Please don’t smoke the daisies

IN THE BACKYARD, my wife and I dig and dig and dig. It’s spring and the ground is soft, good for farming. Forget that. We dig in hopes of discovering oil. A nice gusher would come in real handy right now, wouldn’t it?

I’ve got basketball brackets to buy and Girl Scout cookies to pay for. There was the big, gossipy dinner with Dave and Patty the other night. Steak, Cabernet, chocolate souffle. Dave picked up the tab, but now we’ll have to reciprocate. Jeeesh, I hate reciprocating. Since when did dinner out become a car payment?

Speaking of money, the other day my wife, Posh, spent 300 bucks just on a wagonful of new flowers and shrubs, which she hopes to plant in the divots left by my oil explorations.

“Can we eat these?” I ask, holding up a daisy.

“Nope,” she says.

“Can we smoke ‘em?”

“Nope,” she says.

Well, good investment then.

I say this every month, but this really is the zaniest time of year. There are all those fundraisers taking place, and youth baseball is just beginning. Everybody’s pretty loopy from all the commitments, including Posh, normally the least loopy person I know. She’s almost presidential in her demeanor. “Classy” is how I would describe her.

“How much,” I ask, “are we over on the Visa?”

“What Visa?”

“The Visa bill,” I explain.

All we do lately is write checks. The other day, a Sunday, I answer the phone and in fractured English a complete stranger tells me the Visa bill is criminally overdue and asks how much I’d like to pay at that very moment.

“Right now, as for today?” I ask, because I can speak fractured English with the best of them -- I studied it in school. (You should hear me coaching in tight ballgames. I’m almost incomprehensible.)

“We would like, yes, a token payment,” the guy on the phone says.

There’s almost nothing I like better than giving money to perfect strangers over the phone. On Tuesday, a young woman from my alma mater (the School of Rock) calls to ask about my college experience -- what I liked about it, who my professors were. She is calling, she says, to update school records on my whereabouts. Nice kid. Sounded about 12.

“Tonight we’re asking for your support,” she says.

“Well, you’ll always have that,” I assure her.

“Would you be willing to make a $250 commitment then?” she asks.

Oh, that kind of support. Sorry, I’m broke. Tapped out. Done. Besides, this whole Brett Favre thing has me in a deep funk. He retired last week, complaining of being “mentally tired.” Brett Favre tired? Swashbuckling superheroes don’t get tired.

You know who gets tired? Schmoes like me. Heck, I’m tired all the time. If I were any more tired, I’d be Keith Richards.

I’m no Favre, that’s for sure. The other night, for example, I cried a little after stepping on a Lego toy on the way to the bathroom at 2 in the morning. I step on a lot of stuff on the way to the bathroom -- shoes, scissors, Happy Meal toys -- but Legos are the worst, the hard edges digging into the soft, cake-like instep of my naked foot. I’m so tired of that.

Posh is tired too.

The other morning, between arguments about the Visa, she washed two entire loads of just towels, then three more loads of shirts, jeans, socks, baseball pants, bras, clown shoes, parachutes, pantaloons, pirate hats and Visa receipts. And that was just my stuff.

“Can’t we hire a housekeeper?” I ask.

“Which kidney did you want to sell?” Posh asks.

I never realized how poor we were till we moved to California. Perhaps no other state in the entire nation has such extremes of poverty and wealth. Mississippi used to. Then along came that Civil War. Now we’re Mississippi. My house is suddenly worth about 12 bucks. But we’re surrounded by all these plantations.

No worries. I’m thinking that when these new oil wells come through, life will be good again. Jed Clampett always seemed so content, didn’t he? I know oil is a good business too, because no matter how expensive it gets my older kids keep buying it by the tankful.

Dig, dig, dig . . .

“Hey, honey, I think I found something!” I finally yell.

“Oil?”

“Or maybe that’s just the septic. . . .”

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Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com. For more columns, see latimes.com/erskine.