Several years ago a fad among teenagers was a series of jokes, a play upon words or lines spoken by one inanimate object to another. One day one of my children came to me with this one: "Do you know what one wall said to the other?" As a good father should, I did not attempt to guess the answer, but replied dutifully, "No. You tell me what one wall said to the other." The answer came crisply, "I'll meet you at the corner."
On the coast of California are great forests of redwoods - sequoia sempervirens. The manner in which these trees grow is unlike that of any other tree. Two trees of this species may grow up year after year, a few feet from each other. Finally, sometimes after fifty or a hundred years, the trees touch, and the bark begins to overlap and fill out, so that the two trees ultimately become one. There have been cases where a dozen trees, springing up from the outer roots of a tree that has fallen, have formed a perfect circle. After a century or two, all have grown together so that one may walk between two trees into the empty heart of a great tree, and the ultimate outward appearance will be that of a single giant tree.
I once had the privilege of going backstage just before a performance at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Before the curtain went up, dozens of individuals walked about in the wings, doing vocal exercises. Completely oblivious of others, each singer concentrated on his own voice; the result was piercing discord. We are all familiar with a similar effect in the tuningup of orchestra instruments before a concert.
Glenn Leonard, a bulldozer operator driving to his home in the country, decided to test the acceleration of his new automobile. He passed the side road to his farm, made a sharp U turn at the next road, sped back and turned in the far road. Meanwhile, the driver of a station wagon observed the rapid turn and burst of speed; he mistook the lightblue machine for an unmarked police car, and turned into the road to Leonard's farm to escape detection.
A great hotel publishes a little booklet of chatter for its guests. Whoever prepared it needed a line to fill up space and inserted this sentence: "On the great clock of time there is but one word - NOW." The hotel probably thought the phrase was a good one for salesmen who need to be about their business, and a good maxim for others who are likely to let important matters slip.
