This old cartoon is from this very date, May 26, in 2009. I’ve loved a good tuna-salad sandwich since I was a kid. Mama made the best “tuna-fish salad,” but, like most of her recipes, her tuna salad was very simple. Mayonnaise, a little pickle relish and canned tuna. I know: it doesn’t get much more generic than that, but she had a real knack for mixing it all together. There’s nothing more dispiriting than anticipating a good tuna-salad sandwich and opening a can to find a watery mess that looks like the bottom of a chum bucket. As Arlo discovers, even buying the more expensive “chunk” variety is no guarantee of satisfaction.
244 responses to “A Mournful Tuna”
Jackie: Sipping wine in tub, likely OK. Friending old flames that suddenly show up on Livro de Faces, not so much.
Mark in TTown:
A couple of items that I wrote about forty years ago and shared with my students:
The Dead
The past is dead
Let it stay
Crouched
Within the shadowed alcoves
Of the mind
Until, unbidden, it arouses
Savor briefly its narcotic
And then force it down again
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A long time ago, when I had a younger man’s hair, I wrote the poem which appears below. It was inspired by my noticing how I will forever remember random words, phrases, images, and people that I encounter as I sleepwalk through life and how each has become a part of me.
The Apparitions’ Litany
My life is filled
with ghosts
I’ll not see again
Eyed shadows in cars
hallways
good friends
Mark, Millionaire Widow Lady once plied me with liquor at the Bombay Bicycle Club, and a planned overnight stay at her condo lasted three days. She may have intended that to happen, I’m still not sure.
Well said, Rick, in regard to the ill-used “Happy Memorial Day”.
Rick, well-written. Thank you for sharing those pieces of yourself with us. I too am subject to flashbacks of people and places when some unexpected trigger brings them to the forefront of my memory. And I stop and let the memory play itself out, if I am able.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZyNKrYo9I4
Is it just me or anyone else not like this week’s strips? I just don’t like it. I’m glad to see it will turn out well.Jimmy’s body of work an know he won’t let us down
I’m pretty much am an open book and try be transparent. I usually lhave been very fortunate not to have those complications in my life
Steve, I can’t help but feel this week’s arc constituted a bit of a clinker in Jimmy’s work as a whole. I understand the point, but I wonder if it could not have been made in a less jarring manner.
Steve: I tend to get too involved in fictitious plots, one reason I avoid movies and TV dramas. Books and comics I can close, open later when I can more easily handle it. I didn’t dislike the Vince sequel, but it made me a bit anxious.
Jimmie has done this, at different levels of realism [e.g., Janis never was a mermaid], and has always avoided disaster. Such strips are ok, few and far between. Seems you and I have too much invested in the Days. There are worse weaknesses than being too sensitive.
Peace,
Debbe 😉 I watched this video (times three) looking for an orange string bikini, but I didn’t see one. I did see that Gretchen had been doing her ab crunches, though.
Whatever happened to her, anyway? Perhaps she got all jacked up once too often.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6nygPJMNBU
No, I did not care for Janis actions but it is because I consider Arlo and Janis like friends, not fiction. Truth is I li,e Arlo best. Janis has several foibles and failings that annoy me. I have never looked up an old boy friend, never called or contacted one, avoided meeting any and hated running into any.
The fact she called or sent info so he called seemed so unfair to Arlo, it made me uncomfortable. Trying to think about my own self, never did anything of this sort, even on a couple of occasions where I became close friends with males. It wasn’t my style.
Debbe 😉 I love this Village. Even without any hookers…as far as I know.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Fulz4ytZ54
Memorial Day to me as a florist in the South or Oklahoma was about remembrance of those gone, not just the war dead. It was when you put flowers on graves, cleaned tombs, visited the family buried, thought of their memory.
As a WWII war orphan it reminds me of the father dead too young, forever young and all the others. I hate what it has become, beer and hot dogs and picnics.
Not that I have grown old, I always felt this way.
Dearest Ghost, thank you for posting the link to the story of the butterfly and the lawnmower. It was full of meaning and I liked it a lot. Seldom do I click on links here, or on other sites — don’t want to spend time on them. Can’t imagine why I was drawn to this weapons blog, have little interest except academic.
Here in New Hampshire the Karner Blue has gotten tons of publicity; it’s VERY RARE and endangered, also tiny and beautiful. Its small habitat is only 25 or 30 miles from my home. But I would have loved the story anyway, for I used to use the power mower a lot when Chris couldn’t do it. Our lawn is large, and as I pushed the mower back and forth I was always most careful to spare the lives of any insects or other critters (I have excellent vision) so that’s a thing I can feel good about as I think of my past life.
Jackie, you are right to feel as you do about Memorial Day. I think that most people are respectful of its meaning, I believe only a small minority are ignorant or don’t care.
Jackie, you are feeling what many feel, the day has been hijacked to create another celebration. The fewer who serve, the more remote it seems to current generations and the more distasteful the idea of protecting our country seems to them.
In memory of Forrest Vick, the uncle I never met and whose name I share:
https://www.abmc.gov/node/414411#.V0p1efkrK1s
Sweet Charlotte, the writer (and proprietor of the blog) also lives in NH. I’m glad you enjoyed that post, as did I.
Good morning Villagers….
Llee, thank you for your well wishes….I teased the Boss about putting in a requisition for an A/C unit for the packing room….what I did get was one big fan that blows right on me 🙂
Gal 🙂 I added that one to my screensaver too.
Worked with ‘Skittles’ yesterday….glory be, he is an endless trail of teenage wit….I was standing at the sink and were talking about the surge of flies in the hen house….when he told me he had seen a fly’s peni$…my head didn’t move, my eyes rolled and then he added “I guess I can cross that one off my bucket list”. Then he went on to tell me how…caught two flies “doing it” and pulled them apart….I know guys, too much information, but the bucket list line was funny.
Jean, worse yet….Busch…”double shudder”…give me a dark stout any day, like Samual Adams when I can afford it. When I lived in Corpus, there was a white wine called “Blue Nun” which we drank a lot of.
…and yes, as I said above, I am glad this week’s story arc is over.
…and yes, to the be thankful for those who gave so much for this country.
gotta go…..
GR 😉 no time for tunes…but I did love reading about the butterfly and the lawn mower….very moving, I’ll be thinking of it while packing…going back to reread it.
Mark…hope all turns out for the best with your brother and his wife…what a sad situation for them.
Indy Mindy…yes, you should have stayed hourly….you poor girl….hang in there.
Anonymous (Jackie, I think?):
You’re absolutely right about the phone call: It was unfair to Arlo.
Also, I think that we can assume that it was done without Arlo’s knowledge and that she was hoping the old spark was still there.
That makes it cheating.
Can you imagine what would have happened if the fire was still there?
What’s the guarantee that she won’t find someone new? Leopards don’t change.
By the way, yes, Jimmy Carter admitted that he had “lusted in his heart.” He also said that it was a sin.
emb:
I think you put it better. We do care about these characters was they are based on Jimmy looking in our windows. It did prove that our imaginations are often different than reality. My wife wrote a Christian Romance book called Devotion that addressees infidelity, but U would guess most people would not call it that. I would suggest a phone call doesn’t constitute that, but it’s headed in the wrong direction.
Let’s see more if He never e ???? lol
Good morning. Dickens is lying with his head on my leg and two of my friends are getting ready for Mass and the third trying to decide how to get home through the Texas floods. What has become of Sand? I worry about him.
It is dry and hot here but Texas is flooding and last I looked Oklahoma was still north of Texas.
Good morning, Jackie. I sometimes worry about you overdoing it as you try to cram living into your life. Please don’t. The overdoing part, I mean.
Note to Jimmy: One thing about drawing a cartoon for a bunch of old codgers…you’ll get opinions. We got ’em and we don’t mind expressing ’em. 🙂
A quotation, a comment, and then a quotation and a comment. The first quote is from yesterday’s strip:
“…a private scrapbook of what might have been.”
My comment: “You have treasured in your heart the thought that you could have thrown Arlo over for Vince all these years?!? Well, here is a quote from the fantasy of someone else that she had married a different person:”
“Boo. Boo! Boooooo! …you had love in your hands, and you gave it up. Your true love lives. And you marry another! True Love saved her… and she treated it like garbage! And that’s what she is, the Queen of Refuse. So bow down to her if you want, bow to her. Bow to the Queen of Slime, the Queen of Filth, the Queen of Putrescence! …Boo. Boo! Booooooooooo!”
And my final comment: “Booooooooooooooooooooo!”