I sat down with a cup of tea and The Economist this afternoon, noting with satisfaction, as I did so, that the envelope was intact. I simulated indignation about my mail, addressed to me, a couple of weeks ago when I found that a rival Economist reader in the house got there before me. I paid her back by leaving the next Economist envelope on the kitchen table, empty, with the word “Hah!” triumphantly inscribed on it. It reappeared on my desk later with “I suppose you think that’s funny?” added in a familiar hand. I did, and I had subliminal hunch.
My surprise when this week’s envelope turned out to have last week’s Economist was thus less than it might have been.
“What’s the meaning of this?” I said to an empty house, for the economist and the spendthrift were out shopping; “this is last week’s!”
Then the penny dropped, as I recalled a subtle and, I realized, slightly smug allusion to a bit of family folklore.
As a child I was a compulsive reader and was caught more than once reading under the bedclothes after dark. On one occasion a Hardy Boy’s detective story I was reading was taken away and placed in the hall. I pinched it back, swapping the dust jacket with another very similar volume–the local library had a lot of them.
I don’t recall now what I answered when the bedclothes were hauled back for the second time in one night and I was asked by my irate father that great unaswerable question he reserved for people caught red-handed:
What’s the meaning of this?!
Odd, how a ridiculous question survives as an ineradicable, even reflexive thought pattern. Both my brother and sister occasionally repeat this, faking outrage, in affectionate imitation of our father, before cracking up laughing.
The question is, what to put in next week’s Economist envelope?!
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[...] father’s great caught you red-handed question was “What is the meaning of this?” He was also fond of less philosophical questions like “Are you waiting for the butler [...]