December 6, 2011 · 0:00

A Different Toy Story

Nobody suspects I would have done anything of the sort.  I’ve fooled them all.  Well, at least I’ve fooled the folks I work with.  And that will do.

You see, we have a terrific Christmas tradition at my office.  We have a party, yes, and it’s actually fun because we like each other.  And the highlight of the party is a gift exchange.   About two weeks prior to the party, we choose the name of a co-worker, and bring a gift for that person as if he or she were 7 years old.  We open the gifts and have a great time guessing who gave it to us.  Then the toys are collected and given to a local charity.

We have a blast, it’s for a good cause, and everybody tells their funny childhood remembrances of what we would have done with a toy like they got.

But it was awkward for me this year, because I got a doll.

She was a beautiful, blue-eyed doll with rosy cheeks and curly blond hair just like mine.  Any girl would love her and gently care for her.  Any girl would treasure that pretty doll.  Any girl would have given that beautiful doll to her own daughter to love, too.

Any girl but me.  Because for the most part, I hated dolls.  And for most of my childhood did anything to avoid playing with them.  Except when I was about 7.

Well, I guess I answered honestly when I said that, uhhh, yeah, I would have played with the delicate dolly.   And, yeah, I would have played with it when I was about 7 years old.  So yeah, the gift, umm, fit me.  I didn’t elaborate, though.

I didn’t, for example, tell anyone that the dolly would not have been happy with the situation.

I blame my parents, they bought that particular house.  I blame my brother. Me, I was innocent.  I was led astray.  I was forced to do it.  The fact that it was hilarious and became one of my favorite memories is completely irrelevant.

You see, the house I grew up with was next to the railroad tracks.  And naturally, because it was strictly forbidden, my brother Fred and I used to spend lots of time playing on the tracks.  We’d put our ears to the rail to listen for trains, and, once we were sure none were coming, we’d run across the tracks.

That was fun for part of the first summer we lived there, but hey we were 6 and 9.  We needed growth opportunities.

We flattened pennies until we had enough to lay track from New York to New Haven made entirely of smushed Lincoln faces.  For a while we would wait for a train to come and then hop across the tracks, trying not to trip and die.  Fortunately we both succeeded and outgrew our interest in that particular challenge.  We tried to flip the track switch so that the train would jump the track and go down our driveway instead of on towards New Haven.  But for some reason, someone had locked the switch, and no matter what we did, we could not get the train to go down our driveway.  It was probably just as well.

One day, I got home from a friend’s house to find that my favorite stuffed animal, an orange poodle won for me by my dad, was missing.  Naturally, I accused my brother of hiding it.

“I didn’t hide it, Lease,” he said.  “I played with it.  It was just sitting on your bed,” he said in that brotherly tone that indicates I was stupid for questioning him.

He walked into my room, grabbed another stuffed toy, my stuffed Pebbles doll with the plastic head, and said. “Come on.  This is really neat.”

Out we went, down to the tracks.  We waited and waited, putting an occasional ear to the rail.  Finally, Fred placed Pebbles on the tracks.  Like Pauline, Pebbles looked skyward.  Like Pauline, as the train approached, her feet wiggled.  Unlike Pauline, however, there was no rescue.

The train whizzed by sending the most delightful plume of stuffing up and out, way over the top of the train.  It was a hit.  We rushed back for additional victims.  All my stuffed toys and each and every doll met a sorry end.

We would have let Pauline go, though. Really.

As it turned out, today at the party, my boss had picked my name, and the doll was from her.  “Would you have played with a doll like her?” she asked, no doubt envisioning me dressing her up and playing with her like other girls.

“Absolutely,” I said, weighing the doll and imagining just how high up this particular doll’s stuffing would go.

47 Comments

Filed under Family, Humor, Stupidity

Tagged as ,

December 2, 2011 · 0:00

Both Sides Now

“The Season” makes me crabby.  Grumpy.  Irritable.  I’ve come to hate it.  Everything about it.  I hate the music, the crowded stores, the decorations.  I especially hate the decorations.

Last year a friend stopped by our house in the middle of December.  “God, it’s December 15th,” I said to her, “and the only decoration I have up is the wreath on the door!”

“I don’t think that counts, Lease,” responded my husband John. “You didn’t take that down from last year.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Tonight, I’m looking around at my undecorated house thinking, “uggggh,” not “Ho ho ho!”

It wasn’t always true, though.  I used to be one of them.  I was a veritable Christmas Elf.  I baked, I decorated.  I embroidered Christmas stockings for the whole family.  My son Jacob and I built gingerbread houses that did not come from a mix or a box and were actually made of gingerbread stuck together in the shape of a house!  My friends got a bottle of homemade Irish Cream liqueur.  Some used it to get their kids to bed on Christmas Eve.

But mostly, I sang.  The records, tapes and CDs came out on Thanksgiving.  From the moment I woke up the day after Thanksgiving, until New Years, I would trill away.  “White Christmas,” “Do You Hear What I Hear?” “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.”  I belted “Mele Kalikimaka” when I had an established escape route to avoid people trying to punch me.  I know the words to all 18,423 verses of Frosty the Snowman.  I would start singing in the shower and keep going until John tackled me and put duct tape across my mouth, usually at about 8:30 a.m.  Regardless, I’d start up again the next morning.

If the current, Crabby Christmas Me got a hold of the old Merry Christmas Me, I would slap myself silly.

So you see, I do understand the Christmas-sy part of Christmas.  The love, the joy, the traditions.

But now I see the other side.  And it’s that “tradition” part that is to blame.

You see, my family’s always been fairly competitive.  My mother and her sister Ruth were particularly so.  They’d argue at each shared Sunday dinner over a million things:  whose gravy was better (my mother’s), who cracked the best one-liner (always Aunt Ruth – she was a hoot), and most traumatically for me, whose young daughter was taller. (Duh, Maureen was almost a year older than me – of course she won every time.  But you’re not taller now, are you?  And you’re still older, Maur.  You’re still older.  How do you like it??)  Darn, I wish I’d missed the competitive gene.

When I was a kid, Aunt Ruth was high on the list of my favorite relatives.  Now she’s tops on an altogether different list.  And it ain’t Santa’s list, neither.

Because Aunt Ruth started a family tradition.  A competition.  But it’s not a family tradition I recommend, especially during the Christmas season.  In fact, it should have a warning, although I’m not sure where you’d put it:  Don’t try this at home.

You see, Aunt Ruth started the tradition of kicking the bucket on a major holiday.  What fun!  Great idea!  Not many families do that!  Hey, we are DIFFERENT!

Knowing Aunt Ruth, I’m sure her last thought was “Doris, you’ll never top this one!  I’m dying on Thanksgiving!!!!”   She was no doubt a bit miffed when my mother joined her a couple of years later.  Because, not to be outdone, Mom arrived in the afterlife on Easter Sunday.

Their party really got going when we reached Y2K, and my sister Judy died unexpectedly on my birthday in January.  Now, you might argue that my birthday is not, technically speaking, a holiday.  Not a paid day off for most folks.  But hey, in my book, this qualifies.  So there.

As time went on, there were fewer and fewer holidays I could celebrate.  The only big one left was Christmas.

Guess what happened on Christmas, 2000!  Yup, Dad reclaimed his spot at the head of the table with Mom, Judy and Aunt Ruth. Dad trumped them all.  Or because it was Christmas, perhaps he trumpeted them all.  Maybe both.

I must say I am rather ticked off about it all.  Sort of changes the tone of the Holidays, you see.  I plan to have words with all four of them, next time I see them.  And I will not be nice.

In the meantime, celebrating holidays, well, it just seems so odd to me.  Especially Christmas, because Christmas is so stuff-oriented, and most of my Christmas stuff is from them.  It takes a bit of the fun out of decorating.

For a while, I considered joining the Eastern Orthodox Church.  That way I could celebrate the same holidays, just on different days.  I could keep all my Christmas crap!  I could decorate!  I could bake!  I could sing!  But then I realized that the change would just give us all additional high priority target dates, and I don’t have enough family members left to meet the challenge.  So Eastern Orthodox is out.

At the same time, I also realized that, when Dad hit the Holiday Lottery, the whole tradition had to stop.  Because I’m pretty sure that biting the dust on, say, Columbus Day, just wouldn’t cut it.  So why bother?

Nevertheless, this whole thing has made me decidedly anti-Holiday.

There is one holiday I still look forward to, though.  Groundhog Day.  I just can’t figure out what sort of decorations to put up.

Photo courtesy of Google Images

109 Comments

Filed under Family, Humor, Music

Tagged as , ,

November 30, 2011 · 0:00

Ummm, Mom? — “CHRISTMAS WITH MOM” CONTEST

Mom was known for giving weird gifts.

One year, far from Mom, my sister Judy and I found two identical small packages from her.  One for Judy and one for me.  We saved them for last, to be opened simultaneously.

Judy was faster than I and opened hers first.  It was a little green plastic box of earrings that said “Judy” “Judy” all over it.

I unwrapped mine.  It said “Elaine” “Elaine”

“Ummm, Mom?” I said later, “my name’s Elyse.”

“Well,” she responded, “They had boxes with just a plain E, but that was just too boring!”

"Elaine's Earrings" -- Yup, I still have them!

****

This is my entry in the Christmas with Mom Contest.

The rules?  Write  a Mom Christmas Memory of 100 words or less, link to it in the comments section at sponsored by http://warnerwriting.wordpress.com/christmas-with-mom-contest/.

Deadline is December 5, 2011.  Winner gets a $25 gift card to Amazon.com or Starbucks, as well as having the w inning piece posted on a number of blogs including Things I Want To Tell My Mother

28 Comments

Filed under Family, Humor

November 27, 2011 · 0:00

What happened?

Sometimes I miss stuff.

When I read, sometimes I get so excited about what I’m reading that I miss something very important to the story.  Like the point of the story.  Or a major turning point in the plot.  Most often, I miss it when someone dies.  I don’t like death much.  I try to ignore it, even when I read.

Most of the time, nobody knows I’ve missed something.  Most of the time, I don’t either.  Most of the time, I go on blithely thinking that one thing happened when, in fact, something else entirely happened.  As a result, the books I read tend to be quite cheerful.

In college, I read Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.  Have you read it?  I did, although this time I am quite sure I didn’t race to the end because I enjoyed it.  I think I raced to the end of the book so that Faulkner would shut up.  But when I got to class, I discovered I’d missed a tiny little detail.  Oops.  Because everyone was talking about Quentin Compson’s death.

Huh?

Spoiler alert:  If you haven’t read the book – Don’t.

I mean, if you haven’t read the book and plan to, don’t continue reading this blog.  Do something else.  Click on “My Favs.”   Click on the blogs in my blog roll.  Click on Amazon.com and see what other classics you haven’t read.  Most of them, at least those NOT written by Faulkner, are really great books.

Anyway, back to The Sound and The Fury. 

I was very confused that my classmates seemed to think that Quentin Compson had died!  They had to be wrong, I thought.  I clearly remembered the last time he appeared in the novel:   Quentin was a freshman at Harvard, and he went swimming in the Charles River.  I think that the line was actually “Quentin walked into the Charles until his hat floated.”  I figured that, because he was a Southerner, he wanted to keep his hat on at all times; that river gets pretty chilly, you know.  Besides, Southerners have some odd customs, and at the time I read this book, well, I didn’t know the half of it.

So there I was, taking American Literature 101, reading Faulkner, occasionally walking across the bridge that had plaques about Quentin Compson’s suicide, and I missed the part where he offed himself.  Totally.

Well, you must admit it was an odd literary ploy.

But sadly, that wasn’t the last time I missed something.  It still happens.  I can read a whodunit, and not only not guess who done it, but read it again a year later, and not guess again.  Perhaps I am just subconsciously thrifty.

So when a week or so ago, the blogs I follow started disappearing from my inbox, I wasn’t overly concerned.  After all, we all go through slow periods.  And then I blamed it on the build-up to the Thanksgiving holiday; everyone must be busy.  Surely it was simply a coincidence that everyone was having a slow period simultaneously.  Strange things DO happen, you know.

BUT as it turned out, somehow I missed the fact that I accidentally “unfollowed” all the blogs I had consciously, intentionally and with knowledge aforethought decided to follow.  Oops.  I have now re-followed and re-subscribed.

Sorry.  Sometimes I just miss stuff.

20 Comments

Filed under Humor, Stupidity

November 26, 2011 · 0:00

Too much information

I’ve had a house full of folks here for Thanksgiving for most of the week.  So I’ve been doing a whole lot of cooking.  Tonight, however, I’m taking it easy.  I bought a frozen lasagna, and not long ago, I turned over the box to read the directions.  Basically, I needed to know how long and at what temperature to cook it.  What other information do you think I’d need?

Apparently, our friends at Stouffer’s thought I needed more.  Apparently, they think that the straight jacket has just been removed from my torso.  Apparently they think that I need careful guidance in frozen Lasagna-making.

So I guess it is a good thing that the box gave me the most complete pre-cooking instructions I could wish for:

Preheat oven to 400° F

Do not exceed 400° F

Pull tab from short side of package and remove perforated strip.

Remove tray from box.

Now, I know that some people are better cooks than others, but if you can’t figure out that you need to open the package and take the entree out before you start cooking your frozen dinner, well then, maybe you need something more than a frozen dinner.

Maybe you need a drink.

34 Comments

Filed under Family, Humor

Tagged as