Freakbast

Maybe each person has at least one talent that's utterly useless, one that won't change the world or earn him or her a cent--say, wriggling the ears one after the other, or tying a cherry stem into a knot with the tongue, or knowing which among the walnut, coconut or peanut is not a nut. (I still can't figure out how the non-nut will rock my world, but apparently law schools think it might generate good lawyers since I saw that question in one law entrance exam. Go figure.)

Mine is spelling words out loud and backwards, with hardly a pause. Give me a word, a second or two to visualize the word in my mind, and I can more or less spell it backwards without missing a beat. Jon, friend of my soul, thinks it's like thinking twice at same time: spelling it the right way and spelling it the wrong way, like juggling two balls at a time. He seems impressed. I will be, too, as soon as I branch out to spelling entire sentences backwards. Utterly useless.

My friend, Germaine, is dyslexic with words. She would inadvertently jumble her words, uttering phrases like "throwing pigs to pearls" or "putting your mouth in your foot," which, because of the riotous fun we've had over her unpremeditated bon mots, doesn't count as useless and is therefore disqualied from the enumeration.

Jon's specialty is mixing up his syllables, like, saying base to base casis instead of case to case basis. Useless and dangerous. What if he tells his wife You deviler instead of You deliver? Like I said. Dangerous.

We three freaks--spread out in the archipelago, and coming together a precious once or twice in a year--had laughter for freakbast at Bizu last Monday. Had our beloved Benjie been free to join us, it would've qualified for what Germaine considers the life of our time.




This severely-priced slop was my breakfast: two pieces of ham on bread, some greens, with two poached eggs smothered in goo. (The goo was quite good.) And I ordered a basket of bacon on the side. Yum.