Necessary Mental Revisions of Reality

In my very early twenties -- the first year, in fact -- I was (as they say in the vernacular) shooting the shit with a friend over cheap beers. (Muscles, if you're curious, bleaknemesis, and near the Sprinker Rock.) My friend had made a tired joke. Though I try to avoid tired jokes myself, it was giddy enough or late enough or I had consumed beers enough to respond with a tired reply to a tired joke. I said, "That's as old as my grandma, and she farts dust." Wracking my brains, it might have been the second or third time in my life I used that line. For reasons that should become clear, it was definitely the last.

My friend responded with some correction. "Parts the dust," he said.

"What?"

"My grandma parts the dust. That's the saying."

This was getting a bit bizarre, even for me. I repeated with greater emphasis, "What?!?"

My friend explained, as if to a child, "That's as old as my grandma, and she parts the dust."

If I recall correctly, I just stared. If grandma is dead, he reasoned, her body would lie in the ground, thus separating, or parting, the dust. The comeback was therefore a poetic reference to age as represented by death and burial.

I sincerely expressed my reservations about the veracity of his correction. The expression refers to a woman so old that she passes not gas but, well, dust. I asked him where he got his version.

Now less sure of himself, he explained that he had heard that rejoinder when he was about six from a slightly older kid, probably nine years of age. As a quirky six-year-old, he completely debunked his later nickname of Muscles by trying to reconstruct a mis-heard juvenile rejoinder with one fraught with poetic and philosophical imagery.

I was by this time more than a bit incredulous. Using again the vernacular, I called bullshit. While possibly true, I explained, how many nine-year-olds reflect on the cycles of life and death with enough mental reflection and depth to poetically remember, let alone create, such a non-childish return? I then imitated said juvenile, intoning with a sniveling whine the first "That's as old as my grandma," then deepening my voice into a Shakespearean basso profundo and raising a Yoric-skull-holding claw for the final "and she . . . parts . . . the dust."

Muscles had to accept the likelihood of my explanation. In fact, I think my explanation caused him to briefly and sharply snort Rainier through his nose.

( So what does Muscle's brainy reconstruction of a witticism have to do with reality? )