Fun Fragments

Hammer Time

Corrine's high school drama club participates in the state's one act play festival this March and I've been building the set for their production. Recently, I brought the hammer down onto my hand.

"Fucking cock-sucking whore!" I shouted and then threw the hammer across the stage and into the wings.

"Really, Dad?" Griffin asked me. I had forgotten he was with me.

"What?!"

"You had to throw the hammer?"

Lactose Insolence

Gabrielle insists that Abraham Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd, died from what she calls "drinking too much milk."

"No she didn't," I corrected her.

"Then what did she die of?"

"I don't know but it wasn't from drinking too much milk."

"So you don't know."

"Gabrielle."

"What? I'm just saying."

"Drink your milk."

Naked Junk

Standing naked in our bedroom after a shower, I had to hop out of the way when Corrine opened the door to enter for fear of being seen by the kids.

 "Relax," Corrine said. "The kids have seen your junk before."

"Junk?" I quipped.

"Well?"

Return of the Naked Junk

At work a few years ago I texted Corrine like a horny teenage boy.

"Send me a naughty picture of yourself."

"Ok," she texted back and I sat waiting.

After a few minutes I texted again, "Well?"

"What?"

"Are you going to send it?"

"Shut up."

"Huh?" I fired back.

"I sent it to you."

"I didn't get it."

"Shut up!"

"I'm not kidding. What is it a picture of?"

"A picture of me holding my boob."

"Didn't get it."

"FUCK!"

Apparently in her haste to send it to me, she had selected her daughter's name - Alyssa - in her contact list, rather than Andy.

Wait. It gets better.

Alyssa had lent her phone to her boyfriend that day, who had received the picture.

"I am never sending naked pictures over the phone ever again," she said later that day.

Revenge of the Naked Junk

In a foolish moment of juvenile delinquency, and a perfect case of short-term memory loss, Corrine and I took a picture of ourselves in the buff standing in front of our bathroom mirror. I asked her to send it to my phone. It never arrived.

Months later my mother and father came to see the kids off to school for their first day of school. After the bus left, my mother turned and said "I saw a picture of you naked the other day."

Thinking it was a picture of me as a child that she had unearthed in her trove of family pictures she keeps in her closet, I laughed it off.

"Oh yea?" I smiled blithely and started to head into the house.

"Yeah, you're standing there with a hahd on," she said, snickering.

"Um..." I said, scowling. And then light slowly dawned on marble...um...head

Corrine began to laugh. I began to shit myself.

My mother produced her phone and there, on the screen, was the picture Corrine and I had taken.

"Well, a sem-eye," my 70-something-year-old mother teased.

"Dear Jesus," I said and crawled back into my house, from which I didn't emerge for seven months.

It seems, in her haste to send it to my phone, Corrine instead had sent it to one of my siblings, whose names also start with the letter A.

Speaking of Bad Dreams

Lately the kids have been telling us of their nightmares.

In one conversation at breakfast, Gabrielle said she had had a dream where she was being chased by animals who "used to be my friends but then became not my friends anymore."

"Wow," I offered.

"Yeah, they got mad at me and chased me, then they ate me."

"Why did they get mad at you?"

"I don't know. I think they were sick. But hungry, too."

Griffin then chimed in, as is often the case when not wanting to be outdone by his sister.

"I had a nightmare too," he said.

"Ok," I said.

"You were a zombie and Mom was a zombie and Sissy was a zombie and everyone was zombies!"

"Well that sucks," I said.

"Yeah and you chased me. Everyone chased me and then bited me. It was so scary."

"Bited you?"

"Yeah. Here and here," he said, pointing to both sides of his neck.

"Were we zombies or vampires?"

"Zombies. You were vampires last week."

"Bailey?" I asked our red head.

"What?"

"Did you have a nightmare?"

"I not do it," he said guiltily.

"I didn't say you did anything. I asked if you had a nightmare."

"Yeah. I had a nightmare," he said.

"What was it of?"

"What?"

"The nightmare, Bailey."

"Oh."

"Well?"

"What?"

"Aww, Jesus Christ, the nightmare, Bailey. What was your nightmare about?!"

"I forgot."

The Hitched Hiker

On my way to work this week I picked up an older man on the side of the road holding a sign that read "Windham."

"Mighty nice of ya," he said, hopping into the front seat. "How far ya headed?"

"Westbrook," I answered.

"Well, that works perfect for me, don't it?"

"I suppose it does."

I swelled with pride in having given a fellow human some assistance on a freezing day. I was uplifted by my own act of benevolence. I saw people in high places bestowing upon me the highest of civilian medals and Jesus himself shaking my hand and leading me to the head of The Line when my time came.

Within minutes, however, I was breathing onto my window and scrawling my suicide note.

A mile from where I picked him up, he launched into a monologue about his married life, the darkness of which was so deep that I was swallowed by its infinite despair.

He went on for miles about the vagaries of marriage: the unexpected twists and turns that had come with being "with the same woman for ovah fahty-five ye-ahs." How she was never appreciative of his toil, his service in the army, his head injury, his sacrifice for the sake of her contentment, his love of corn out of season.

Yes. He even claimed she did not appreciate that he loved corn in the winter.

On and on and on he preached, for miles. And not once did he sound angry.
 
"My wife don't even eat suppah with me no more," he said at one point.

"Wow. Well, that's so...I'm really sorry about that," was really all I could offer him and my hand was on the handle of the door ready to spring myself into a snowbank going 65.

Of course, in the back of my mind I wondered why he hadn't already buried the shrew in the back yard of their home when he said this final thing:

"But, you know, that's why I love her. Heh heh."

Really?

I let him out at an auto-parts store in Windham and he ducked his head back into the car before closing the door.

"See me on the road, be sure to stop, ok? I'm outside every day, same time."

"Ok. I won't waste a second to stop. See ya later!"

 I drove away, happy in knowing that my wife is appreciative of everything I do.

I have pictures to prove it.

Wanna see 'em?