Good Robin Hunting

                                

Perhaps the most provocative post I read this week regarding the suicide of Robin Williams came from a friend who wrote:

Breaking news: The death of Robin Williams is causing America to give empty lip service to mental illness that will result in nothing.... again.

Maybe I liked it because of my friend's cheeky cynicism, a trait we both seem to share. Instead of mentioning his favorite Mork and Mindy episode, his comment exhibited a ballsy flippancy in the face of a post mortem social media tsunami. We were all overwhelmed by the same huge wave, weren't we? I got home from play rehearsal Monday night and checked my Facebook feed to find it filled, top to bottom, with an outpouring of shock, sadness, photos copied-and-pasted from Google, clever quote memes, and bunches of this-is-my-list-of-favorite-robin-williams-movies.

I found my friend's comment refreshingly different. And basically accurate. Let's be fair here, since Monday the web has been awash with two types of stories: addiction and depression. The media has lapped up Robin's tragedy, found the root cause of it, and is now doing their damned best to package it all together into neat segments to prove they have the pulse of the American people.

I'm not suggesting the media ignore the issues. Neither is my friend. He's just reacting to the Big Wave, and its smaller after-waves, that have been hitting our shores this week and how, after it's all dried up, nothing will have really changed.

Oh stop it. I am not suggesting that if you contributed to this then you were a bad little doggy who shit on my carpet. I am not rubbing your nose in it and throwing you outside.

Besides, this blog post is not about the social politics of it. I really just wanted to talk about how his death hit close to home for me. Because there is nothing more human than personalizing someone else's personal tragedy to bring attention to ourselves. Where your attention really needs to be focused. You know you love me. Give into it. You'll feel better if you do.

The truth of the matter is that I, like 1 in every 10 Americans, suffer from depression and/or anxiety. Or, as in my case, both.

There. I fucking said it.

Depression and anxiety are the greasy-haired WWF tag team that is in constant battle with a far weaker tandem of sanity and logic. They perform their blatantly choreographed dance in the boxing ring of my psyche, all to an orchestral version of the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby. 

All the lonely people, indeed.

Except, someone forgot to teach sanity and logic the choreography and the poor bastards are always caught off guard.

But you wouldn't know any of this was going on, would you? Because while my sanity is being clothes-lined and logic having his ear bitten off, I am your personal Robin Williams. I've got that zip-bang retort at the ready; a pocket full of self-deprecating one-time lozenges for you to suck on; a plethora of perfectly timed, wink-wink, double entendre face-blushers.

Me so fawny. Me yuk-yuk you long time.

If depression and anxiety are the causes of all those internal emotional wrinkles that I carry around, then humor is the facial I give myself to hide them from you.

See what I did there? I said I give myself a facial when I'm depressed.

God I crack myself up.

Here's the thing: I was just as shocked to hear the news of Robin Williams' death as you were, but not because I thought he would never ever be capable of such a thing. For heaven's sake, anyone who truly loved Robin knew about his addiction, his failed marriages, his recent financial problems, and the resultant depression.  I knew what he was going through. 

No, no, no. My shock was not based on the idea that someone so funny was so sad. I'm living that life. I know it first hand. My shock was in the sudden loss of a comic genius.

You know what I think? I think we don't like our comics being depressed, because we know deep down that if those people - the ones who make us laugh until we cry, who lift us up, who pull us up out of our own depressing lives - are depressed, then we are all fucked.

We prefer the Good Robin. We go looking for him, and people of his ilk. We look forward to the funny man at our social gatherings, because we need the hit. We crave the fix. The high that comes with being around the clown.

But when they're not on, what do we say?

"Wow. Andy wasn't himself, was he?"

The truth is, I don't choose to be funny. It is not who I am. It's actually a reaction, folks. A defense against the Dark Arts called Depression and Anxiety. A mechanism I learned from my early years being picked on as the littlest kid in my class, and honed over the years to help cope with feeling unwanted. I was once told by someone close to me that I like making people laugh because I need people to be my friend.

That hurt. But it's the truth.

Being funny as a way to deflect pain is like that boat scene in Good Will Hunting. Will (Matt Damon) is the brilliant but broken Southie kid and Sean, his equally brilliant Southie therapist (Robin Williams), are sitting in Sean's office when Will notices a painting on one of Sean's shelves.

He walks up to it...

                                WILL
                    It's a real piece of shit.

                                SEAN
                    Oh..Well, tell me what you really think.

                                WILL
                    Uh, just the--the linear and impressionistic mix makes a
                    very muddled composition. It's also a Winslow Homer
                    rip-off, except you got Whitey uh..rowin' the boat there.

                                SEAN
                    Well, it's art, Monet...wasn't very good.

                                WILL
                    That's not really what concerns me, though.

                                SEAN
                    What concerns you?

                                WILL
                   It's the coloring.

                                SEAN
                   You know what the real bitch of it is? It's paint by
                   number.

                                WILL
                   Is it color by number? Because the colors are fascinating
                   to me.

                                SEAN
                   Are they really? What about that?

                                WILL
                   I think you're about one step away from cuttin' your
                   fuckin' ear off.

                                SEAN
                   Really?

                                WILL
                   Oh yeah..

                                SEAN
                   Think I should move to the south of France and change my
                   name to Vincent.

                                WILL
                   You ever heard the saying "any port in a storm?"

                                SEAN
                   Yeah.

                                WILL
                   Yeah, maybe that means you.

                                SEAN
                   In what way?

                                WILL
                   Well, maybe you're in the middle of a storm, a big fuckin'
                   storm.

                                SEAN
                   Yeah, maybe.

                                WILL
                   The sky's fallin' on your head, the waves are crashin'
                   over your little boat, the oars are about to snap. You
                   just piss in your pants, you're cryin' for the harbors,
                   and maybe you do what you gotta do to get out. Yeah,
                   maybe you became a psychologist.

                                SEAN
                   Bingo. That's it. Lemme do my job now, we still have a
                   minute. C'mon.

                                WILL
                   Maybe you married the wrong woman.

                                SEAN
                   Maybe you should watch your mouth. Watch it right
                   there, chief, all right?

                                WILL
                   Ah...Well, that's it, isn't it? You married the wrong
                   woman. What happened? What, did she leave you? Was
                   she, you know, banging some other guy?

                                SEAN
                   If you ever disrespect my wife again, I will end you, I
                   will fuckin' end you. Got that, chief?

                                WILL
                   Time's up.

                                SEAN
                   Yeah.

The storm Sean found himself in was actually the death of his wife, misinterpreted by Will as Sean having married the wrong woman. The truth was far darker, far more personal than what was on the surface.

The metaphor here is obvious to me as it relates to Robin Williams, the comic genius rowing like a bastard in the middle of his own personal storm. The guy was looking for any port, a place of safety, and many say he chose his port to be drugs and alcohol. 

I think it was comedy. That's where he anchored his little boat, to get away from a terrible youth, something he admitted to having endured, which directly led to his depression, which he medicated with drugs and alcohol. A classic example, actually, of an addict.

I'm not naive. I know the drugs and cocaine contributed to the depression. How could they not. He even said so himself.

But comedy..that was his port in a storm. That's where he found shelter, where he found acceptance. That is what people don't realize about those who make us laugh, but disappoint when they are off. They are not being funny, as if it's who they are, they are sheltering themselves.

We go hunting for the Good Robin, and when we don't find him, we're shocked to learn that he was really just one of us. Well, we're shocked but we're not...we know, but we don't.

Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting that when your funny friend tells the joke about that time he did that thing that was so damn funny that he needs to be talked off a ledge. He's probably just telling a great funny joke.

But when he's off...

Give him a hug and be a real friend, and rest assured you'll laugh with him again tomorrow.

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We Together, Him And I, You and I, Have Truth

Lately, I've been forced to mine the past in order to make sense of the present.

This is a game the mind plays on those faced with the mortality of someone they care about.

It goes something like this: to reckon with the end of someone, the mind works feverishly to anchor that someone to a place in time relative to ourselves. Maybe it's a desperate grasping to feel solid ground beneath our feet at a time when the surreality of the situation has stripped us of our mental gravity and we're floating in emotional space.

Actually, I think of caves lately, not space.

The brain goes spelunking into the deep recesses of abandoned caves whose openings were once wide but have since been covered. The mind discovers such a cave, hacks through the crawling vines of time and memory, and enters a cold place.

It is a provocative enterprise, fraught with the slippery peril of memory's unreliability. You step on stones you think are solid facts, only to slip and fall waist-deep into a mire of contradictory truths.

Did I go with my brother to the drive-in on a Saturday when I was 10, sitting on the hood of our parent's Plymouth Station Wagon while the girls flirted with him? No, I was 12 and it was the GMC pick up. NO. It was the Plymouth. But there were no girls at that time. Wait. There were always girls. I think he bought me an Orange Crush soda. Or maybe a root beer, because I went through a root beer phase when I was 10. But not 12. Then it was grape soda, the summer I spent at Ganderbrook Christian Camp when his presence as the camp swim instructor inspired me to be baptized later that year. The last year before he began to spiral down and I unfairly replaced him as a hero.

And on it goes, this chipping away for those rare rocks called facts that we overvalue for the sake of the common minerals called truth. And in the middle of this, we come to our senses and ask "Why the hell am I here? This is too damn hard. I'd rather just not deal with this. Take me back."

But I swing the pickaxe anyway, because I know I have to. 

Perhaps it's because I identify myself as a writer and that my mind naturally goes for the connection, the metaphor, the meaning in the tether between the tiny particles that shape my life. Of course we all have those, but writers are geeky ant collectors when it comes to them. We trap them on the page. We look for the patterns. We study the meaning.

So it has gone, these past months, while I write a memoir about my relationship with Woofit. The inundation of memories has had me spiraling and faltering, spinning and crashing on a daily basis. The ground falls suddenly away at the unearthing of a forgotten memory, and then comes back at me hard and fast when I consider the truth behind it. I think of 1982, when I was 14 and perhaps at my most vulnerable and how that singular year spun me out in ways I would not understand. Not until 1992, anyway, when holding my daughter Fallon for the first time, I broke down with her in my arms because I could not get her to stop crying whenever I held her. I was a failure as a parent, I insisted. My parents were parents in 1982, when they cried for a child they felt they had failed.

Boom. Connection made. Thanks for coming. And oh, by the way, it was probably 1983.....

I sit in between the silences of the night, lately. Those folds of quiet in which one finds comfort in the stillness but is nevertheless on edge for the impending sound, the sound of screams in the head when the future gets here at last. The sound of an avalanche of memories loosened.

Twice a week I watch my brother during these silences. Guiltily I jot down, as quickly as I can, the fresh new stone I've unearthed with the dull pickaxe of memory. All the while the co-inhabitant of this particular mine is dying of brain cancer and I have nothing to give him except my meager presence.

So in my twisted way, I reason that by writing this memoir, I give myself permission to keep mining, no matter how deep the vein. I solicit justification and I find it in a simple, striking realization: Woof and I have both mined here together, as partners. The relationship we form with others creates a singular cave filled with common, almost ugly stones of memories. Yes, there are precious gems. And they sparkle and tempt us into the belief that they represent some sort of truth. When, in reality, the small, seemingly useless memories, the ones with all the dirt and moss on them, are the bedrock of real life. And Christ doesn't it hurt when you drive the pickaxe home and one of them flies out and strikes you between the eyes.

The haul from our endeavors - 46 years of it - has created something of significant value between Woof and I. And by bringing them up out, into the light, I in no small way have solved the riddle of my recent days: how do I keep my beloved brother alive.

I give you our truth, our imperfect stones, the foundation of his immortality.

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The Show Must Go On

Every Friday is devoted to a collection of things heard and seen over the past week that I find amusing, poignant, or embarrassing. I could probably cultivate these tidbits into separate posts, but then what would be the fun in that? Everybody likes lists.

Friday Fragments is my end-of-week list for your utter enjoyment.

In the run-up to next week's opening night of "See How They Run" I thought I would share with you some personal anecdotes about my own experiences in productions over the years. Live theater can be hazardous and fun. Live community  theater can be downright hilarious.

Don't Forget to Duck 

 

In the first play I ever acted in, called "The Rainmaker", I played "Jim", a young cowboy not too quick on the up-take. In one particular scene my character spars with the local sheriff, played by a good friend and work colleague. In our fictional fight, his character was supposed to punch my fictional character across the jaw and I was to fall to the ground.

Opening night, the sheriff drew back, swung, and hit me - literally - across the cheekbone.

Everyone's a Critic

 In a production of probably my least favorite show I've ever done, The Pajama Game, I played "Prez", the president of the union of the local pajama factory. The opening number was a grand spectacle, as all opening musical numbers tend to be. The "factory" featured sewing machines atop rows of desks, around which the entire cast danced and sang "When You're Racing With the Clock."

Imagine upwards of 40 people singing and dancing, choreographed down to the last minute, when the final note rings out and we're all standing on stage with our arms up in the air. There is a beat just after the song ends and, from the front row of the audience comes the voice of a darling little old lady.

"That was horrible," she said.

Mind Your Head

 

Same show, different night. We ran the show on the stage of a private academy, who needed to use their stage for academics the Monday following the first weekend of our show. So, we were required to remove as much from the stage after the end of our first weekend performances.

At intermission, we hurried to move the desks and their sewing machines downstairs beneath the stage. I picked a partner to help move one of the last desks, a sweet older actress, the kind of person who knitted sweaters for dogs and would never hurt a fly.

She took the rear, I the front, and we proceeded to move our desk down the stairs. The Singer sewing machines were these heavy beasts, bolted down to the desks. Well, all but ours anyway. Halfway down the stairs I heard my partner say "Uh oh," and then I blacked out.

It seems our sewing machine was not bolted down and tumbled off the desk and onto my head. I woke up, dazed, in the women's dressing room. I don't recall anything about the remainder of the show.

My lifting partner did, however, bake me a pie because she felt responsible for my concussion.

Le's Try This Again

 

Same show. Another different night. The signature song of Pajama Game, "7 1/2 Cents", explains the basic premise behind the show: the pajama factory workers demand a raise and if they don't get it, they'll walk.

The song is led by Prez, my character, in two verses. The first verse was sung in front of a few other factory workers on stage, with the remaining cast to storm through auditorium doors behind the audience and down the aisles when I began the second verse.

On this particular evening I finished the first but, inexplicably, started the song all over. I knew the minute it happened and I searched the eyes of the accompanist in the pit below me for a signal for what to do. She wasn't watching me, however. She was too busy rifling through her score to get back to the beginning of the song in order to continue accompanying me.

I finished the second helping of the first verse, then launched into the second verse. The back doors of the auditorium burst open and the remaining cast streamed down the aisles to sing out the rest of the song with me.

Convinced my colleagues were ready to lynch me for flubbing the song - and their entrance - I was surprised to hear that my screw-up was a blessing. Someone had locked the auditorium doors and they were frantically trying to get the keys before I launched into verse number 2.

Tom Foolery

 

During The Nerd my character was required to open a door, check to see if anyone was there, deliver a line, and shut the door. The door was positioned in such a way as to ensure that the audience could not see what was behind it. Closing night of the show, my fellow cast members thought it would be fun to prank me. During this particular scene, I tore open the door and standing there, to my surprise, was a cast member covering her rather ample breasts with a pair of shoes.

I forgot my line. And the next four lines after that.

 

Mala-Props

 

~ In Damn Yankees I played the Devil. In one scene I was required to "light" a cigarette and "smoke" it. I played the entire scene, one night, with the wrong end of the cigarette in my mouth.

~ Dress rehearsal for a show in which I was required to remove my pants on stage and stand in my boxers, I realized almost too late that I wasn't wearing underwear

~ In a show in which I was expected to shatter a vase, I threw it to the floor and it bounced, unbroken, into the audience

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Night of the Attack of the Flying Chinchilla Squirrel Thing!

Gabrielle was an infant the night we were attacked by a flying squirrel.

Now, listen. I'm not afraid of snakes, spiders, moths or bees. But rodents wig me out. I can't tell you why. There's just something not to trust about small, four-legged fury things that can out-run a car and have beady little evil eyes.

This story will live in infamy in the Turner house. It's one of the few told repeatedly, and the details of which increase in color, length, and disproportion to the truth at each new telling. That's because Corrine is the storyteller, because Corrine is not afraid of rodents. Well, not as much as me anyway.

As do all great stories starting with "Corrine and I", this one begins with us in bed.

It was the last waning moments of the evening, after dinner, when the older kids were downstairs arguing over what to watch on television, and Corrine and I had just climbed into bed. Gabrielle, who was 9 months old, was asleep in her crib across the room from us.

Outside our door came a curious sound. Something akin to a doll being thrown down a flight of stairs, followed by a growl. Not a fierce growl, as if from a dog, but a muted growl, as if from a cat that had something in its mouth.

At the time we had two cats, and both were great mousers, so this was not an uncommon sound in our home, a three-story house built in 1850. Our house, when we moved in, was a mouse's version of the Continental Hyatt House, that infamous Hollywood hotel where rock stars flocked in the 1970s and ran riot, throwing televisions off balconies and driving motorcycles down hallways. 

Like the great bouncers that they were, our cats disposed of our unruly, drunken mice without impunity. For the first months there, we regularly found the decapitated carcasses of the little hell raisers in the middle of our living room floor or hallways.

"Francesca's got another one," I grumbled to Corrine, who was already sound asleep.

But then came a different noise. The rapid whap-thud-whap of two small bodies wrestling outside our door, and then a hair-raising chit-chit-chit-chittering. I'd heard this sound before, in a science fiction horror movie.

"What is that," I said, loud enough for Corrine to hear me. I may have also elbowed her face.

"Whaaaa? Stop. I was asleep." she growled.

"Did you hear that?"

"No."

"Do cats wrestle with mice?"

"Seriously?" she said, and sat up in a huff.

The wrestling recommenced. Francesca mewed and hissed and her opponent chittered. Goosebumps popped up onto my skin. I was now convinced our cat had cornered the Predator and we were all about to be disemboweled. I turned sharply to her, the covers pulled to my chin.

"What the fuck IS that?!" I asked. I may have stuttered.

"I don't know, Andy," she said, with the same tone she uses when the kids ask the same question for the ninth time.

So like all great horror movies when the main character inexplicably becomes illogical and runs toward axe-wielding mask-wearers, I got out of bed, turned the light on and opened the door. I would love to say it's because I face my fears or that I'm brave. Folks, I don't ever face my fears and I am not brave. I am Priscilla Queen of the Desert who will not allow his wife to tear a Band-Aid off his big toe.

Nevertheless. Here I was, Barney Fife in boxer briefs, opening our bedroom door to let in The Thing.

I may have peed a little when it raced into our room, chased by Francesca. I do remember leaping. From the door into the bed next to Corrine. Corrine yelped.

"WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!?!" she shouted.

"I DON'T KNOW, CORRINE!"

"YOU OPENED THE DOOR, AN-DY!"

"I REALIZE THAT, CORR-INE!!"

We watched and listened. Francesca whined and screamed, digging at our bureau, beneath which she had cornered something vile and angry. Probably someone's dismembered hand now animated by radiation experiments. Ok maybe that was my adrenaline-infused writer's imagination. But still, the whatever was chittering and now stuck beneath our bureau and -

"NEXT TO THE BABY!" Corrine yelled, bruising my arm with her fist. What? She punches like a middleweight.

"I know," I said, bug-eyed and spying the darkness beneath the bureau.

"Andy. GET THE BABY!"

"Me?"

I hoped, in that moment, that Andy Warhol, or Andy Griffith, or maybe Raggedy Andy was standing in our doorway. Certainly they had bigger balls than me. I'm not too proud. Let one of those bastards risk losing their larynx, I reasoned.

"Andy!"

"Ok! Jesus!"

I slid the covers from around my neck, flexed my fingers to get the blood flowing again, and then slowly moved my right leg over the edge of the bed with the same deliberation that Neil Armstrong used in dismounting the ladder to reach the surface of the moon.

My eyes remained affixed to the bureau. Francesca sat and watched me with contempt.

I brought the left leg around and both feet were planted together on the floor. I reached down and groped for something I could defend myself with. I found nothing. Because for the first time in my life I slept in a bed that didn't have shoes or books or pizza crust beneath it. Of course.

"Shit."

I looked at the crib, then the bureau, then the crib.

Crib-bureau-crib-bureau-crib-bureau-crib-bureau-

I leaped toward the crib, snatched my sleeping daughter, turned and leaped back into the bed. (This was a night of leaping. Lots of it). Gabrielle's body warbled limply around my arm, her head lolling like a bobble-head toy. I chucked her at her mother and pulled the covers up to my neck again all with the fluidity of a perfectly executed double play.

"Did you get a look at it?" she asked, placing Gabrielle beneath the covers beside her.

"It's small and wicked fast," I said.

"Ya think?"

"I don't know Corrine, it's bigger than a mouse. Like a squirrel but..."

"But what?"

"But different. Something is different about it," I said. I felt like I was being interviewed by the FBI and trying to describe the guy on the grassy knoll.

"It's a chinchilla," she said with sudden expertise.

"It is NOT a chinchilla," I argued.

"How would you know?"

"Because. A chinchilla...chinchillas are....they're warm-blooded nocturnal animals that only live in tropical locales," I said, like I knew what I was talking about.

"It's night time," she reasoned. "It could be someone's pet."

"Pshaw." I dismissed her.

Because I was now Andy the South American Rodent Expert and no longer Andy, The World's Skinniest, Leaping Pussy.

 "Well, anyway. We have to get it," she said.

"Get it?"

"Yeah. We can't let that thing run around our house with the baby."

Because for some reason, when there's a baby in the house, everything matters more. Exposed electrical outlets, exploding toilets, Satan, rabid chinchillas.

"Francesca will get it."

"Yeah. Clearly that's working."

"Well, how am I supposed to get it?"

"I don't know. Get a net."

"We have a net?"

"I don't know."

"Mmmhmmm. Yup. Bingo."

It was at this moment that Francesca, clearly rested now, took a swipe beneath the bureau and dislodged the creature. Corrine screamed. I screamed higher and louder.

Francesca pounced at it and missed. It bolted across the floor, up the nearest curtain and to the top of the window sill where it sat peering over us all.

"WHAT. THE FUCK. IS. THAT?!?!" I shouted.

Francesca rustled the curtain. The thing. The IT. The whatever leaped (told you) into the air and flew...FLEW...down to the bureau where it came to rest.

"IT'S A FLYING. FUCKING. SQUIRREL!" I shouted.

"What?!?!"

"It's a flying squirrel."

"Squirrel's fly?"

"Did you not just see that? A squirrel? With wings? Flying?"

Francesca leaped (right??) onto the bureau and the chase was back on. The squirrel landed on the floor and sprinted out the door, Francesca whining and sprinting in hot pursuit.

"Now!" Corrine shouted and shoved me.

"Now what?!?!?"

"We have to get it."

"Jesus H. Ok. Gimme a second."

I got out of bed and began to do the dance of the helplessly inept. Spinning in circles, searching for weapons. Corrine joined me.

"Wait," I said. "Find a box or something. I'll get something to hit it with."

Corrine vanished out the door. I bounded into Fallon's bedroom and found a tennis racket. We met up again in the hallway at the foot of the stairs leading to the third floor, where we could hear Francesca and the squirrel dodging and parrying, mewing and chittering. Corrine held a cardboard box.

"A tennis racket?" she asked, in the same tone you would ask someone coming to a fishing expedition with a shotgun.

"Come on," I said, leading the way up to the top stair, where I stopped and peered into Ty's bedroom. The one time when leaving his light on was a blessing. I spied Francesca staring up at the top of a window sill and knew the squirrel had found another lofty perch.

"Come on," I whispered to Corrine. 

We slunk into Ty's room. We kept our eyes on the squirrel. The squirrel kept one bulgy eye on us and one on Francesca.

"Ok. I'm gonna knock it down, you catch it in the box," I whispered.

"Huh?"

Corrine had started laughing at about the time she noticed me holding a tennis racket downstairs.

Just then, the squirrel (anyone? anyone?) - leaped from the window, flew down to the floor at my feet and I screamed the scream of a 16-year-old girl at an N'Sync concert. I hopped up onto the bed. Corrine, meanwhile, still laughing, began chasing the squirrel around the room, with Francesca as her wing-man.

From my perch on the bed I watched, waving the tennis racket back and fourth like I was preparing to return a back-handed lob.

Corrine - laughing even harder now - flushed the not-a-chinchilla flying squirrel from a corner, and the little bastard leaped up onto the bed with me.

"Jesus fucking christ motherfucker!" I screamed, dancing, pumping my knees high into my chest, the racket flailing over my head, as the squirrel bounced off the bed and into a far corner. Corrine was right there with the box, flipping it onto the squirrel and trapping it. She remained bent over the box. I got down and approached, racket raised in case of a break out.

Corrine, still bent over, turned to me, her face red, laughing the kind of silent laugh of the truly insane.

"I pissed my pants!" she finally shouted, tears flowing.

Francesca sat on the bed, looking down on the spectacle with amusement and disgust.

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Careful What You Slap People For

Sitting next to Maren is highly coveted in our home, and the privilege to do so can be as treacherous to my children as it once was for those who sought to be on the right side of emperors and kings. My children will kill each other in order to sit next to her.

Maren is merely 6 weeks old. She can't talk, turn her head very well, or reach out with any reasonably deliberate dexterity to hold your hand, and yet she's treated as the Crown Princess. She has nothing to offer her older siblings in the way of toys or money or advice, but you would think, if you watched the melee that unfolded whenever space opened up next to her, that Maren held in her possession magical powers.

Take one such episode recently as an example.

Any trip into town with my children begins the same way. Corrine's announcement to get their shoes on stirs them to action in the same way, long ago, a Man-O-War's bell-ringing signaled a beat to quarters. It's all hands and feet and running and shouting.

Shoes must be found first, of course, and this takes its toll on couch cushions, chairs, bureau drawers, dogs and any other thing the children swear  is where they left them last. And they never find them in pairs. One will be on the top of the refrigerator while the other is next to the toilet, for example.

Once discovered, of course the shoes require untying since the last time they wore them they were double-knotted and then worn in the rain for a full week. This leaves the task of untying them the equivalent to unscrewing a bottle of acetaminophen in the dark with greased hands. This eventually results in shoe-horning the sneakers onto little feet, twisting and turning and bending the ankle to an unnatural angle while the child screams as if being tortured. Which, let's face it, they are. I mean at this point a delirious frustration sets in for the parent and the best way to get to the car is the most expedient way, ankle bones and delicate tendons be damned.

Finally shoed, the children are checked to make sure they're not wearing yesterdays clothes, or today's clothes backwards, or someone else's yesterday clothes. Then and only then are they released simultaneously from the living room and told to get into the car.

This is a running of the bulls meets roller derby. Seemingly as if chased from the living room by a stampede, they carom off furniture and each other, cursing in their own native tongue.

"I hate you stupid head!" is a common refrain.

I placed Maren, already strapped into her car seat, in the car ahead of all of this. In this way I have beat the madding crowd and need not tap dance, with baby in her seat, around the pixie devils hell bent on being first.

Gabrielle is always the quicker of the three and therefore was out in front as ever. Griffin jostled with Bailey in the rear, but not because they're equal in speed, but because Griffin likes to jostle Bailey.

"You're not winning!" Griffin shouted, and then face-slapped his brother. Bailey crumbled to the floor, face on his palm, in faux shock. I say faux because The Red has limited pain receptors and therefore feels very little pain. He once grabbed an electric fence without flinching. I grabbed the same fence - thinking it was off - and the jolt sent me into a fit of profanity that Bailey thought was the funniest thing he'd heard since that time his mother bent over and farted.

Once crumbled, Bailey was now safely in third place. Griffin, satisfied that he'd eliminated one, set his sights on the other: Gabrielle. This is folly. Because no one eliminates Gabrielle. Especially Griffin, her arch nemesis in all things relating to anything, whether truly a competitive sport or not. Hell, they fight over who can chew their supper food faster without vomiting.

To taunt Griffin, Gabrielle paused at the open door and grinned back at her advancing brother. When he reached the door, she sang "La la la laaaa, Lo lo lo looooo," and then slipped through the door and slammed it in his face. The song makes no sense whatsoever, but it pisses Griffin off more than if she had wiped her snot in his eye. Truth be told, the sound of the song makes me want to punch my own sister. So, there is some competitive edge to using it.

He bounced back from the force of the door slamming and immediately filed a complaint.

"GABRIELLE HIT ME IN THE FACE FOR NO SUCH REASON!" he yelled at me with the conviction of a wronged people. No such reason is a term they both picked up years before. We're not sure why. We've speculated that saying No apparent reason was too difficult. Either way, it translates to "That fucker!"

And like all parents who attempt to diffuse a live grenade, I lost a limb.

"She didn't -"

"Gabi threw the door right at my face!"

"Not at your -"

"She's mean! I hate her!"

"You don't -"

"I HATE YOU GABI!!"

And so on and so forth, Griffin relighting and exploding multiple times like one of those infernal candles you can never blow out. He finally stormed out the door and toward the car, where Gabrielle already had staked a claim to the spot next to the baby. This set Griffin over the edge and he resumed his tirade by shouting at the window of the closed door while Gabrielle snickered at him from inside.

Bailey, for his part in the race, remained where he was left crumbled on the floor. He picked grass from his sneakers and sniffed it, a typical race strategy of his that neither his mother nor I have ever comprehended. He's a sniffer, not a fighter, apparently, and for that reason he always ends up last and with Griffin's hand print on his face. But he doesn't care. So really the fight for Maren is only ever between the two youngest.

Once in the car, Bailey took his place in the farthest seat from Maren because he needs a window seat and because sitting between Gabi and Griffin would be the end of him. Gabi, already glued next to Maren, was asked to move.

"I EARNED IT!" she shouted at me.

"Yell at me again and you're in the trunk," I warned.
 

"That sounds fun!"

"Just move, Gabrielle."

Appeals made to Corrine, about having been the first, and that she's never first and that Griffin is always FIRST and even when she's first she's never FIRST, all failed. Gabrielle stood in a huff.

"Well MOVE Griffin. I can't just sit on your stupid lap!"

Griffin slid beneath his sister to take his post beside Maren, who had been oblivious to everything except the twinkling light design on the ceiling of the car. Gabrielle plopped down and called her brother something that sounded like Rat Bastard. I let it go, because I wanted bliss. I was emitting bliss particles from my soul and my ass because I was ready to kill and counting to 10.

We pulled out and were on our way.

Soon, Bailey breathed, which made Gabrielle irritable.

"He's breathing on me," she complained.

"Just enjoy the ride," Corrine told her.

"I would if Bailey would stop breathing," she replied.

Griffin, meanwhile, was paying attention to Maren.

That is, until Maren vomited. Then he began gagging.

"Mom! Maren - hooah - Maren just puked! Hooah. Can I sit - HOOAH - can I please sit somewhere - HOOOAH - else?!"

Gabrielle laughed. Bailey breathed. Griffin dry heaved.

"You insisted on sitting there, Griffin," I reminded him.

"I know, but not - HOOAHHHH - Not if she was gonna - HOOOOAHHHH - PUKE!!!!"

Corrine swabbed up Maren, who cooed and then fell asleep, while Griffin pinched his nose and little tears fell from his eyes all the way into town.

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Every Friday is devoted to a collection of things heard and seen over the past week that I find amusing, poignant, or embarrassing. I could probably cultivate these tidbits into separate posts, but then what would be the fun in that? Everybody likes lists.

Friday Fragments is my end-of-week list for your utter enjoyment.

Squirm

Griffin approached me with hands cupped together.

"I found a worm in the kitchen!"

He revealed his catch.

"That's a maggot, Griffin," I told him.

He dropped the maggot to the floor.

"Is it poisonous?"

Wheely Fast

At the birthday party for Paige (our granddaughter) at the Maine Wildlife Park, the skies opened up and the rains crashed down. Sitting on a picnic table beneath a shelter, we watched as people sprinted toward the park exit. One in particular was an amputee in a wheelchair.

"Look, he's going fast!" Griffin said.

"He's running to get to his car as fast as he can so he doesn't get soaked," Corrine told him.

"Well, he'd be running if he had legs."

Blocked

Griffin was told he needed a pair of socks on before putting on sneakers.

"Or your feet are gonna stink," Gabrielle said.

Moments later he came into the dining room and lifted his pant legs.

"I found socks.They block smells. They're smell-blocking socks."

Not Quite

At summer camp this week, Corrine and I had the pleasure of teaching drama to several area youth from first grade up to middle school. While many kids appreciated the sessions of face-painting, theater games, puppet-making, and related fun, there were some who were just too cool to be into it.

As any teacher can attest, when confronted with the perpetually contemptuous student, a break-through is always the equivalent to finding gold.

One such student, an incoming seventh grader who had remained sullen and disengaged most of the week, out of the blue raised his hand when his group had been asked if anyone had acted in a play before. I watched Corrine's eyes brighten and I could almost feel her pulse quicken. She had done it! She had gotten the coolest boy to engage.

"You have?" she asked him. "What show?"

"When's lunch?" the boy asked.

My Hero

Alyssa is a counselor at the same camp and was assisting a young boy with painting a set piece for a puppet show. I wandered in to check out the artwork, said hello to Alyssa, then left. As I was leaving the boy looked up to Alyssa and said "Is that your brother?"

Well...Perhaps Not

Same camp, different players:

One of the break-out sessions I was in charge of was called Writing for the Stage. The older kids (5th-graders and up) were taught the essentials of play writing, and were then separated into groups of five or six to create their own small play.

Milling around the tables to assist, I was privy to perhaps some of the most curious and engaging conversations of the week. The best exchange, however, came between Sandy and Rick*, clearly into the exercise but grouped with three other boys who would rather be having their molars pulled.

Rick: I don't like the direction this story is going
Sandy: Yeah. It's missing something
Rick: (To the three other participants in their group) Yeah. Do you guys notice that?

Contemptuous stares with the sound of crickets

Sandy: What's the matter?

More contemptuous stares with the sound of crickets, this time louder

Rick: We could have explosions. Do you want explosions?
Sandy: (Overly enthusiastic) That might work! Would that work?

Contemptuous yawns


*Their names were changed

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