Дней минувших анекдоты...

So early on in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which is revered by Russians as a national cultural treasure, Aleksandr Sergeyevich makes a point of letting the reader know that Onegin, a "good pal of the author's,"

...had no urge to rummage
In the chronological dust
of the earth's historiography,
but anecdotes of days gone by,
from Romulus to our days,
he did keep in his memory.

(from Nabokov's translation of EO, Canto 1, Stanza VI)

I bring the subject up because increasingly, I find myself being reminded—out of the blue—of various jokes I've heard over the years.

Case in point: This morning, I woke up to find that the floater that caused me to seek the services of an ophthalmologist O.D. over a week ago—said floater being a really magnificent specimen that looked like a jellyfish during the first couple of days—has begun to break up, mucking up my vision even further (to the point where I have donned an eye patch so as to avoid distraction while working on the computer).

As I adjusted the patch for the first time, it occurred to me that nothing better happen to my one remaining eye, or else...

...and my train of thought (which seemed destined to fly off the end of a freshly dynamited bridge over a deep gorge, in my mind) was suddenly replaced by the recollection of a joke whose setup involves passengers on a transocean flight who are periodically informed by the captain that one, then two, and then three engines of four have been shut down due to technical issues, that there was nothing to worry about (as the plane could fly, albeit slowly, on one engine), but that arrival at the destination would be late, then later, and then really, really late.

At the end, the story's hero nudges his neighbor and says, "Gosh, I hope the fourth engine doesn't quit, or we'll be up here all night!"

Rim shot.

In retrospect, there wasn't really much of a percentage in my original "or else" musing, so the change of mental scenery was a good thing.

Another example: Just a few minutes ago, I was catching up with an old friend and mentioned that I was through with trips to Kazakhstan, for various reasons, not the least of which was that, over a ten-year period, I had spent a year of my life there.

"A year of my life there" is the same as saying "a year of my life not here," so technically, on my and Galina's 37th wedding anniversary, we had actually only lived together for 36 years.

This immediately brought to mind the old chestnut in which the husband raises his glass at a dinner to mark his wedding anniversary and starts talking about "15 happy years of matrimony," whereupon he is reminded by his wife that they have actually been married for 20 years. The punch line? Says the husband, "Absolutely correct! And hey! 15 out of 20 ain't all that bad!"

I guess this was a good way of keeping me from dwelling on the early couple of years of our marriage, when Galina was still in the USSR, first waiting for them to let her out and then for us to let her in.

The examples just keep on coming, and it may well be that this phenomenon is getting out of hand. Earlier in the evening, I was explaining how Thumper just doesn't "get" the idea of not letting an immovable vertical object get between us while he is being walked on a leash. When he invariably does end up on the wrong side of a tree from me, gently tugging on the lead doesn't help, because he fights the suggestion. (Oh, but does he fight it.)

The only explanation for this behavior that makes sense to me is that the little fellow, despite being pulled that way (away from me, back around the tree), is determined to go this way (toward me) come hell or high water.

As I was explaining this, there came to mind an old joke involving Nikita Khrushchev, whose setting is the era of the space race. Abbreviated, the story goes that Khrushchev wanted to watch the launch of a moon probe, but after the rocket was lost to sight, he started yelling for the KGB to start arresting all of the scientists and technicians involved in the launch. When asked why he was ordering this extraordinary step, Nikita replied, "You think that because I come from peasant stock you can pull the wool over my eyes, do you? Well, I see what you're doing! With my own eyes I saw the rocket go that way, despite the fact that the moon is very clearly"—and here, Khrushchev turned to his left and pointed—"over there!"

I get where Pushkin's verse is trying to illustrate how Onegin is always ready with a quip or a joke, but I wonder if something like that is intrinsic to something deeper that might lead one to be, in Nabokov's description of Onegin, a "sullen rake."

Which reminds me of a joke, but I really need to get to sleep...