THE SONIC BOOMER
I wanted you to be the first to know: I am going to live forever!
I know!
Much like you, I thought this was impossible. I actually thought I would be departing sooner rather than later (particularly given our current stampeding virus), but it turns out my grandchildren have taken things into their own hands.
Upon hearing that older people were easy targets for COVID-19, they panicked. What would their lives be like without grandma and grandpa? Awful! No useless toys? No junk food? No watching cartoons all day? It was unthinkable!
Without any prompting at all, but with an extreme sense of urgency, both got to work. Tess, the five-year-old, began working on cloning, while Skippy, the seven-year-old, started building a time machine. Lego bricks, construction paper, glue and paperclips were flying. If they pull this off, there’s an award in it somewhere, perhaps a Nobel Prize or, if not that, at least a year’s supply of merchandise from Lego or Elmer’s.
And where was I during this time of crisis management? I was sitting nervously in my living room — masked, gloved and wrapped in cellophane — totally unaware of their adorable efforts until my daughter called.
“You can quit worrying about the COVID,” she said. “The kids are working on it.”
“The kids?” I asked. “They’re working on a vaccine?”
“Better,” she answered. “You’re going to live forever.”
By the time she hung up, I had finished unwrapping myself, and I was thinking. What if Tess was successful? What if she was able to clone me into another Debbie or, better yet, a couple of Debbies? Where would Deb-Deb-Deb go? What would she-she-she do?
I decided we’d get a couple of homes first. Maybe in Alaska, Montana and Maine, freezing cold states with fewer cases of the virus, despite the fact that “heat kills it.”
Of course, we’d need more money in order to do this. We’d have to get jobs, but not jobs that have anything to do with people, of course, because if there’s one thing this country doesn’t need right now, it’s a bunch of COVID-infected clones infiltrating a busy workplace.
Maybe one of the Debbies could volunteer to test out new vaccines. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Help humanity and earn some serious dough at the same time.
But what if things went horribly wrong? What if a Super-COVID developed in Debbie #3, and she got loose, running rampant and terrorizing our cities — going to bars and restaurants and political rallies? Refusing to wear a mask, talking loudly and shaking hands with everybody?
It’d be horrible! But don’t panic. That’s where Skippy’s time machine comes in. We stuff her in and send her back to a time pre-clone, when she didn’t exist — maybe all the way back to a time pre-COVID, when people had jobs and were happy, and when every single column I write didn’t have to mention the virus in order to be timely.
That would be nice for everyone.
