On the subject of tripping, imagine my surprise when I took a look closely at the new cell phone I was looking to purchase Wednesday (and did purchase last night) and saw this:

If you zoom in and look closely, along with letters in the English script are letters in the Jewish script from the Hebrew alphabet. And Jewish script is what it is called by scholars, according to that great source, Wikipedia, lest you think I’m being anti-Semitic. Which you shouldn’t anyway, since I bought this Jewish phone (my wife said I should call it a Hebrew phone, because she thought I might be too offensive), after all.

How did our local cell phone store get it?

They don’t know. It can’t be to supply the large Jewish community out here in the woods of northcentral Pennsylvania. I think I’ve met one Jew since we’ve moved here and I think she goes to a synagogue, which is about 60 miles away.

All of this somehow led my Caucasian wife and I, also Caucasian, both WASCs (White Anglo-Saxon Catholics), to a conversation about how many friends of the ethnic minorities (soon to be majorities) we have.

We have about one of each, and in some cases, two. The breakdown is as follows:

• ONE Jewish friend, who, bonus, is married to an African-American. TWO down.
• And another African-American, who is the boyfriend of my wife’s sister, and who probably will end up our brother-in-law, double bonus: we’ll have an African-American as a relative.
• ONE gay friend, who was in our wedding and to whom I always refer to my parents, as “Kim’s friend from high school, who was in the wedding, you know, the…(dramatic pause and then pronounced slowly and with a flourish)…LEZ-BE-AN.”
• THREE Asian friends, if you count Kim’s friend, Raj, who is from India. The other two are Soyoung, who is from Korea and who recently married my college roommate for some unknown reason (she’s hot and well, he’s…well, let’s just say if he wasn’t married, I thought we probably had two gay friends) and Tim, whom we met at a conservative Christian college we attended — if you can believe it — and who we always remember for saying once at a reunion in an art gallery full of people at the college, “Holy Shee-It. Holy Shee-it” upon seeing us. We don’t think he quite had the concept of the word being considered a swear word.
• HALF a Hispanic or Latino (depending on which terminology is in vogue this year) friend. I didn’t think we had any, but then my wife reminded me that we have a friend who is married to a woman who is half-Hispanic. So hey, we’ll count her.

To top it all off, when I mention to my mother that I have a Jewish phone, what does she say?

“Well, you’re not anti-Semitic, are you?”

Thanks, Mom, for the vote of confidence. Like suddenly I had strayed that far from the path I was raised and had hidden my Hitlerite tendencies all these years? (They’re in the basement, right next to my collection of Leninesque leanings and my Mussolini penchants.)

So we were talking about drugs and on that subject, sort of, in a roundabout way, of course, otherwise, why else would this be called a ramble? Remember from previous posts: rhetorical. Anyhoo…on the subject of drugs, because my wife was going to the Wal-Mart pharmacy when we had the following phone conversation: or should I say partly a running stream-of-consciousness monologue into which I only was able to break a couple of key times?:

Wife: Why do people just decide to walk out in front of you as if you’re not even there?

Me: So you’re in Mansfield?

Wife: Yeah I’m passing the church there on the corner and now the funeral home and oh the flowers are so pretty and there’s the bank and the church don’t forget to cross yourself when you pass and the fire hall I wish someone was there to ask if my piano is tuned that reminds me I need to call Sue Cook…

Me: Wait. Fire hall and tune the piano? Huh?

Wife: It’s a long story oh I’ll tell you I had to call and see if they had a piano because we’re having a concert there next week and we need to make sure the piano is tuned first see I remembered last weekend when I was at that accident where that guy died in the motorcycle accident we were standing over the guy when I suddenly remembered and pulled out my cell phone to check the date of the concert and then I asked the guys there if they knew anyone who knew how to tune a piano and they said what are you talking to us is she talking to us…

Me: Wait. You were at the accident scene where that man died and you were talking about a piano?

Wife: Well you have to do something to keep your mind off it…

A few minutes later, she called me from THE Wal-Mart, and when I say THE Wal-Mart, I do mean, THE Wal-Mart, because in our county of only 40,000 or so people, it is THE only Wal-Mart in the entire county, but anyhoo, while there, she calls me to ask me if we need any drink mix (hell, yeah, I’m thinking now, I definitely could go for a drink after that first conversation, but unfortunately, she means the tea kind). The last part of the conversation I hear from her before I hang up is again a location check: “I’m in aisle 8 right now...”

Thanks, hon, I was just thinking I wonder if she’s in aisle 8, because I really need a LOBOTOMY! Have they got that there?

And while I thought this blog entry might be over, she calls me once more:

Wife: Why is Wal-Mart such a freak show? Why do I always get stuck in the aisles with smelly people and screaming little kids? It’s like I get stuck in the aisle with someone with incontinence. Why? Why? (Again, I’m reminded of the word rhetorical. What goes around comes around, huh?) And then I can’t find my car for five minutes when I get out. By the way, I’m passing…

Click.