Add Children. Blend Carefully Into Family.

Talk about blended families. Our family tree has more exes than a Tic Tac Toe tournament. At 2:00 in the afternoon on holiday weekends all the children automatically rotate parents from force of habit. This weekend I found myself seated at dinner next to an entertaining young man who was engaged in a fork joust in an effort to keep his creamed corn from touching his potato salad.

“Well, hello.” I’m nothing if not a sparkling conversationalist.

The fork executed a remarkable thrust and parry to save yet another food item from corn domination. “Yo.”

Limited verbal motivation. Uncombed hair. Aversion to cohabitation of vegetables. I hate that nagging feeling that you’ve seen someone before and can’t remember where.

“And who do you belong to?” I really should write this stuff down.

“You. I’m your first-born male child. I inherit your kingdom, such as it is.”

“What’s your name?”

“You told me not to tell anybody that doesn’t say the code word.”

“What’s the code word?”

“Nice trick. You warned me you might try that.”

I liked him better when he was poking holes in the entrée.

I squinted critically and turned his face side to side with my palm. “You don’t look like me.”

“Yet one more thing to be thankful for.”

I paused to consider. Wit coupled with a side order of sarcasm. A single sterling family trait does not make him an heir to my fortune in frozen Girl Scout cookies and unrecycled grocery bags.

“So what’s your name?”

“Nice try, Mom.”

“If I’m your Mom, tell me something personal that only I would know.”

“You hide leftover Easter candy in your underwear drawer, you can’t reach the Tupperware bowls on the second shelf, and you cry during the end of Secondhand Lions whether you see the first half of the movie or not.”

A few lucky guesses does not equal a DNA match.

“And what happened on Friday,” I queried, conjuring up memories of Family Scrabble Night.

He swallowed the last bite of uncontaminated potato salad and guzzled a half gallon of iced tea without stopping for breath. “Friday was allowance day. You owe me five dollars.”

Anybody with that kind of money memory has my blood in his veins.

Now how can I get him to tell me the family password?

Maybe I can buy a vowel.



Son One? Who Knows?

 



What Child Is This?

Welcome to the Absolute Write October Blog Chain. This month's theme is Masquerade. And I can't help wondering. . .Who is this kid?


Talk about blended families. Our family tree has more ex’s than a Tic Tac Toe tournament. At 2:00 in the afternoon on holiday weekends all the children automatically rotate parents from force of habit. This weekend, I found myself seated at dinner next to an entertaining young man who was engaged in a fork joust in an effort to to keep his creamed corn from touching his potato salad.

“Well, hello.” I’m nothing if not a sparkling conversationalist.

The fork executed a remarkable thrust and parry to save yet another food item from corn domination. “Yo.”

Limited verbal motivation. Uncombed hair. Aversion to cohabitation of vegetables. I hate that nagging feeling that you’ve seen someone before and can’t remember where.

“And who do you belong to?” I really should write this stuff down.

“You. I’m your first-born male child. I inherit your kingdom, such as it is.”

“What’s your name?”

“You told me not to tell anybody that doesn’t say the code word.”

“What’s the code word?”

“Nice trick. You warned me you might try that.”

I liked him better when he was poking holes in the entrée.

I squinted critically and turned his face side to side with my palm. “You don’t look like me.”

“Yet one more thing to be thankful for.”

I paused to consider. Wit coupled with a side order of sarcasm. A single sterling family trait does not make him an heir to my fortune in frozen Girl Scout cookies and unrecycled grocery bags.

“So what’s your name?”

“Nice try, Mom.”

“If I’m your Mom, tell me something personal that only I would know.”

“You hide leftover Easter candy in your underwear drawer, you can’t reach the Tupperware bowls on the second shelf, and you cry during the end of Secondhand Lions whether you see the first half of the movie or not.”

A few lucky guesses does not equal a DNA match.

“And what happened on Friday,” I queried, conjuring up memories of Family Scrabble Night.

He swallowed the last bite of uncontaminated potato salad and guzzled a half gallon of iced tea without stopping for breath. “Friday was allowance day. You owe me five dollars.”

Anybody with that kind of money memory has my blood in his veins.

Now how can I get him to tell me the family password? Maybe I can buy a vowel.


Follow the blog chain. There is no weakest link!

Auburn Assassin and direct link to her post

Hillary Jacques and direct link to her post

Aimee Laine and direct link to her post

Ralph Pines and direct link to his post

Veinglory and direct link to her post

Laffarsmith and direct link to her post

PASeaholtz and direct link to his post

Madelein Eirwen and direct link to her post

Amy Doodle <== YOU ARE HERE

CScottMorris

Orion_mk3

Dolores Haze

Aheila

FreshHell

IrishAnnie

Lilain

Semmie

Bettedra

Oprah Envy

I don’t hate Oprah because she’s worth more money than major studios rake in by making movies about attractive, charmingly incompetent pirates. I don’t even hate her because she has a house big enough that if she weren’t speaking to her husband, supposing she’d found a nice model for a good price on Ro-Day-O Drive, he wouldn’t know for six months. Or because she can speed dial any number of people who can prevent her from ever having a bad hair day.

I hate her because she can afford to gain weight.

There are three sections in my closet. To the right are clothes that I have worn within recent history—which includes the eras that boasted Edith and Archie Bunker, Sonny and Cher, and the Beatles. With enough time and dedication to the study of fat content on spaghetti sauce labels and ice cream wrappers, I might wear these clothes again. I might also don a tricorn hat and sail with Johnny Depp on his next voyage, but that's beside the point.

The middle section of the closet is devoted to clothes I can wear right now. This section contains a pair of faded blue jeans, the black top my niece gave me with a buckle that’s guaranteed to draw the eyesight of innocent bystanders away from unsightly ripples in the terrain, and six pairs of stretchy pants.

The section to the left holds selections for days of bloat, hormone fluctuation, and random binges of drinking whole milk. My fat clothes.

My budget allows me these three small sections, although there are days when the power bill, car payment, and rent deadline band together like wayward musketeers to encourage me to sell the buckle shirt on eBay. I dream of a day when there’s enough money left after the cable bundle that I feel comfortable throwing out the bra with the broken wire.

I imagine Oprah’s closets. She probably has whole rooms devoted to different sizes of clothing. If she has an off day and, say, indulges in salad dressing or puts a dab of sour cream on her potato, she goes to the blue closet and pulls out a clever chiffon that skims the hips, conceals arm pendulums, and erases under eye circles.

Last week I went for a walk on the wild side, the closest thing I have to a workout plan, and plunged a chip deep into the salsa at the Mexican restaurant. Without a single thought for future wardrobe planning, I ate the whole thing without sharing a crumb with anyone else, including my lap. Today my jeans wouldn’t zip, my blouse wouldn’t button, and my Victorias threatened to spill their secret.

My life will never be like Oprah’s. Maybe I’ll try for Jerry Springer’s. If my clothes have a story to tell, let them tell it to somebody who will make the most of it.

Miss Manners Fights Back

While I’m not considered a prude by anyone except the examples of the species to whom I have given birth, I’m altogether a poor sport when it comes to food I will consume in public.

Unless I am in the company of dear friends who have known me long enough to identify the stains on my Riverbanks Zoo T-Shirt right down to the unsightly spot from the day we learned that the output of Lorikeets is greater than the input, or of family who is bound by the courts and/or the church to love me for better or for Waldorf salad, in sickness and in Heath bars, I’m not ordering anything that displays unlikely tendencies toward flinging sauces at random passersby.

Salads are particularly offensive in a social setting and should be regulated to over-the-sink binges indulged in while wearing particularly offensive pajamas destined for cleaning canary poop from the birdcage or grimy corners in the garage. Salads are filled with treacherous items that shoot streams of noxious juices into your eye when pierced with a sharp object, and difficult fibrous items that do not respond admirably to cutlery.

Likewise, I am not interested in consuming steaming dishes of noodles at, say, Sunday School gatherings because the first time an errant strand of fettuccine slaps my chin with a load of steaming Alfredo leaving a worm-shaped brand that will be with me til death do us part, I am altogether capable of comments that will guarantee excommunication on the spot. At the very least I'll be voted out of the covered dish dinner line.

On one ambitious jaunt to a local restaurant I couldn’t help but notice a young lady at a nearby table gather up more vegetation from her salad bowl than many farmers reap during a summer afternoon, and place the bales of foliage in her mouth with the same delicate flair usually reserved for swallowers of flaming swords. She was sitting with a young man who was engrossed in hand-dipping pieces of his French toast into the syrup swamp he cultivated in a nearby soup bowl. How have we raised a generation of young people who are passionate about a clean environment, but do not consider Mr. Knife and Mr. Fork their friend?

I watched in open-mouthed amazement as the girl hauled up a load of greens that wouldn’t fit into a lobster trap and crammed the whole package into her mouth. She looked like Sylvester the cat seconds before Granny rescued Tweety Bird from his jaws. She chewed contentedly for several minutes, then blotted her lips with a napkin and, looking my way, leaned over to Sticky Hands Steve and whispered through the poppyseed dressing, “Somebody should help that little old lady with her food. She can’t even close her mouth and there’s a puddle of gravy in her cleavage.”

I summoned the waitress and ordered a dessert dripping with enough chocolate sauce to cover Hershey Pennsylvania in profits and had her deliver it to the young lady and her boyfriend, Mr. Syrup Hands. Then I pulled out my digital camera with movie function.

Good manners are nice, but You Tube is still the best revenge.

Guns and Grandmas

When Southerners make the news it's never the "Mild-mannered College Professor Cures Cancer" type of story. It's not even the "Socialite Bequeaths Diamonds to Charity" type story. Oh no. When we make the news it's more of a "please don't put that on the front page and for goodness sake don't put a picture or say they're related to me" type of story. In which case I point out the happenings for the whole word to enjoy.

But in the sense of fairness, because this could have happened to anybody, I've left out Bubba and Junior's real names and supplied fitting character-generated epithets.

Here in the Redneck Capital of the World, a story made the newspaper that involved all the necessary ingredients of a made-for-TV movie—or a family reunion, depending on whether potato salad was served.

Seems Granny was unable to sleep what with pondering the whereabouts of her debit card, and woke up Nephew Number One to ask for his input on the matter. Meanwhile, Nephew Number Two, The Bad ’Un, wandered away from his plant-cultivating hobby, leaving his pipe on the kitchen table long enough to grab up Grandma in a choke hold, and poke the business end of a rifle into the throat of our boy, Rip Van Winkle. He takes a shot at the family Bible and sends Rip in to sit on the couch wearing nothing but his underpants and a plastic bag on his head.

But suddenly the plot twist kicks in. When Bad Boy turns to look out the door, Captain Underpants overpowers him, grabs the rifle, and hotfoots it down the street, where, despite his lack of fashion sense, he convinces a neighbor to call Emergency Services. (I have no proof, but I’m assuming he dislodged the fancy bag hat before the action sequence.)

If it weren’t for the Bible incident, I’d be leaning toward the Family Reunion story. But no Southern boy is going to take a pot shot that separates Matthew from Mark, Luke, and John in front of his grandmother and live to tell about it. Which leads us to the question: Where was Granny during the excitement? Any Southern Grandma worth her weight in blackstrap molasses would have pulled out a shotgun of her own and blasted the pants off Mr.Yuk. The whole tale smacks of “If you believe that one, then listen to this.”

As it was, reports state that Mr. Meanie was caught after a brief pursuit. From the descriptions, it sounds like they got their nephews mixed up because the briefs were last seen high-tailing it over the river and through the woods away from Grandma’s House.

Potato Salad Payoff

Talk about blended families. Our family tree has more exes than a Tic Tac Toe tournament. At 2:00 in the afternoon on holiday weekends all the children automatically rotate parents from force of habit. This weekend I found myself seated at dinner next to an entertaining young man who was engaged in a fork joust in an effort to to keep his creamed corn from touching his potato salad.

“Well, hello.” I’m nothing if not a sparkling conversationalist.

The fork executed a remarkable thrust and parry to save yet another food item from corn domination. “Yo.”

Limited verbal motivation. Uncombed hair. Aversion to cohabitation of vegetables. I hate that nagging feeling that you’ve seen someone before and can’t remember where.

“And who do you belong to?” I really should write this stuff down.

“You. I’m your first-born male child. I inherit your kingdom, such as it is.”

“What’s your name?”

“You told me not to tell anybody that doesn’t say the code word.”

“What’s the code word?”

“Nice trick. You warned me you might try that.”

I liked him better when he was poking holes in the entrée.

I squinted critically and turned his face side to side with my palm. “You don’t look like me.”

“Yet one more thing to be thankful for.”

I paused to consider. Wit coupled with a side order of sarcasm. A single sterling family trait does not make him an heir to my fortune in frozen Girl Scout cookies and unrecycled grocery bags.

“So what’s your name?”

“Nice try, Mom.”

“If I’m your Mom, tell me something personal that only I would know.”

“You hide leftover Easter candy in your underwear drawer, you can’t reach the Tupperware bowls on the second shelf, and you cry during the end of Secondhand Lions whether you see the first half of the movie or not.”

A few lucky guesses does not equal a DNA match.

“And what happened on Friday,” I queried, conjuring up memories of Family Scrabble Night.

He swallowed the last bite of uncontaminated potato salad and guzzled a half gallon of iced tea without stopping for breath. “Friday was allowance day. You owe me five dollars.”

Anybody with that kind of money memory has my blood in his veins.

Now how can I get him to tell me the family password? Maybe I can buy a vowel.