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I know a lady who lets oatmeal determine her day. I’m not kidding.

The Source

I know a lady who lets oatmeal determine her day. I’m not kidding. Every morning of her life she rises at 6:30, puts on the coffee, steps into the shower, then sits down to a breakfast of instant oatmeal. She never measures the amount of milk, opting instead to simply “eye it.” This means that on some mornings her oatmeal will be a bit mushy, on other days it’s dry, and about half the time she gets it just right. I suppose there’s nothing unusual about this, but as she sits down to her morning newspaper with the bowl of oatmeal, she looks at the mixture in her bowl and decides how her day will go. She firmly believes that however goes the oatmeal, so will go her day. She would no doubt laugh at the ancient shamans or present-day witch doctors who cut open a chicken and observe the bird’s entrails to foretell the future, but that’s exactly what she does every morning with her oatmeal. She believes it, and like reading a horoscope every day, she looks at her day through her oatmeal-colored glasses and sure enough it turns out that way. I know a lady named Lois who has a cure for bad luck at cards. If she’s losing her hand of poker or rummy, she’ll get up from the card table, light a match, and swish it around her chair saying, “Shoo…shoo…shoo.” Lois believes this dispels the demons in her deck. Every TV network now has its own reality show. Even the esteemed PBS recently aired a show called “Monastery” where four laymen were chosen to spend time among the monks and friars in hopes that one of them would crack and run (two of the four do.) There’s something about real people doing strange things that appeals to us. In the small town of Perry where I grew up we had a couple who’d slowly drive around town every night hoping to get a peek in someone’s window. I think they should be credited as the originators of the reality show. Arenzville used to have a man who owned only one pair of pants, a faded set of overalls. When once a week he’d decide to wash them, he’d hang them on the clothesline then take his guitar and sit on his front porch to croon Hank Williams tunes. If the weather was nippy he’d wear his long underwear. If it was moderate he’d opt for boxers, and on really hot nights you didn’t want to drive by his house until his overalls dried out. Last week I drove west on Morton and saw a guy stopping to kick the heads off every dandelion along the sidewalk. When I made the return trip two hours later he was strolling down the other side of Morton decapitating the yellow blossoms in the opposite direction. Maybe he worked for Bruce Surratt in the Parks Department. I used to go trail riding with a guy who talked to his horse. Seriously. I don’t mean the occasional “Good boy,” or “Easy, Ned.” Merle would chat with his horse as we road through the timber toward Siloam Springs on Sunday afternoons. They’d talk politics, corn prices, the chances of the Cardinals winning the pennant. Even this could be excused as slightly eccentric, but when occasionally I’d hear Merle say, “What? You don’t say?” it became obvious that Ned was talking back and that Merle understood every word. I always wanted to inquire further into this equine-human type of conversation but I was fearful that if Ned spoke to me I’d fall off my horse. A town in our area had a hotel with but one inhabitant. She ran the hotel and believed that it was full even though no one had stayed there in fifty years. Not only this, but she believed that her dead son was living in one of the rooms. Three times a day she’d fix his meal, place it in front of his door, then return a couple hours later to retrieve the empty plate. I’m not sure what her deceased son thought of her cooking but the rats relished her delicious delusions. I recently drank coffee with one of our local characters who happens to believe that our President was not born in the United States, thinks that there is a secret international club that controls all news and world events, and is absolutely convinced that alien beings are somehow in control of the U.S. government. Last week we were talking about TV reality shows. He said, “You know that’s all a put up job, don’t you? People can’t really be that nuts.” No, no. Not at all. I went home and peered in to my oatmeal.