Bedwetter

The Fourth of July and my birthday are both coming up in a couple of weeks, which means two things. First, JHP will attempt (usually unsuccessfully) to steel himself for any possible sightings or encounters with the ne plus ultra of his phobias, Uncle Sam on stilts. The second thing is that I will begin to get phone calls from my mother that are both precisely timed and scripted, and describe in detail the days leading up to my birth.

Happy birthday America, ye bastion of whiny lardbottoms, ye.

 

I don't know when she started this tradition, but I can't remember a Fourth when I wasn't greeted with a (insert my pending age) "years ago today, I was making a blackberry cobbler for your dad and Uncle Bob, and I burned my arm on the stove..." etc. This goes on periodically for the next two days when we get to my actual birthday and money shot, as it were. It's not a particularly exciting story (the dramatic highlight is the retelling of a vaguely suspicious vehicle that was outside their apartment and never seen again. Kind of dull stuff), but it's mine, and I love it. The best part is how Mom tells each installment completely seriously and without preamble - no "hello" when I answer the phone, just a solemn "By now I'd made a German chocolate cake and decided to wash my hair..." in her thick Nashville accent.

 

Even though I know the whole story word for word at this point I still look forward to this every year. Back before cell phones, catching each phone call could get a little dicey, and missing one would throw the whole thing into chaos and lawlessness....human sacrifices, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria! So you can imagine how happy I was to come home one July 5th some years ago and find that Mom had left that evening's installment on my answering machine. More precisely, she'd left it on the answering machine of the people for whom I was house sitting. The 7/5 pm episode is my favorite, because that's when her water breaks and we finally get this show on the road. "...and I woke up in the middle of the night, and the bed was aaallll wet so I said 'Dennis! I think I wet the bed!' so I got up and went to the bathroom. I woke up later on that night, and said 'Dennis! I think I wet the bed AGAIN!'..." I was so pleased to have part of the story documented that I immediately opened the answering machine and swapped the tape with what I thought was a spare tape inside next to it. What I didn't realize was that by doing so I'd actually made Mom's story the outgoing message on the machine. And remember I was house sitting? It was for my old boss, the former senator from the great state of Tennessee who was at the time the US Ambassador to China. For over two months callers to his house were greeted with a five-minute dramatic reenactment of the time some anonymous country woman twice thought she'd wet her bed.

 

She's really good at storytelling and fake peeing. All reasonable offers considered.

 

Some very, very important people left some very, very confused messages on that machine before I finally figured out what I'd done. "Um...Secretary Albright would like to speak to the Ambassador but we have the wrong number?" "Ah. Well. Let me see. I'm calling from the Washington Post. I'll try back later." When I called Mom to tell her about it her reaction was a firm and certain "No, that did not happen. Dennis! Bring me a scotch, baby." To this day we do not speak of it.

 

Personally I'm just relieved that this didn't trigger an international incident, or get misinterpreted as some sort of strange American S&M etiquette. I also wonder how many people are still wondering what happened after Dennis! went off to work and she finished hanging my mobile. You'll just have to wait until she calls on the 6th!

 



 

Pops

JHP and I recently had a week and a half without children and it was a glorious thing indeed. AD's at camp until the end of June, and the RM went to Memphis to inflict herself upon the Higdons. My family has a long history of pawning children off on grandparents; I'm more than happy to do my part.

My mother would wait maybe ten minutes after school was out for the summer before packing us up and shipping us up to Nashville. Sometimes she'd drive us all the way herself and stay a couple of days before leaving us to our own devices, but more often she'd hand us off to my grandmother at the designated halfway point, Deena's Restaurant off the Lexington/Huntington exit on I-40. Cslos and I were glad to oblige because as far as we were concerned there was nothing more fun than spending time in Nashville. In addition to Opryland and the retrospectively creepy Water Boggan, Nashville was the home to both sets of grandparents, our most fun cousins and a host of aunts and uncles.

My dad's younger sisters - beautiful identical twins - worked here one summer, and you could not convince me that there was a more glamorous job outside of Hollywood. I mean, seriously, doesn't this just ooze sophistication?

 

My paternal grandparents were perhaps the kindest people in the world, and not just because they let us have all the normally verboten sugar cereal we wanted. Visiting them might include an impromptu fashion show with my aunts' clothes, or building a sandbox with my grandfather - idyllic grandparent stuff. My mother's parents on the other hand were a different animal in that visiting them carried with it a reasonable chance of serious injury or defamation. My grandmother, Moms, was the most loving and responsible woman you can imagine but she had somehow nonetheless managed to marry the most inappropriate man in the tri-state area. Pops. My Lord, that man.

 

I asked my mother recently how she would describe her dad, and she immediately replied "flashy vain insecure unfaithful obstinate argumentative quick temper quick to laugh smart charming and loving". He was a Cark Gable mustachioed dandy who would make my grandmother move to the backseat so he could pick up hitchhikers. He once visited my mother in college and somehow got so drunk by the time she met him at his hotel that he told her he had cancer (he didn't) so she wouldn't get mad at him (she did); he even showed her his "radiation burns" - sunburn from working in the yard - to prove it. Pops was also a bit of a firebug and torched not one but two automobiles. The first he claimed to have no active part in; he started his car and went back inside the house to get something, and in the meantime it somehow accidentally caught fire. My grandmother informed him that their car was in flames in the driveway, and his response was a dismissive "what do you want me to do, piss on it?" I personally consider the "accidentally" part to be alleged, since shortly thereafter he also burned our car down to the steel after throwing a lit cigarillo (a cigarillo!) in the backseat.

 

After JHP and I saw "The Royal Tennenbaums" I told him I hoped he'd enjoyed meeting my grandfather. Dead on.

 

Pops once traded his .22 rifle to a cousin for a bike to give to his girlfriend's son. I'm not sure this was the same girlfriend he wanted to invite to my christening, but it bears mentioning that 1. he and my grandmother never divorced and 2. the girlfriend's son may or may not have been his as well. We still speculate about any potential half-siblings my mother might have. Several years ago there was a horrible flood that killed over 3,000 people in Papua New Guinea, which just so happened to be where Pops had been stationed in WWII. Dad called me and said "you need to be extra nice to your mother...she lost a lot of family today." You might think a man of this caliber would have trouble finding professional success, but in this case you'd be mistaken - Pops was actually an attorney of some prominence. Which made it all the more newsworthy the time he was tossed in the poke for telling a cop to go fuck himself...that stayed on the front page of the paper for almost a week.

 

When I was three years old, Pops fell and suffered a head injury that resulted in irreversible damage to the part of his brain that controlled judgment and inhibitions. Which was cool since he obviously had both of those qualities in spades and could totally afford to have them take a hit. The stories of his hospital stay are legendary; my mother has especially fond memories of the time a nurse asked him what he would like for breakfast, and he responded "I WANT SOME HOT PUSSY!" He backed that shit up, too - his signature move became luring a nurse to his bedside and then jamming his bare foot up her dress. Cute! Once he came home he wasn't much better, which meant he was a pretty fantastic playmate for a three year old. We were always cautioned to keep it to ourselves if there was a certain toy or present that we wanted, because he was as likely as not to get it for us even if it wasn't remotely appropriate, a lesson my grandmother learned the hard way after Delta Air Cargo called her one day and told her she needed to come pick up her dog. "What dog? We don't have a dog." Turns out he'd ordered a show dog, a giant red Doberman, and neglected to tell her. He thought we might like it.

 

Pops died of cancer when I was eleven so it's only in retrospect that my sister and I can appreciate how truly off his rocker he was when we were children. Every now and then we'll realize "so he was SERIOUS when he accused us of smoking cigars in the back yard..." or we'll stumble across a photo of him reading "Oui" magazine, me perched on his lap obliviously watching tv. It definitely puts a spin on the time he rolled the car window up on my neck "just for kicks". I think about him all the time, especially on Father's Day, and wonder what kind of grandfather he would have been as we grew older. Something tells me we might be better off not knowing.

 

Happy belated Father's Day, Pops.

 





Let's Not Give Them Something To Talk About

To say that my children talk a lot is like saying Hitler had a bigotry issue. Words just can't adequately convey the magnitude, the monstrosity, of that reality; to truly grasp it you need scholastic research, historical perspective and eyewitness accounts, if not pie-charts and support groups. My children simply do not stop talking and it makes me have wine for dinner. Please do note that's not wine "with" dinner.

AD is a color commentator - she provides a running narrative of absolutely anything that's happening, like she's a reporter on the scene of a hurricane or breaking Supreme Court decision. Except 99 times out of 100 she's giving you "and then she said get your book it's on the chair and I said no it's not and she said yes it is and I said oh here it is I was looking on the wrong chair". Pretty dull stuff, and it's constant; she even talks in her sleep, in a voice so loud and clear that you think she must be awake until you realize she's making less sense than usual. "Buy sugar free, though original is yum for kids!", "you really want to keep my shoes, don't you?" and "he doesn't need to be one of those juggling persons" are some of the things she's woken us up with lately. Kind of disorienting.

The good thing about AD is that if you can just tune her out, you're okay. She doesn't require any input or answers, she's all outbound. The Red Menace is a different story; she talks just as much (if not more) but she demands your full attention and participation

Look mom. Mom LOOK. LOOK. MOOOOOOOOM LOOOOOK. Mom.

If I try to ignore her she will either repeat herself until I knuckle under and respond or will physically attach herself to me like a tree frog until she feels adequate attention has been paid. Taking her out in public is a daily exercise in humiliation for me; it's not a trip to the grocery, nossir, it's just the opportunity she's been looking for to expand her fan base. She talks to everyone, and it doesn't matter one bit if they're 50 feet away. "WELL HELLO TO YOU THERE. WHAT'S YOUR NAME HOW OLD ARE YOU." Woe upon your house if you don't respond - the RM will keep you in her tractor beam until you agree to converse, which will end up being confusing and uncomfortable for both of us as she will inevitably say something like "my hiney has a hole in it and I'm a princess" or "I have BURGERS in my nose".

My sister Cslos works at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and has given both girls several really cute "I love St. Jude" t-shirts which have become invaluable when it comes to salvaging the RM's public image. I've noticed more than a few people dial down their annoyance with her when they see she's wearing one, like they think perhaps she's the subject of some strange medical experiment that makes her act like a nosy caveman. I do nothing to dissuade these assumptions. Since I know the truth, my annoyance has traditionally been alleviated only by the silence that the night-nights would buy. Letting her have one of those was the only way I could get her to shut the hell up - alas, those days are gone. Last week the "Night-Night Fairy" came and took them away to give to all the new little babies that need them and don't have good enough judgment to get ones that haven't already been used. Stupid new little babies! We left the night-nights out on the porch because the RM didn't cotton to the idea of having a thieving stranger coming inside the house.

Farewell friends, loyal and true. I miss the shit out of you already.

 

In return, the NNF brought her a new Ariel Barbie which actually swims and will hopefully make the RM stop being such a twat about putting her face in the water at the pool. Anyway, When my friend Erin gave me the idea for the NNF I thought it was brilliant, but man my bleeding ears are missing them now. At least AD is at camp for the next three weeks so I'm not getting it in stereo.

 

Time to hit the K-Roger...wish me luck. I'll bust out the St. Jude shirt and remember to buy sugar free, though original is yum for kids!