Unsolved: The Case of the Early-riser

Dear Martha,

I sincerely apologize for accusing you of Wall Street Journal hogging. I received bad information via the Harris Teeter and was not a responsible researcher. Mom went to your restaurant this afternoon to see if you were selling the WSJ. Alas! You were not.

The Paper Pig is still on the loose. We think it's the Belle Meade Country Club. They began serving breakfast on Saturdays about two months ago, which is when this WSJ shortage began. More investigative research to follow next weekend.

Wherefore Art Thou, Kitty?

Something is going on with the cat. Last week, he came home with the unfamiliar flea collar. Everything seemed normal after that incident. Then, yesterday he didn't show up for his morning milk and he was still missing that evening.

We looked all over the neighborhood, but couldn't find him. Then there was a big storm in the middle of the night, which just made me more afraid for our kitty. After lots of pouting and a few little tears at the thought of losing Krispie forever, he showed up this morning yowling at the back door.

He wasn't hungry or wet. Hmm, that's curious. Where had he been? He should have told us if he was planning to spend the night with a friend. We didn't think he had any friends, but a neighbor four houses up told Tom last night that Krispie often comes over to play with his cat, Oscar. We've never heard about Oscar. What if Krispie has another life with another family?

Now he is sitting regally on his Mizuno shoe box throne in the kitchen. I feel much better that he's home, but I fear he will go away again soon. Has he found another home that he loves more?

Solved: The Case of the Early-riser

Last Saturday, I woke up at 6:00 a.m. to my phone having a conniption fit. I stumbled out of bed and picked it up to see what was so important. Tom had sent me three text messages. They read as follows:

5:59 a.m. at the door


The witness


Now we know *

Mystery of the Early-riser solved by an earlier riser. I still can’t decide which of these scenes is my favorite. Is it the watch documenting the time in the first or is it the poor Harris Teeter employee who arrived at work at 6:00 a.m. only to be sucked into one family’s mission to expose a neighborhood blight?

Although this was supposed to be a family assignment, Mom and I copped out the night before because the thought of waking up at 5:30 in 30-degree weather was really unappealing. Had I known that I’d be getting up at 6:00 anyway, I might have made a bigger effort to go along as the wheelman.

Unbeknownst to anyone, Tom awoke early and drove down to Harris Teeter to catch the W2. He documented the Wall Street Journal drop-off and entered the store at 6:00 when it opened. All of the timing had been confirmed with a phone call to Harris Teeter from the dinner table the night before. Tom has Harris Teeter on speed dial. I am not joking.

Once in the store, he cornered the WSJ keeper and asked again who took the papers each Saturday morning. Seeing no way out of this interrogation, the keeper answered, “Oh, the lady who owns the restaurant down the street comes in and takes them.” Martha! The whole time the W2 had been right under our noses – on our very street no less!

Martha owns the Belle Meade Mansion restaurant named, well, Martha’s. Technically, it’s called Martha’s at the Plantation, but no one calls it that. According to her web site, Martha believes that cooking is an act of love and she wholeheartedly supports sustainable food systems. Yes, both of these are very nice philosophies. You know what’s also a nice philosophy? Sharing!

The Harris Teeter WSJ keeper also told Tom that a man had once confronted Martha about her WSJ stealing. So she knows! She knows that other people are Journal-less on Saturdays and she doesn’t care! Shame on you, Martha! You were really upset when the people in the neighborhood picked all of your tomatoes. Wall Street Journals don’t grow on vines, but the concept is the same here. I’d like to see a newspaper vine . . . .

Martha also mentions on her web site that she would be happy to talk to you about anything that’s on your mind. I wonder if she’d like to talk about this. Actually, I’m thinking about going down to Martha’s this Saturday and buying every single one of those Wall Street Journals back.

“Good morning. I heard you carry the Wall Street Journal.”
“Why yes, indeed, we do.”
“Oh, super. I’d like to buy all of them.”
“All of them?”
“Yes, I’d like to buy all of them. Is that a problem for you?”

* Note reads: "Martha ?? We know who you are & what you are doing. -- Avid Reader(s)"

Cornify-ment

Paul, my favorite thing to do now is to Cornify things. It makes it all so mystical and enchanting. If only I could Cornify the world . . . .

Around Town

Cedar Tree (Belle Meade Mansion)

Three Leaves in the Garden

Fish Lamp at Mary's

The Curious Case of the Cat & the Collar

The mysteries are multiplying. Today, the cat came home with a flea collar. We haven't put one on him in about 13 years . . . .

Whence did this collar come? We may never know.

How to Feign an Interest

So I “auditioned,” that’s what they call it, to teach the Kaplan GMAT class this evening. My fellow auditioners and I were asked to present a 5-minute presentation on how to do something non-academic. I taught 3 Vanderbilt boys and a remedial high school teacher how to paint a fence. Yep . . . how to paint a fence. I’d say the topic was about an 8 on a 10-point lameness scale, but it got the job done. I even referenced an imaginary book entitled Fence Painting. Yep, I just referenced an imaginary fence printing manual in what was essentially a job interview.

The first boy walked us through the fraternity recruiting process without mentioning beer once, which was pretty impressive. The second taught us how to make ravioli. The teacher gave us a quick lecture on counting carbs that ended with an anecdote about a grandmother, diabetic candies and diarreah. The last boy presented the riveting piece (I know, I shouldn’t throw stones), “How to Use Chopsticks,” but he never really got to the “how to use” part. Anyway, he gave us a whole run-down on the history of the chopstick. The earliest chopsticks date back to 1200 b.c. Chopsticks then described the different materials from which chopsticks could be made. They can be fashioned out of wood, bamboo, ivory, jade or metal.

When he mentioned the last material, Chopsticks exclaimed, “Although, I don’t know why anyone would want to stick metal in their mouth!” And I’m thinking to myself, “Um, you mean, like a fork?”

I hope that good fences make good impressions and that I move one step closer to teaching. No, it’s not at all my dream job, but it’s a job. It’s a job that I can do here or in New York or even Paris. Hopefully, it will be a job that will earn me enough money to move to a place where I can find something that’s a bit more luxurious.

The Mysterious Case of the Early-riser

When I lived in big cities, I was surrounded by mysteries. They popped up everywhere. In New York, I wondered:

• What were the dreams of Caesar, the boy who fixed my coffee every morning before I even ordered it?
• Why was it so important that day that the drycleaner chase me down the street yelling “Beeeeshop!” just to tell me that he was holding a package for me?
• Was Homeless Babbo Natale actually homeless . . . and was that his girlfriend?
• Why did Shirtless Old Man have such a humongous Chinese paper light? Why did he prefer placing a fan in the window every single night rather than buy an air-conditioning unit . . . and was that his girlfriend?

In Paris, the mysteries seemed even greater since I knew fewer people and didn’t speak the language fluently.

• Why did the tenant in the building next to us adorn his window with real x-rays? (Creepy!)
• Why did the crazy lady on the 1st floor always come out of her apartment to tell me that Clovis the Cat wasn’t her cat, whenever I stopped to pet him?
• How was it possible that I still functioned on such an enormous lack of sleep?
• Why did the hobo spit on Jody and why wasn’t that other guy wearing pants in the Metro?

Here in Nashville, though, the mysteries are dwindling. People share too much. I have discovered a few, although none are as colorful as the unknown motivations of the spitting hobo or the pantless rider.

• What are the dreams of Matt, the boy who fixes Mary and my coffee and entertains us at Bread & Co. in the morning?
• Why do people continue to use street names when giving me directions when they know that I operate on a strictly landmark mapping system here?
• Why does the cat simply stare at the corner of the dining room for an uncomfortable amount of time most nights?

I hope to never understand the answer to the third mystery, but the first two could be solved easily enough. The second really isn’t a mystery so much as a frustrating fact. Just as I feared that all of the mysteries would be lost, however, one most mysterious mystery presented itself at the most mysterious place of all, the grocery store.

On Saturdays, Tom goes to the Harris Teeter to buy the Wall Street Journal. Every Saturday the Harris Teeter has sold out of the Wall Street Journal and Tom must go down the street to the Kroger. Tom mentions this to the Harris Teeter manager most Saturdays. The manager doesn’t seem to care. A few Saturdays ago, Tom went to the Harris Teeter particularly early and still they were sold out. But how? How does a Harris Teeter in Nashville sell all of their Wall Street Journals before noon every single Saturday? When Tom posed this question to the keeper of the WSJs, the keeper replied that a man comes every Saturday right when they open and he buys all of the Wall Street Journals – every last one.

Tom proposed a logical solution, “Why don’t you order more copies?”
The keeper responded, “Well, he buys every one we have.”

Yes, clearly that is the soundest explanation. It’s entirely reasonable to assume that no matter how many copies of the WSJ you ordered, this mystery man would purchase all of them (never mind that he is buying them to resell them somewhere else). Anyway, there are many ways to solve this problem – order more copies, put one aside for Tom, tell the reseller that he can’t buy more than 3 – but how to solve the problem isn’t nearly as intriguing as how to solve the mystery of the WSJ Weasel (aka "W-squared" or "W2").

We have a few theories. As a family, we have narrowed the W2’s location down to the stretch of Highway 70 between the Kroger in Bellevue and the Harris Teeter in Belle Meade. Our method wasn’t interesting enough to describe here. The W2 could be the manager of the Bellevue Publix, which isn’t yet on the WSJ route, but will be soon. We think he might be the proprietor of the Loveless Motel, but we’ve yet to call to confirm that they offer the Wall Street Journal in the restaurant on Saturdays.

Unfortunately, the most effective way to solve this mystery is for us to show up at the Harris Teeter on a Saturday before it opens and go from there. We are currently in the planning stages of attack. To be continued, of course . . . .

The Arrow & the Song

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, who has sight so keen and strong
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

From the Neighborhood

Window of the Dairy (Belle Meade Mansion)

Mossy Roof (Belle Meade Mansion)
Stone Wall (Belle Meade Mansion)

Middle School Memories

Last week, I went to see Ben & Abby play in their last basketball games of the season. Indeed, I had a few flashbacks to my own middle-school basketball experiences, namely, this:

and the festive smell of stale concession stand popcorn mixed with the odor of gym, consistently spelling “aggressive” incorrectly during the “be aggressive, b-e-a-g-g-r-e-s-s-i-v-e” cheer, and Lacy’s absolute hatred of playing actual games. I would have posted a picture of Lacy on the court, but I don’t have one. I seem to remember that she scheduled appointments with the dentist or doctor whenever she had a game. Maybe that only happened once. She’ll have to confirm. (And yes, I did misspell “aggressive” yet again when I first wrote it out in cheer form just now.)

Abby played on Monday night with her 6th-grade team. It was a low-scoring, but fun game. Passing seems to be a challenging skill to acquire. Ben then played in a tournament at USN on Saturday. I’m always a little leery of stepping inside USN because there was a rumor among the Harpeth Hall Honeybears that the USN kids, whenever their school played ours, handed out Teddy Grahams and bit the heads off of them.

Anyway, Ben played a game in the morning and the Tigers won by a landslide. In between Ben’s two games, one of the Ensworth girls’ teams played my alma mater. The Ensworth team came out like gangbusters and started running practice drills the second the warm-up clock started. I watched them for a minute and then looked across the court to see 4 Harpeth Hall girls standing around stretching, as my dad said, “like a bunch of flamingos.” The game was a little brutal. My Honeybears didn’t win.

In the next game, Ben’s team played David Lipscomb, a team with a 6’2” kid and a bully with a bad attitude. Unfortunately, the Tigers didn’t win, but Ben had the best game ever. He attempted 7 3-pointers and made 5 of them! So amazing!

Basketball

Wild Birds at Play

Emerging from the brush.

Bela & Felix Arwen

A Man & His Cat

Protecting the yard.