The good fellow Tara calls “Dad,”
Said, “Room service here is so bad,
“I asked for a steak,
“They gave me an ache!”
A good time by all was not had.
I always joke about the fact that there are only two people reading this website. This limerick is dedicated to one of them, and the postscript is here so the other one will get the joke!
Clarence is currently having a spot of bother at a hospital in Columbus, Ohio. I hope he gets well soon, so he can outrun the nurses. I bet I know who will be driving his getaway car…
Well, the masts and the bulkheads all creak,
And the decks have a bit of a leak,
She’s a classic old boat,
And she keeps us a float,
But, goodness! The head sure does reek!
There are so many interesting alternative terms for toilets — “biffy” is a charming Canadian term for a pit toilet. And “head” refers to a toilet aboard a ship. This little ditty is from our crazy adventures in Florida and the Bahamas aboard Vger. The diesel tank vented into a locker in the head compartment, so that part of the boat always reeked … of diesel.
Said the famous explorer, de Gama,
To his proud but befuddled old mama,
“I’ve got spices galore,
Precious jewels, silk, and more,
But I wanted to find Grand Bahama.”
Vasco de Gama was the Portuguese sailor who discovered, in 1497, a sailing route from Lisbon to India. The goodies he brought back made him famous and made Portugal’s King Manuel wealthy.
The Bahamas had actually already been discovered by then, by a much more famous sailor, Christopher Columbus.
A bike has two wheels in a line,
But this speed-demon husband of mine,
Needs a wheelchair to ride,
With its wheels side-by-side,
And a nurse and two doctors behind.
Barry was riding too fast on his new Bike Friday on Monday. The accident netted him a broken arm, a broken finger, multiple contusions, a black eye, and an extremely concerned but annoyed spouse.
I’m tired of this snuffling and sneezing,
Bronchitis and head colds with wheezing,
I don’t like to suffer,
I wish I were tougher,
But bring on some spring, ’cause I’m freezing!
In honor of Punxsutawney Phil, who did not see his shadow on February 2nd. That means spring should come early this year, and I, for one, am ready!
A Newfoundland lady once bet,
That she’d find, somewhere, out on the ‘net,
A recipe page,
For wine, moose, and sage.
She won! It’s on Foodie Gazette.
A little limerick to celebrate the spinoff of The Foodie Gazette, Meps’ new food website, with over 700 recipes and articles. Sage Moose Braised in Wine from the St. John’s, Newfoundland, newspaper, is one of the more intriguing recipes on the site.
I remember the good ol’ days. That was when the drive from Seattle to Eugene, 280 miles on I-5, was only 5 hours.
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, such a fast trip is no longer possible. Nor is it possible on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. We spent eight hours driving south, seven coming north. There were more backups, slowdowns, and stoppages than I could count. A couple of accidents, crumpled bumpers and tow trucks. One truck bore the telltale sign of someone’s head hitting the windshield. That round pattern of broken glass made us both somber.
To add to the driving challenges, we had rain. First, the mist, which drives me crazy because I don’t have intermittent wipers. Then hard rain, coming down so fast those same wipers were on high and struggling to keep up with the torrents. Then sleet, hail, and finally, a mini-blizzard.
All the weather and traffic did make the driving a challenge. But inside the car, it was a different story.
Inside the car, were warm and toasty and dry. We had great music from the iPod, plugged into an old-fashioned cassette adapter. We jammed to R&B and then switched to Jimmy Buffett, singing along off-key. When we stopped for dinner at a Mexican restaurant, the non-driver went to Margaritaville.
Maybe I was just happy because I love going to see my two sisters. Maybe it was because I was looking forward to three days of eating all the things that are verboten on the South Beach diet — mashed potatoes, and pie, and stuffing, and cranberry sauce.
Or maybe I’m just nuts.
That’s probably what the people in the rest area thought when they saw me. They were battered and wearied by the traffic and the weather. Maybe they weren’t looking forward to the family visits ahead. Or maybe they just forgot to have fun.
Me, I was skipping.
Not rope-skipping, or stone-skipping. Just skipping.
I skipped all the way from one end of the rest area to the other. And when I got back to Barry, we swung each other in circles, and he started skipping, too.
Barry is the one who discovered the magic of skipping in rest areas. He and his sister can skip circles around me. They get lots of height in their skips, and they both have long legs, so they cover a lot of ground. I could hardly keep up, and I’d just end up galloping along behind them, laughing until I fell over.
The problem with skipping is that after a little while, I can’t catch my breath. Not from the exercise, from the laughter. I simply cannot keep from laughing while I skip. The more I skip, the harder I laugh, until I am incapacitated.
But that’s the way road trips ought to be. Skipping around the rest areas until you can’t breathe, and then laughing the rest of the way there.
I wrote this during the Bush administration, to celebrate the annual pardon of two turkeys by the president. Six years later, two turkeys get pardoned, but is the pardoner still a bird with a tiny brain? It all depends on your political persuasion and reaction to the third line:
I just heard that two turkeys’ demise
Was avoided, to their great surprise.
The Big Turkey in power,
In the eleventh hour,
Gave them pardon, along with the pies.
There once was an ornery cuss,
Who was driving a yellow school bus,
But she flipped off George Bush,
Now she sits on her tush,
‘Cause she lost her job in all the fuss.
This refers to a Seattle-area school bus driver who was fired for flipping off George Bush’s motorcade this past June. OK, a bus driver is supposed to be a role model for students, so I can see a reprimand. But firing? That’s going too far.
Writing a birthday limerick is simple and doesn’t take a lot of time. In this age of conspicuous consumption, a simple birthday limerick is a great way to celebrate someone special without bringing more styrofoam, wrapping paper, and unwanted aftershave into the world.
I have chanced on a great birthday present,
Not expensive champagne, duck, or pheasant,
But a lim’rick — some humor
To dispel the old rumor,
That a birthday is not something pleasant.
In order to make the limerick special, it needs to be about the person, not a generic 30th- or 40th-birthday limerick. For me, that requires a little brainstorming session. I do this best when insomnia strikes in the middle of the night. If the person’s birthday is imminent and you don’t have insomnia, a couple of beers can lubricate the rhyming process.
The brainstorming simply involves thinking about the person and anything related to him or her that’s easy to rhyme. Is the person’s name easy to rhyme? I have both a sister and a sister-in-law named Julie, and I haven’t been able to do much with “Bernoulli” or “patchoulli.” So I’ll have to use other techniques, as you’ll see below. However, some names are easy, such as “Kate” or “Barry.”
There once was a lady named Kate,
Whose birthday was on this fine date,
She wanted a cake,
But her friends could not bake,
So her candles just sat on a plate.
Now, there once was a pirate named Barry,
Who is frozen and quite stationary,
He’s unable to fight,
What is looming in sight,
Turning forty for him is reeeeeeal scary.
If the person’s name is not easy to rhyme, think about his or her relationship to you — what rhymes with “sister,” or “son?” When I needed to write a birthday limerick for my father, I found no good rhymes for “Henry,” but dozens for “Dad”:
There’s a guy who I proudly call Dad,
And a mighty fine birthday he had.
To make such a great man, it
Takes years on this planet.
But I won’t tell his age (he’d get mad).
Another good theme to get the rhyming started is the person’s age. Ages ending is “seven” are bad to rhyme, because you’re limited to “heaven” and “eleven.” But you can talk about the fact that he or she is no longer thirty-six, which rhymes with plenty of words — flicks, picks, tricks, mix.
Here’s one I wrote for a reader with two young children who wanted help with the invitation to their combined birthday party. The nice thing about this one is that it’s flexible, and you can change it to suit different children. You could replace the names, change the month, even replace “cookout” with “party,” and it would still work:
Our Seth is about to turn two,
And Rachel’s soon four, it is true,
We’ve written this rhyme,
‘Cause October’s the time,
For a big birthday cookout with you!
You can be even more creative, branching out and thinking about the subject’s home town, home state, occupation, or hobbies.
Here’s one about my brother-in-law, Ed, an ultra-marathon runner. Every year, on his birthday, he runs the same number of miles as his age:
The number of miles he would run
Last year was a mere fifty-one.
But now, fifty-two?
That much harder to do —
Old age does not make it more fun.
Current events or something funny that happened to the person can also inspire a good limerick. I once had a friend who moved from the bug-free Pacific Northwest to New Orleans. That year, he gave me plenty of subject matter:
While taking a drink in the shade,
Dear Brian enjoys Gatorade.
But taking a swig,
Found a live roach THIS BIG,
Now he’s mixing his cocktails with Raid.
Once I come up with an inspiring word or phrase for the person, I usually start going through the alphabet, looking for words that rhyme with it. There are also lots of good rhyming dictionaries on the internet, where you can type in a word, and all the rhymes come back. I use Rhymezone, which organizes the choices by syllables. If I’m having trouble coming up with good rhymes, I can also check Rhymezone for synonyms. That often breaks through the rhymer’s block.
There are a couple of tricks you can do to come up with even more rhymes for a given word. One is to contract the word:
For your limerick, you’ll need at least two sets of rhymes — one with three words and one with two words. If you have more than that, you may be inspired to write several stanzas.
Now you’re ready to construct the birthday limerick. If you’ve written limericks before, or if you feel comfortable mimicking the ones you’ve read, go for it — but when you’re done, there is one crucial step you should not skip.
Write or print your limerick and hand it to someone else to read out loud. That will immediately identify any problems with the rhyme and meter. This is an important step for a birthday limerick, because birthday limericks are always read out loud, either at large parties or just repeated many, many times.
If you’re new to this limerick business, or you want to hone your skills further, keep reading for some tips on structure and meter.
The structure of a limerick is five lines, A-A-B-B-A. That means that the first two lines rhyme with each other and with the fifth line. The third and fourth lines rhyme with each other:
A – Now my big sister Daisy’s a dear,
A – And I wrote of her birthday last year.
B – But another year’s passed,
B – And it happened so fast,
A – That she’s now one year older, I fear.
One of the biggest challenges to limerick-writers, new and experienced, is getting the meter right. A proper limerick has anapest meter, which means lines one, two, and five are stressed like this:
da-da-DUM da-da-DUM da-da-DUM
And lines three and four are shorter, but still have the same kind of meter:
da-da-DUM da-da-DUM
You can modify this a little, starting a line with da-DUM and ending it with da-da-DUM-da. But don’t make changes other than that, or it won’t flow properly, as this example attests:
No, it’s really not that hard to rhyme,
And it just takes a whole lot of time.
But the meter’s the thing
To make every piece sing,
And limerick-writers like me consider lousy meter a terrible crime.
The trick to making a good limerick great is to make it funny. Humor is the hallmark of a great birthday limerick, and you have a chance to gently poke fun at the birthday person. It’s always nice to throw in a little surprise in the last line, as I did in this 40th birthday limerick:
So by 40, your hair’s turning gray,
And gravity holds you in sway.
You must stand on your head
When you get out of bed,
Just to keep nasty wrinkles at bay.
But the truth is, you’re not really old!
You are vibrant and youthful and bold.
You can still climb a tree,
You’re vivacious and free —
Now just eat these stewed prunes, as you’re told.
Margret “Meps” Schulte has always had a soft spot for silly rhymes, her favorite poetry book being the Norton Anthology of Light Verse. In 2002, she was inspired to publish her first limerick on the Web when she noticed that her friend Brian’s name sort-of-rhymed with the name of his new boat, Cayenne. Since then, she has written well over 200 limericks about her travels, current events, friends, and anything else that strikes her fancy. Meps has also submitted about two dozen limericks to the Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form, or OEDILF, giving her the dubious title of “Contributing Editor.”
