SHALLOW THOUGHTS (EVEN 12 MILES OUT OF MT. PILOT, ENGLISH IS HARD & HISTORY IS COMPLEX) FROM THE DEEP END WITH MISS JULIE’S POOL BOY: It’s less than 5 days until the City Swim Meet & the Pool Boy being unsupervised for 48-72 hours. Upon Saturday night’s return of Miss Julie & what remains of a bag of DumDums suckers to reward little ones for their first big swim, MJPB will grab one & Miss Julie will think “never have a man & his candy been better paired”.

      
      Also on Saturday, 41½ firework lighting citizens will spend their first week counting only to 8 ( if that ½ of a person made you think about poor Horatio the half a boy, in the “Gateway to Danger” village just 12 miles from Mount Pilot, you & MJPB are soulmates) due to too much testosterone or alcohol or both following “…watch this…”, English is still hard with 8 fingers or 10.
      
       With homophones like, mined/mind, colors & verbs such as red/read or blue/blew, other words like led/lead, reed/read(& why aren’t deed/dead pronounced that way but pronounced like reed/red), the cerberus like collections of to/two/too, there/their/they’re & I’ll/ aisle/isle.

     Then there’s great & grate out there rearranging their letters yet still sounding the same & homographs like bow/bow, lead/lead & read/read, language can be a minefield or, a mined field. Not to mention gray being a colour & grey a color, or is it the other way around? The Pool Boy confuses easily.

      History, when it comes to English, is easier, as in the spelling of canceled/cancelled. On this side of the Atlantic, twelve miles from Mount Pilot it’s spelled with one L, which is good with MJPB.
      
      In England, who hated the French & defeated them in the first global conflict, before we had the civilized decency in the 20th century to simply number them, known as the 7 Years War or the French & Indian War, depending on allegiances, it’s spelled with two L’s.

      That’s because, thanks to the Marquis de Lafayette, pronounced LUH-Fay-ette in this neck of the woods, & the French fleet (French fleet unashamedly ripped off from Schoolhouse Rock, MJPB now picturing deGrasse yelling to Cornwallis from the bow of his ship, “Hooray, I’m for the other team”), George & the boys gave the Redcoats that second L at Yorktown in October 1781,the Pool Boy thinks that’s a good thing because if not, we’d all still be speaking British.

      The contest that ended in a Virginia redoubt in 1781 had its roots in 1765 & Patrick Henry resolving & getting his mad on 23 miles from the Virginia redoubt in Williamsburg over the Stamp Act. That begat the Sons of Liberty & the tea party they threw in the Massachusetts winter where white people dressed as a people from whom they would one day steal their land & then to Revere + four riders (Misters Dawes, Prescott, & Bissell & to the chagrin of a faction of flag waving male Southern Baptists, a woman, Sybil Ludington) horseback in the Boston night. Which begat a writing effort before his cut & paste effort of the Holy Scriptures by the Deist Jefferson, his Dear John letter to George III & Ben Franklin’s diplomatic brilliance with the men & polyamorous dalliance with the ladies of France & the Mayberry Bridge set ablaze by Nathan Tibbs.

     And now, The Lagniappe:  MJPB, like Styx on his 8 track, with too much time on his hands, wonders why do pony & bologna rhyme, yet comb, tomb, & bomb don’t & he wonders if Ernest T. Bass would have passed geography if his mother figure Helen Crump hadn’t ignored the western boundary of this great land being Old Man Kelsey’s Woods? And could Ernest have learned the dates required to be a Mayberry Minuteman?
      
     You can see why Miss Julie is glad that in 30 days a school & 19 other women will take the Pool Boy & deal with him every day & you can realize her uncanny accuracy concerning Dum-Dums & you can see why she says that being married nearly 40 years to the Pool Boy feels like nearly 40 minutes….under water.

      With that, a final nod to Rochambeau & the rest of the French that kept us from speaking British & still keep Baton Rouge’s Tiger Stadium hammered on an autumn Saturday night like Nathan Tibbs offspring Otis Campbell in Mayberry, only 12 miles from Mount Pilot, “ce week-end, MJPB laissera le bon temps rouler”…