Knotted and Tangled
A tough nut from Waist Not, Want Knot
Knotted and Tangled1
The best idea, it seems to me, would have been for Angela to not get in between and betwixt the others in the first place. Once people begin to hurl silverware (stainless, in point of fact) there’s no telling where things will end up.
Plates, goblets, chafing dishes, candlesticks, who knows what all, will shortly be airborne, and sooner or later someone will storm out of the building, spoiling the party for everyone else.
Because, you know, once a thing like that gets going, everybody joins in. Particularly so on the East Side.
Why, you may be asking, was Angela there in the first place? That’s a story for another time. But let’s just say that she’d been curious about Tippy Toe Lane for a goodly spell and the invitation to the PTA holiday party piqued.2
As the stories had it, there was a great deal of hanky-panky going on over on the East Side of the small hamlet in southern New Hampshire, between and betwixt persons rather too closely related to embody, and we do mean “embody,” the path of wisdom. Not an Olympic sized gene pool, one might say, rather sort of a blow-up wading pool. It was bandied that there existed a population of offspring with red hair and arms of unequal length. Which obvious myth Angela, being a thoughtful and analytical sort (rather like yourself), discounted.
Until Halloween.
On what we must agree is a child’s favorite holiday, children from the East Side, which we can also agree is generally lower middle class, flock to the West Side which is clearly and generally middle-middle class with a smattering of upper middles, and therefore provides better pasture for the costumed herd. Also, and this is truly sad (that is, sad and true3) lower middles have less to spend on fancy costuming.
That Halloween, Angela’s first since moving to her apartment just a block West of East, a parade of red haired children had tricked and/or treated their way heading West from East, most carrying #44 grocery bags in left hands that were further from the ground than their …
Angela gasped a little at this point in the paragraph as realization dawned. Their left arms were shorter! Their hair was red! These were self-evidently the spawn of Tippy Toe Lane!5
“Sports,” she said to herself. “Sports.”
No, she wasn’t thinking about Globetrotters® whistling “Sweet Georgia Brown,” nor her favorite local sports bar which was perennially short-handed. Angela, as you likely didn’t know, insofar as we haven’t discussed it yet, is a botanist. In botany a “sport” is a part of a plant that shows morphological differences from the rest of the plant.6 “Sports” indeed!
As Angela deposited M&Ms® and other more or less toxic treats into the #4 bags clutched in eager hands appended to abbreviated limbs she couldn’t help but wonder whether a characteristic so broadly shared was the result of intent. In her line of work sports with desirable characteristics are often propagated vegetatively to form new cultivars that retain the characteristics of the new morphology.7 Were East-enders engaged in a breeding experiment?
Or just fooling around?
For that matter, upon careful reflection, the question arose: Was it the left arms that were short or the right arms that were long? While there could be survival problems for a creature with an arm of deficient length, it seemed entirely possible that there were survival advantages to be had for beings with greater reach. Certainly it seemed clear that the less lengthy limbs were sufficient for collection of candy, not that such promised particular benefit.
Dental issues loomed.
Perhaps the righties were better for reaching up to elevated doorbells, or door knockers?
Ah. There was this: If the right humerus, radius and ulna were of sufficient dimension, it could be that one’s right hand would be incapable of reaching one’s mouth, or more accurately, that it would overshoot, in which case as long as the candy bag remained in the left, the child would be incapable of delivering the sugar laden substance to the oral cavity, hence providing a measure of protection (from cavities, come to think of it). Unless, of course, East-enders were socialists.
As another cluster of lamely costumed carrot topped tots approached the door, Angela recalled the long spoons in hell story8 and sighed. If East-enders are, in fact, socialists there’s no sugar protection to be had from extensive limbs.
In regard to protection, however, it was plausible that there was method in their breeding madness regarding future employment. As kids we were all forewarned concerning the “long arm of the law.” Don’t just be good for goodness sake, be good to avoid the unpleasantness of capture and incarceration, bread and water, clanking chains and rats scurrying between your feet, being read the riot act as you’re good-copped and then bad-copped, and enduring the perilous “third degree.9”
She asked herself, “Will these long limbed offspring grow up to be police officers?” There are worse paths out of lower middle classdom, right?
Hence, her research project, something she clearly should never have gotten tangled up in10. Being pronged with a hurled fork wasn’t the worst of it but at least no one pulled a gun.
*****
Note: Substack starts footnote numbers anew each time I paste in a story. But footnotes are wildly important and sometimes refer back to previous matters, so I’ve thoughtfully put the correct numbers in brackets, like so [#].
1 [43}Whether or not this is a hendiadys is a puzzle and a conundrum. It might be characterized as sound and fury signifying nothing. Tangled knot?
2 [44] Though being child-free Angela had no particular personal interest in East Side Elementary.
3 [45] Another hendiadys. They’re popping up like mushrooms after the rain.
4 [46] Hence, recyclable. We’ll discuss this at greater length sometime.
5 [47] Not that there actually exists a “Tippy Toe Lane” per se. You see. The idea seems to be that the inbreeding in the district involved one or more Sneaky Petes traipsing through back yards. One or more Neo-Nean-derthals working their magic on the Homo sapiens sapiens family tree.
6You owe Wikipedia for this one.
7Ditto.
8You can look it up!
9Angela, we should note, did earn a third degree. A B.S., an M.S. and a Ph.D. Smart cookie, but not much of a conversationalist.
10The Preposition Police, extending their long arm, would prefer that this sentence read “something into which she should never have gotten tangled.”
*****
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