Many say that what went off the Tallahassee Bridge is the great musical mystery of our (okay, my) time, but I also wonder at times about the exact nature of the do-wacka do-wacka do.

The most succinct example I can remember seeing was a cover story about Jack Nicholson in Esquire magazine in the mid-1990s (I think it was Esquire), where the cover of the magazine featured only a photo of the face of Nicholson wearing his steely, slightly evil grin and the following caption:

Jack.

Clearly the period was unnecessary — even “wrong” — to a punctuation purist, but its presence represented a nice little joke between the headline writer and the reader who “got” it.

I am sure that similar exchanges happen among the cognoscenti of various forms of music, visual art and other pursuits in life where you really need to understand exactly what you are doing in order to pull off an effective intentional mistake.

From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t work so well in sports.

I had watched and overheard the inane chatter of these two (truly, truly inane. You can trust me on this) the week before, as they manoeuvred dozens of carry-on bags (each) onto our plane en route to the Caribbean—and it appeared they’d killed off even more brain cells in the seven days since I’d last seen them.

We were located to the left of the conveyor belt that brought the bags in from the plane outside, and the carousel was going counter-clockwise—which meant, of course, that while the luggage was out of our sight on the other side of the baggage-distribution apparatus, almost all of it was picked off by its owners. The carousel was therefore nearly empty of luggage when it came back into our line of view.

Now, five or ten minutes into the process, although plenty of bags were still coming up from the plane, the young women’s brows were increasingly furrowed. Finally one of them said, “I’m getting really worried about my stuff. I’ve noticed that none of the bags that comes out over there from the plane comes around to where we are. Do you supposed there’s a double spiral?”

The other agreed that they’d better go round and look. That was —to my disappointment—when I lost sight of them. I believe that these two young women are destined for lives of confusion unless someone quickly realizes that they are ideal muses for the writers of Dr. Who.

This is an expression I also learned at my mother’s knee when I was about the same age as that boy — i.e., around seven. But it never occurred to me until I heard that mom to wonder how that expression ever came into being in the first place. I mean, who wants to catch flies? They are dirty, bothersome creatures and should keep to themselves.

Maybe the expression means, “If you want to squish flies, you can catch them more easily if you put out a plate of honey than if you put out a plate of vinegar.” But that is never what I understood it to mean. I always thought it meant that the goal was to catch flies.

I think this is just another one of those confusing adages wherein I understand the meaning but not the words.

There are too many triple-A batteries and too few double-As.

What else?

When I began to get “older” I was occasionally alarmed to catch sight of my mother’s face looking back at me from the mirror, or her hands resting in my lap — or, worse yet, my grandmother’s face or hands. I saw these resemblances only as a sign that I was aging. But as of this year, I am the eldest person in my immediate family, and suddenly I kind of like the idea that I look and sound like the women who came before me. It is as though I am carrying around a special key that only I am able to use to unlock the past – and I do it so easily: with a facial expression, a way of saying something, or a laugh. The family resemblance has turned from something I resented into a precious heirloom.