people?”