Mrs. Pulley

It’s Wednesday. The days are rushing past. It seems like only yesterday it was Tuesday. Where does the time go?

A female friend just “broke up” with me by text message. My phone was off and I forgot to turn it on until early afternoon. That’s when I saw she had sent, and then deleted, several text messages. The final message was the “breakup” message. “It looks like you don’t want to hear from me.” Etc.

Truthfully, I’ve had more than my share of female drama. ¡No más! (Spanish for “no more!”) Her native language is Spanish, of which I remember “sí” and “no” from high school Spanish classes. You see, when I was in high school, I learned enough to pass the exams (most of them) and not much beyond that. I remember “hola” and “adiós.” I tried to learn “left and right” but it was too complicated. They translate as “izquierda y derecha” for feminine gender and izquierdo y derecho for masculine gender. Spanish is full of adjectives and nouns that are different for different genders, so if you want to learn Spanish, you basically have to learn two languages. Good luck.

All I remember from my high school Spanish classes is the teacher. Her name was Mrs. Pulley, and even today she holds the record for the hottest woman I’ve ever seen in or out of high school. So I have this story.

I had a ball point pen that I used in class. On the upper half of the pen was a figure of a woman. The image was about an inch tall and she was wearing a swimsuit. But when the pen was upside down, her swimsuit slid off, revealing her nude body.

I was sitting in the front row as Mrs. Pulley was speaking to the class. I was absent-mindedly tapping my pen on my desk, and it was upside down. Mrs. Pulley looked down, and with supernatural visual acuity, she saw the naked woman on my pen. Her face turned red and she ran to the back of the room and sat down in one of the little desks with her face in her hand. The kids all around me turned to me and asked, “What happened?” I replied with a shrug and “beats me” and tried to put a look of bafflement on my face.

Mrs. Pulley recovered with no permanent damage. She took my pen and gave me hers, although her pen had no naked lady on it, which to this day I think was an unfair trade, but life goes on.

But regarding my former female friend, if she thinks she can hurt me by not speaking to me and not texting me, she’s going to be disappointed. I grew up in the era when people “texted” using Morse code, one letter at a time. I was a ham radio operator. I used Morse code. I often waited with anticipation for the next letter of the alphabet to arrive. So if a person stops speaking to me now, it takes me months to notice. Modern times. You can have a friendship when you go to bed and 12 hours later you don’t have a friendship because they texted you and you didn’t respond within 30 seconds. It’s just as well. I don’t need friends who are that quick to pull the you’re-dead-to-me trigger.