But a couple of guesses seem safe.
1. He never served as president of an Optimist Club.
2. No one ever said of him, “Yeah, that boy’s got a bright future.”
I somehow picture Nostradamus as a preoccupied kid taking the ACT through the gifted and talented program at age 8 and saying the word apocalypse so often that the preschoolers in the neighborhood thought it alternated with the Dreamsicle as Good Humor’s flavor of the week.
“Oh, mommy, I want the Apocalypse.”
“No, dear, that makes your teeth black. Mommy’s going to get you a Jet Pop.”
For safety’s sake, I keep Nostradamus locked up in my mental museum Goth Room with Edgar Allen Poe, Rasputin and Freddy Krueger.
Behind glass, the four of them sit around a card table sharing bottles of laudanum and absinthe.
With a raven perched on his shoulder, an animatronic Poe occasionally heaves a consumptive cough into a handkerchief while Rasputin and Nostradamas shuffle tarot cards and Freddy knits a casket warmer with oversize metal fingers.
Sitting against the wall is a special Nostradamus pinball machine, which offers an extra ball if you can activate up all five plague lights.
A friend of mine actually had a Nostradamas moment last month. For years, he’s worn his cowboy hat to bars and never had anybody fool with it.
But the other day, he thought to himself, tonight, somebody’s going to do it.
Sure enough, a gentleman he described as a “big old greasy biker” came up and touched his hat as it sat on the bar. (No offense IS meant here to either the elderly or bikers, regardless of their level of lubrication.)
“You shouldn’t touch a man’s hat,” my friend told him, ready to add blood then circulating in the biker’s nose to the grease his clothing if he went for the hat again.
But it never came to that.
It struck me that although the prediction was Nostradamus-like, it was more like an ADD Nostradamus. It dealt with what was just about to happen.
If any of the stuff they say about Nostradamus is true, he was more patient than that. He had to not only come up with horrific things to predict, he had to look far enough into the future to place them in time.
My guess is that his predictions took time, ripening at the rate of gangrene.
And with baseball season upon us, that raises a historical question: Was Nostradamus ever a season ticket holder at Wrigley Field?
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
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