Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Across the Salty Pond...

It started with that last message you sent. You closed it with, "Have a good afternoon. I'm off to nosh!"

We sometimes exchanged little notes with one another in the course of critiquing each others work, so to get this note from you was nothing out of the ordinary. At least it had not been until today.

"Ok then," I thought. I didn't give it much thought at the time as I had other things pressing me for attention. But about the umpteenth round I made in the field, it began to bug me a bit.

"Nosh!....nosh?....what the hell is that?" I wondered. I tried to dismiss it and get my mind on other matters but it just kept popping back up. Before I knew it, I was not paying the best of attention to what I was doing and had rows of furrows turned as crooked as a dog's leg. All because of this 'nosh' business.

Well, I gathered my wits and set about straightening things out, the whole time struggling to keep my mind on plowing and off noshing, whatever that was. I succeeded and had things skippy again and kept on plowing....nosh.....nosh? "Damn it! Just look what a mess! Again, too!" I found myself cursing under my breath as the rows were once again anything but parallel.

Correcting it for the second time, I noticed a light ringing in my ears and knew that this whole thing had my blood pressure pushing the mercury up. I also became aware that I was out of smokes due to the nervous chain-smoking over this 'nosh' thing!

Nosh. What kind of activity could it be that requires a nickname anyway? Maybe it's like jogging or jazzercise, a fitness thing. A nap might be a possibility, but that just didn't sound right somehow. It had a sound on the shady side of things to me. "Let's go down to Paddy's and toss back a couple of pints and get noshed." Or maybe it was in reference to a game of chance played only by high-rolling gamblers, "Tough game, this Nosh, all or nothing every hand, but today is my day, I just feel it!"

Perhaps it is something sultry, sensuous and lewdly sexual...Oooooh! I mean 'N' is close to 'S' in the alphabet so it would be no far stretch for it to be a cousin of some kind to 'snog'! "Oh yes, Pricilla, you should have seen us going at it, snogging and noshing one another like wild animals back in the rear of Paddy's Pub. I was howling, I must say! You know how much I have been in need of a good, hard noshing and well, you know first hand about Willie's skill!"

Enough! I stopped the tractor in the middle of the field and almost trotted back to the house. I had to know! Nearly tearing the door off the hinges I flew inside, snatching a pack of smokes off the fridge as I passed. Straight to the computer and with shaking hands I began my search. "dictionary,English,slang -- enter". I picked one of the resources and clicked the mouse on it and waited impatiently for the site to open on this dinosaur computer of mine. There, I found it. I stared at the screen in disbelief. This can't be right. "nosh -- to eat," it said ..... I looked above and below it for some alternate meanings. Nothing.

Imagine my embarrassment for being such a mullet-head. I did notice, however, I was a bit hungry now that you mentioned it. The thought crossed my mind that this woman did this on purpose and was surely lying there in bed secretly laughing at my dilemma. No....that would be a bit of a stretch, but you never can be sure of the corruption that goes through a mind under the influence of estrogen. Dangerous thing, that!

I never in my wildest dreams thought I would end up an English tutor to a British student, but here was the task laid clearly before me. "Oh well, so be it," I thought, as I headed to the kitchen to nosh a bit.

Copyright © 2007 wml

5 comments:

Chandana said...

Hi,

Here's a blog that serves for your spiritual needs.
It has messages from the Holy Scriptures, that teach us how to have GOD in all the aspects of our lives and have GOD's rule over every matter:

www.holyoneofisrael-reconciliation.blogspot.com

Have a blessed reading.

God bless you.

Mike said...

Thanks for the comment, Servant. You comments are most appreciated. But your comment is not in line with the topic and, in effect, is a form of comment spam. Please post comments of a relevant nature in the future.

the greek chik said...

Good read! :)

Gail said...

Delightful, insiteful and funny as heck!

Sid said...

Can relate; very funny.