Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Missing The Point, Now In My 57th Year

At a baby shower this afternoon for a St. John's School colleague, we guests were offered the opportunity to guess the date and time Kellie's baby would be born. I wrote down the due date at 7:20 p.m., turned in my little slip of paper, and then spent a moment or two wondering whether they'd announce the name of the winner before the event was over. (Kellie's due date is in November.) When the St. John's youth group gathered tonight for their annual pumpkin carving, acolyte Hannah Schuh had to explain to me why the 16th letter of the Greek alphabet would make a good template for a jack o'lantern. Of course I was the guy who didn't notice until 2002 or so that the work Beatles contained the word "beat."

2 comments:

MK said...

Ha, I like it when people can make fun of themselves, good sign, in my book! I tend to attribute such things, as also absent mindedness, to too much data on the hard drive, LOL. Of course being a good former Nixon Presidential Project employee, when I see the Pi or pi symbol, I think President. Some of Nixon’s aides (Ehrlichman, Strachan) used the upper or lower case symbol in their handwritten notes (available in the collections at the Nixon Presidential Library) to mean President. (Haldeman used a capital P.) Glad to hear you’ve had some fun events to attend, in addition to more serious ones!

Fr. John said...

Thanks, MK. I picked up the pi-for-president from reading through the files that Frank Gannon (or someone working for him) kept during the Nixon memoirs project. He knew shorthand, so some of his notes were hard to follow, but "pi" was always president.