Coonridge Digest: As presidents go…

Greetin’s from the Ridge.

Lappy Mills was about the unluckiest fella we ever knew. He never owned a car that’d run, a dog that’d hunt or married a woman that’d put up with his losin’ ways for more than a season. Like the little fella in Al Capp’s comic strip who walked around with his own private rain cloud over his head, Lappy and luck were complete strangers.

I can remember walkin’ home from school one day and seein’ Lappy’s shed on fire. A bunch of us youngsters ran over and offered to help.

"No need," Lappy drawled.

"Why not?" I said.

"Got me a water hose," Lappy responded.

"Then why don’t you use it?" I hollered over the snap and pop of the flamin’ timbers.

"Can’t," said Lappy. "The hose is in the shed." The strange thing about Lappy’s luck is that he never complained. The old man just assumed that misfortune was his lot in life and there was little benefit to be had by gripin’ about it. Lappy’s bad luck bothered us a great deal. Didn’t seem to phase Lappy, though. He wrote it all up to coincidence.

Lappy assumed that we were all assigned a certain amount of coincidences by the hand of fate and if an unusually large number seemed to fall upon him…well, that was just the way things go.

Seems like we’ve all been sufferin’ Lappy’s Lament of late.

The travel season hits us then lo and behold, gasoline prices to up.

Oil company spokesmen with well-paid straight faces tell us that this is mere coincidence. The Sheiks of the oily nations chime in, swearin’ that it’s a ‘momentary glitch’ or a ‘temporary delivery problem.’ The fact that you suddenly have to pay twenty cents more a gallon once the weather gets good enough to visit Aunt Flo in Florida is just another example of Lappy’s Lament. A coincidence. Smacked across the chops by a petroleum fragranced hand of fate.

I can tell when the temperature drops below zero. Our john freezes up.

The west end of our house was insulated by Swiss Cheese, Inc. and if there’s a wind on the continent, we feel it on our west end. As a result, we’ve gotta keep the thermostat cranked up to ‘combust’ durin’ the most horrid days of winter weather. And guess where the natural gas crunch seems to hit us? Right in the coincidence.

As luck would have it, the coldest winter in recent history exactly coincides with a shortage in the gas industry. I mean, who’d of thought?

And we’re told it’s nothin’ more than ‘an unfortunate juxtaposition of circumstances.’ Believe me, when I take my ‘juxta’ position in the west end of this old house, it’s a dearly unpleasant circumstance.

Lappy’s Lament. That’s all there is to it.

Even politics can fall victim to poor Lappy’s syndrome. Fugitive financier Marc Rich is charged with usin’ fake oil transactions to escape payin’ more than $40 million in taxes then illegally buyin’ more than $200 million worth of oil from Iran. Then..as the clammy claw of coincidence would have it, he receives a dark-of-night pardon from Ex-Pres Bill after Rich’s ex-wife contributes $1 million to Clinton and other Democrats. Holy Cow! I think we’ve got another unfortunate juxtaposition here! Then even more money somehow ends up in the Clinton Presidential Library and it happened again! Denise Rich’s name is on the sizable check for what her lawyer calls ‘an enormous sum of money.’ Poor old Lappy just didn’t know how to make his coincidences work for him. Maybe he needed a Hillary. Perhaps he just needed his position ad-juxted.

Oh, I’ve felt the ghost of Lappy lappin’ at my heels off and on my entire life. The lady ahead of me checkout lane is always the one who insists on balancin’ her checkbook while she’s line. Sometimes she even plans next month’s budget and does a crossword. Every fast food attendant I draw seems to have the same last name: Trainee.

If there’s one mulberry-eatin’ starling in town he’ll suddenly strike up a romance with the hood of my newly-washed car, and I have a spiritual magnet inside my head that naturally attracts me to the one pew in church directly ahead of the family with noisy kids who come in late.

The higher price I pay for a theatre ticket, the more strongly this magnet attracts the little hellions. Theatrically, unfortunately juxtaposed.

Still…gasoline prices, heating fuel, Presidential pardons..seems like the whole nation is sufferin’ under poor Lappy’s jinx. Of course there’s another alternative. Lappy might just have been stupid.

You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door, but you’ll enjoy the trip.