Bill Grenard is a high school friend.  That would not seem unusual until you realize that after graduation, we both moved away and didn’t see each other until our 50th high school reunion.  In fact, we didn’t hang around much in high school because he was a brainy kid and I was a jock.  About the only thing we had in common was being math wizards.

Well, as you do at reunions, we spent some time catching each other up on what had happened in the last 50 years and found that we had quite a bit in common.  We have kept in touch over the last three plus years.

Shortly before Christmas, he told me that rather than have family members provide him with traditional gifts, he was asking them to write twenty or so questions.  These are not questions to be answered.  He got the idea from a book by Padgett Powell entitled, “The Interogative Mood: a Novel?.”  The book is made up entirely of questions.  He provided me with examples from the book and then provided some questions from him.  I told him I would send him twenty questions for Christmas.

Below, you will find some of Powell’s questions, some of Bill’s questions and my Christmas gift to Bill.  If this inspires you to comment with twenty or so questions, great.  If you decide it is a stupid idea and pass, I will understand.

I liked Bill’s questions better that Powell’s.  And, to no one’s surprise, I liked my questions best of all!

Some of Powell’s questions: 

Do you do yard sales?  Are you happy with your teeth?  Do you in general trust or mistrust earnestness?  Do you attend parades?  Do you gamble?  Do you like pull candy?  Have you any weapons on you at the moment?  Would you buy a pearl choker?  Are you important?  Do you have any skin disabilities such as eczema or psoriasis?  Can you envision saying seriously to someone, “You just holler for help, and I’ll come arunnin’ “?  Do you like to use terms like “triangulation” and “extrapolation” when not speaking mathematically?  Are you bold, would you say?  Can you count in languages other than your mother tongue?  Would you like for your life to be more, or less, dangerous than it is?  Have you ever experienced any sort of hernia?

Is baseball all it’s cracked up to be? Do people stink, mostly?  Is there life on other planets, or after death on this one, as it were?  Do you like stalling for time?  Can you lob a grenade accurately, would you think?  Are there interstices in your character?  Is it hard for you to resist the demands of whiny people?  Have you ever wound an armature for an electric motor?  Do you know precisely what a chilblain is?  Do you bite your tongue or grind your teeth at night?  Have you ever witnessed any credible sign of ghosts?

(I think that is enough.  As I said, I thought Bill’s questions were better.)

Some of Bill Grenard’s questions:

Do you think that the older a person is, the better judgment they have, or does each person exhibit about the same level of good or poor judgment throughout the adult life?  What does the word deuteronomy mean?  Do you think people who live in a hilly area are in general more mentally unsettled than those that live in a flat area?  Have you ever used the word “morsel” conversationally?

Seeing that the latest mountain bikes have 24 or 27 speeds; do you think this is just about right, overkill, or would 48 or 54 speeds be even better?  Do you find that you take pleasure in the successes of underlings, but successes of your peers make you feel bad, at least for a brief time?  Would you rather have a parakeet or a turtle for a pet?  What would change you mind on that?  Would you rather be a cross-country truck driver or a cross-country bus driver?

Do you think there is, in aggregate, a greater amount of talented, high-quality TV programming now that we have 600 channels than when we had just a dozen or so?  Doesn’t it seem that Eeyore is clinically depressed and Pooh is suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s?  How much do TV sets playing in grocery stores enhance your shopping experience?  If you think that people living in hilly areas are more unstable mentally, do you think it is because mentally unstable people tend to move to hilly areas, or is it just that living in a hilly area provides a dimension of variability that people in flat areas don’t experience and that makes them a little less stable?  If you lived in a flat area and wanted to ride around the neighborhood, how many speed would you want on you bicycle?

If you think people have about the same level of judgment throughout their life, should we lower the minimum age for President to 21?  Do you feel that people are subjected to more distractions, say ten or fifteen years ago, and if you do, how do you square this with reports that productivity has continuously increased over the time period?  Do you feel that if the Eeyore character had been a regular on Mr. Rogers, the show would have been much too depressing for small children to watch, or would the children who watched it have just turned out to be very quiet and sort of whiny?

My Christmas present questions:  (You will notice that I write shorter questions and don’t go through the folly of deciding what constitutes a paragraph.)

Is Chap Stick a necessity?  How does my dog always know what time it is?  When are the Vietnam veterans going to be welcomed home?  Why do the American people believe candidates who make outrageous promises and then ignore the fact when they don’t keep them?  Can you dress for success on a nudist beach?  Is a stitch in time better that receiving a penny for you thoughts?  Is Tiger making his own decisions or is he receiving wise counsel and ignoring it?  Why is it difficult for people to admit that they like fruit cake?  Is golf a game or a sickness?  What’s so great about a White Christmas?  What ever happened to Pong?  Why did the lower enlisted man in financial trouble have a color TV, when I couldn’t afford one?  Who are the Jones anyway?  Would there be more or less strife in the world if everyone spoke the same language?  Why should anyone select the  cartoon character Snoopy to be their hero?  Is chess a game or a sickness?  Is there any reality in a reality TV show?  If there is water on the Moon, will the cheese go bad?  Why do they make tooth paste containers so that you can’t get the last of the tooth paste?  Would Yo-Yo Mah be such a memorable cellist if his name were Joe Schwartz?