So It Turns Out I Don’t Live Down the Street From Popeye, After All

I was changing the oil in my car the other day. I needed a place to put the old oil, so I was going to drain it into my coffee pot. Problem was, the coffee pot was full of fresh spinach for some reason. Ah, well, I thought, the oil will just fill in around it. There’s room enough for both.

That’s when Popeye was walking by, and noticed what I was doing. Not Popeye the cartoon character or comic strip character, but the real Popeye, the guy who played Popeye in the black and white live-action serials of the 40s and 50s, the way Clayton Moore played the Lone Ranger. He lives around the block from me and runs a small grocery now. He saw what I was about to do and said, “Son, don’t you know anything about cars?” (I don’t.) And he showed me a better way to do an oil change. But the first thing he did—the very first thing—was to find a bowl to put the fresh spinach in, so I could drain the oil into the coffee pot more easily.

Later on, I’m looking back on my day, and I realize: Not only did I meet Popeye, but I met him in a spinach-related incident! What are the odds? I have got to blog about this, I thought.

It takes me ten minutes after I wake up to realize that a) to the best of my knowledge, no one played Popeye in live-action movies before Robin Williams in Robert Altman’s film version; b) Popeye doesn’t live down the street from me, and c) Me, changing the oil in my car? Come on, now.

Rob