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?

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The Kemsen Crush

My 6-year-old son is in love with my teacher.

I mean his teacher.

Who used to be mine.

No, I don't mean she used to be mine. Not mine mine in the leather-jacket-wearing, hickie from Kenickie kind of way. I mean she used to be my teacher.

But I used to wish her to be mine in that other way. 

Well, no. I don't mean I'd wished she'd given me hickies. I don't think I knew what a hickie even was when I was 13. I just mean she was my first teacher crush. My only teacher crush, for that matter.

Her name is Kemsen and I wanted to marry her.

And now, it would seem, my son is similarly smitten.

Granted, I was in junior high when it happened to me, while Griffin is merely a first grader. Clearly his Kemsen Crush affection thermometer mercury level is much lower than mine was. Lower meaning that crushes in a 6-year-old still hover around 10 degrees while when you're a teenager they rise to a boiling point.

Now, for Heaven's sake, don't run out and Google every reference you can find about 'teacher-and-student scandals' and try to apply it to my situation. Relax. This was an innocent crush, and in no way was (or is) Kemsen anything more than a pure-as-the-driven-snow teacher. And neither was my crush on her anything untoward. I was a 13-year-old, 68-pound dork who attended the Church of Christ. I didn't start entertaining impure thoughts or slow dancing with girls or start masturbating until, like, a year ago.

This is merely my G-rated, crush-on-a-teacher story universally experienced by just about every student on the planet. Including, it would seem, my son. Poor little nearly-toothless bastard.

I met Kemsen for the first time while sitting in the fourth row, first seat, of an English class on the second floor of the Oxford Hills Junior High School in 1982.

I was 13 and wore a pair of tan/brown/light-colored (how the hell would I know?) corduroys that my mother had purchased during our typical last-minute school shopping trip to K-Mart in Lewiston the week before. I remember the pants because it was the first week of September and our school classrooms had these monolithic, almost cathedral-sized windows that converted sunlight into raw energy that was further absorbed by my pants. Aside from the whiff-whiff-whiff sound they made whenever I walked, I always smelled like burnt hair.

Most everyone else in my class wore non flammables that breathed. I wore haz-mat chic and got the same kind of withering glances from my peers that one now casts upon piles of dog shit. Or Wal-Mart greeters. They chattered about their summers, who they were dating, and how they were all going to the Auburn Mall that weekend to see Fast Times at Ridgemont High, even though it was rated R. I was not allowed to watch rated R movies until my first child was born 10 years later.

It was then, while avoiding any eye contact with, or addressing direct questions about my pants from, my classmates, that our teacher entered.

Kemsen floated into the room that day to the sound of Air Supply's  Lost in Love, with her Farrah Fawcett feathered curls and her brilliant Colgate smile. She crossed the front of the room clutching books that she laid down on her desk with the delicacy of a new mother putting a child in a crib. I think she even patted them.

I knew then, and there, that she would be a special kind of teacher. Because none of my other teachers cooed at dictionaries. Or smiled. Or liked kids. Or smelled like a swath of wildflowers in the fields of the Lord.

Shut the fuck up. I'm not exaggerating. 

"Hi class," she said. And that, I believe, is the only thing I recall her saying that very first hour or so of English class. Which is ironic because, while I believed myself to be fluent in the native tongue, I swear to God her voice triggered some sort of chemical anomaly in my brain that blocked any cognitive language comprehension whatsoever.

She would talk and her words would flutter out and over me like happy butterflies, but would make no sense. I watched her lips move. Intently. Trust me, I stared at them all the time, trying desperately to understand her. I turned to my best friend, Ted, and scowled. He was opening a book to page 4. I looked at Kemsen, who was still talking, but all I heard was the gibberish of muted vowels and underwater consonants, while the erratic hummingbird pulse of my heart scared the shit out of me.

What was happening to me? I wondered if corduroy could reach a high enough temperature that, at a molecular level it could eventually break down and pass through skin and cause blood poisoning and lead to eventual brain-swelling. (See: Sylvester Stallone)

The class ended with the bell and everyone gathered up their things and left, including me.

"Listen," I told Ted while whiff-whiff-whiffing down the hall. "I think I'm dying of brain swell."

"What?"

"I didn't understand a thing she said. Not one thing. Her lips moved but all I heard was, well, Charlie Brown teacherspeak."

"You have a crush on her."

"What?! No I don't! That's, like, gross!" I scolded him, but I suspected deep down that he was right. My own father had worked as a teacher and a school principal for all of my life and I recalled stories he told of star-struck girls who used to hang May baskets on him. Boy did that piss Mom off. (And soooo make me want to be a teacher. That and getting summers off.)

I tested the theory. I returned to school the next day because, well, that's the law. I took my seat in the fourth row, the row closest to the surface of the sun, and a foot from Kemsen's desk. I braced myself for her entrance, expecting her to do so on a silver-laced cloud, or in the escort of angels, or singing directly to me in French. (On the news the night before there had been a story about Jeanine Deckers, the Singing Nun, and I had Dominique on the brain. What? It's catchy and cute.)

She entered under none of these conditions, of course, because, let's face it, what public school system in Maine do you know of would allow teachers to be creative unless they paid for it themselves? Taxpayers don't pay for clouds, dude. Or angels. Or Belgian nuns with guitars. Or basic supplies.

Of course my heart started in again. Then came the breathlessness that arrives with anticipation and really cold weather. And confusion. And lack of focus. And a desire to break out into a rock ballad that has a pretentious orchestral bridge.

She stopped me in my tracks mentally and physically. I was in some sort of shock, yet I knew I was enduring it at the same time. A cruel dream-within-a-dream kind of emotional apoplexy. The kind of feeling you get that is so shattering that your mind embargoes its explanation for a minimum of 30 years. All you know, all you recognize, is the fact that you've been struck by something you don't understand.

In other words, love.

Please spare me your picayune postulations on true love verses infatuation versus admiration versus passion versus like versus obsession versus desire.

I was 13, for fuck's sake. Someone had just detonated a grenade in my soul. I was feeling something bigger than me. With all of its fuzzy, inexplicable, knee-weakening definitions. Get a law degree if you wanna argue semantics, you parent's-basement-dwelling, formula-fed loser.

Sorry. Anyway...

On accepting the truth of my condition, everything around me now became infused with her likeness. Songs I heard on the radio were naturally written for us like John Cougar's Jack and Diane. Or Waiting for a Girl Like You by Foreigner or Chariots of Fire, because every romance needs an instrumental. (Um...Duh. Hellooo??). The lead characters on my favorite television shows were now replaced in my mind by Andy and Kemsen. I was her Remington Steele, she my... my.... whatever the female character was in Remington Steele. My imagination was consumed by images of sunsets and songs, eternal love and lots of slow-motion runs on tropical beaches.

I loved everything about her. Her name. Her way of diagramming sentences. Her really cute one-shoe-sole-is-thicker-than-the-other trick. The fact that she used to be a cheerleader at the very same junior high school. The fact that she didn't ask me if I was visiting as part of a field trip for third graders.

She was, by her smile, the valentine that came when girls in my class conveniently forgot my name on their lists of cards to be handed out. Her presence was the lighthouse in the stormy pubescent seas of junior high school. Her's was the face that helped me realize that the faces of pretty girls were not to be figured out, but simply admired.

I spent that year in a fog. But as it turned out, I learned to love everything to do with English and reading and writing. The point is, I survived. I worked through my crush and came to understand something about the Human condition: we are supposed to be in love, we Humans. We are OK if we love our mentors, so long as its innocent. And, well, the music of the 1980s was awful, but that it's okay to love it nonetheless.

Now...what to do about Griffin.

He has Kemsen for his first-grade teacher and whenever he mentions her name, he glows like a bulb on a Christmas tree. It's adorable, really. And not lost on me, who came to be illuminated some time ago by her magic.

When I saw her again for the first time in years she had popped her head out of her classroom at the kid's elementary school. She'd migrated to the lower grades years before, I guess, but seeing her face still made me blush.

"How are you?!" she asked me and gave me a hug. Something I dreamed of getting so many years ago, but never did, to her credit as a professional. I think I heard angels, but I might be wrong.

"Hey. I saw...that...you. Teacher. Nice. Weather on the outside," I stammered.

Another couple stood a few feet away while Kemsen explained that I had been a student of hers "many years ago."

"He still blushes," the woman said. And I was. I could feel it, clearly.

I don't mind all these years later. I can appreciate now the effect a good teacher has on an absorbent student. Had she not entered my life at that moment, I may not have come to love what she loved: the written word. I find myself cooing over books all the time, as a matter of fact.

And what's more important is that Griffin loves her, whatever that means.

I think I do, and I think it's good, and pure, and cool as hell that he does and that he gets to see her every day.

Lucky bastard.

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It was the best of dimes....

I paid for three gallons of gas the other day.

In dimes.

I don't know what the most humiliating part of that day was, to be completely frank with you. Was it the actual act of handing the woman behind the counter 80 dimes? Or was it the fact that we even had 80 dimes in our house? Or how about the sphincter-tightening ride into town hoping to not run out of gas? Or the fear of running into someone at the gas station with whom I graduated high school and who drives an SUV with vanity plates that read YALLSUK?

Certainly I've had my share of public shame and embarrassment, but this drop-kicked me into a far deeper level of Hell. By way of comparison, for example:

• I've stood in line with a box of tampons, vainly over-stuffing my arms with every male-seducing checkout line impulse purchase I could find in order to hide the Stayfree logo. Listen, you can never have too many 300-count Slim Jim value jugs.
• I once went to reach for something across a teacher's desk and accidentally punched her left breast. How did I know it was her left breast, you ask? Because she was our health teacher, and we were learning human sexuality. It's a good goddamn thing I didn't punch her in the right labia majora. (What? You think I was born tall and then shrunk?).
• I was yelling to myself in the car while waiting for the light to change when I turned and saw four varsity football players staring at me from the car next to mine. I quickly pretended I was listening to Kanye and even flashed the Rock On symbol. Only to realize it was the hand sign for "I Love You."
• Just recently I was on the stand in a court proceeding and was asked how long I had been married to Corrine. I went pale, looked at Corrine's face for an answer, and finally said "Uh...um...er...six years?" Under oath. Justice is blind my ass. Now I'm blind from the look I got from my wife. Of six years. Who I love. And whose breasts or labia I've never punched.

Dimes for gas is a far different stool softener. Far different. Principally, tampon purchasing, tit-punching, and public contempt of wife fall within the arena of mild humiliation. Paying for your gas in dimes, however, is a clear sign of abject poverty and therefore beyond mere face-blushing embarrassment.

I suppose I've denied myself, all these years, the possibility that I could be poor despite all the signs being there: The long succession of $500 cars whose mileage began at 500,000; the 12 volumes of Betty Crocker ramen recipes; the non-designer wear from Goodwill Industries; the savings account passbook so unused that it still has that new bank smell. All legitimate indications pointing to a certain personal financial propensity, but ignored nevertheless.

But dimes for gas? That was the wake-up call; my Grapes of Wrath moment. Standing in line at the convenience store, I experienced a flash moment of clarity and saw my family, like the Joads, being forced to live in a boxcar. Or the 2015 equivalent: an abandoned UPS truck, since I would have no clue where to find a boxcar these days.

I pulled into the station and unclenched my teeth and my buttocks at the same time. The relief of having made it into town on the vapors of gas and whispered prayers was quickly replaced with a new fear.

I looked down into the passenger's seat and stared at the plastic sandwich baggy full of the dimes. I looked up again at the store. Foolishly I had been aching for the possibility that no one would be at a Cumberland Farms on a Friday morning in Maine. That everyone had somehow forgotten that it existed or had slept in or had overdosed the night before on their own fucking vomit.

Instead, every pump was being pumped; an 18-wheeler of fuel stood on the tarmac with the driver frigging with hoses and yacking at the local folks like they were friends from the war; the store bustled with early-morning coffee wranglers and toothless scratch-ticket whores. The line at the counter was 10 deep and I screamed at the side of the passenger window "Don't you fucking lowlife, degenerate, crack-smoking, shit-for-brains have anything better to do?!?! My problems are real! I got a bag of dimes here!""

I grabbed the baggy, dumped the dimes into my hand, got out of the car and let the coins fill up my pocket as I walked toward the store. Once inside, I took the last spot in line. I clutched the dimes in my pocket with an oily palm. The bulge so pronounced and the fiddling with the coins so audible that I just know everyone there thought I was trying to reassemble some sort of semi-automatic with my right hand. Or really loud at masturbating.

Gradually, painfully, the line moved ahead and just as I neared the counter a man took up residence behind me. I turned, cleared my throat, looked out across the store and said, "Oh. Yeah. Forgot sumthin'. You go on ahead."

"You sure? I can hold your spot," he said.

"Nah. No. It's big."

"Huh?"

"What I'm getting. What I forgot. It's big. Take a while. Over in the...that...big items section."

I stepped away and walked among the aisles of overpriced cereal and toilet paper and dog collars, every-so-often peeking toward the counter to monitor the line. It took me 45 minutes to finally catch a break.

I got to the counter and, with ironic pep, said, "Hi. I'll take 8 dollars on pump 3," to the attendant, who also just happens to have graduated high school with two of my children.

"Hey. How are you?" she asked. A line was beginning to form behind me while my intestines started to weave themselves into a French braid.

"Goodandyou?"

"Are you still living in Buckfield? I loved that house. It was so, you know, like, old and full of character and had all these creaks and groans like it was haunted or something, but not in a ghost way, in a good way."

"Um. Nope. We moved."


"Awww. That's too bad! I loved that old house. And the pond out back, did you ever swim in that? I can't remember, and the horses! Corrine still ride? I would love to ride a horse someday but I can't because I've got spine issues. So, eight on three?"

"You did where?"


"Eight dollars in gas on pump three?"


By now, the line behind me was long and everyone looked like they blamed me for why they had to come to Cumbys braless or in their night pants to get cigarettes because their goddamn good-for-nothing significant others were too hungover to do it themselves.


"Yeah. Yup. Eight bucks."


Slowly I dug deep into my pocket and produced a mound of silver.


"Hope ya like dimes. Heh heh. Heh heh. Heh heh," I flirted.

She looked back at me like I'd punched her in the labia. The woman behind me sighed windily, her breath announcing the coming of the seven angels of Satan on seven black horses. And from the corner of my eye I detected the shifting of others from one foot to another.

I thrust the coins into the attendant's hands and said "It's all there. I know. I counted it 76 times over there in the motor oil and donuts aisle."

She nodded knowingly and took the dimes and dropped them into her register.

"Say hey to Harrison and Alyssa!" she said brightly. I grunted and waved, then navigated through the gauntlet of glassy-eyed men and women I just knew had spent the previous night fornicating on their plaid couches in the pale, flickering light of a not-wide-screen television that showed a Downeast Dickering marathon.

How had it come to this? I asked myself as I pumped my three gallons of gas. I'm better than this! I'm not one of them.

But, alas, I was. 

I had to admit it. I was poor.

But, do you think I let it get to me?

No no no.

Pulling out of the convenience store parking lot I cranked the radio and began singing and drive-dancing in celebration of a gas-level display that read 52 Miles Before Empty. As if that was some great thing in a car that gets 25 miles to the gallon.

The way I was throwing down Anaconda, with my Dollar Tree shades on, you would have thought it read No Man Measures Up to You, Big Guy.

I guess I was elated because I had not fully failed. I had certainly gotten close to it - close enough to hang my toes over the edge - but I hadn't gone completely over.  I had not run out of gas and had to push it the rest of the way to the pumps. You know, like those real losers you see every so often.

I may be poor. I admit it. But I got dimes, baby. Just enough dimes to make me not pathetic.

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The Cup

Wars between our children start over the simplest things. 

They begin with the breaking of treaties between siblings and the shattering of the peace. Usually by way of insult, such as "Your face is a gray fart." 

From there, things move swiftly to hand-to-hand combat, with the slapping and pounding of opponent's flesh with open hands and closed fists. And then actual weapons are procured and volleyed. Such as pillows.

Or complete dollhouses. 

It is a swift escalation and no accords are reached until at least one of the combatants is bleeding internally or black-and-blued in some noticeable way. 

I turn to a recent conflict for my example. A conflict that arose from a cup. 

A plastic 6-ounce cup. 

A cup I said. 

We, like any family with multiple children under the age of, say, 21, keep in our cupboard a variety of plastic cups for the kiddos. None are plain old cups because while we may be poor, we're not boring. Our poverty is, at least, colorful.

No, our cups are either an assortment of faded pastels or they feature the imprints of various cartoon characters from their favorite movies. Like Belle from Beauty and the Beast, or Buzz Lightyear or Scooby Doo. And all of them, each one, has the chewed-edge markings of years of abuse from the mouths of babes. We will never need dental records. The authorities can just take our cups.

Our cupboard is overrun with them, and none stack easily with the others. Because of this, they are thrown into the cupboard recklessly and therefore tumble out and onto the floor every time the door is opened. Even our cups don't get along.

Each child has his or her favorite, of course. And I can never remember what they are because remembering is a Corrine thing, not a me thing. I'm not a remember-er. I'm a forget-er. This is one of many irritants for my kids: my lack of remembering anything, including their names, their birthdays, the names of their stuffed animals, or what curb I kick them to whenever I take them to the city.

At every meal the routine is the same. The food is piled onto little round plates, silverware is placed, and the cattle are called to dine. They toss whatever they're doing in the living room up into the air above their heads, shout "Huzzah!" and then sprint to the kitchen. This primes the pump of the coming conflict. Because while it has nothing to do with the actual engagement later on, the mad dash to the kitchen to be first always involves a physical melee. And physical melees are like doing a slow lap around the field before the actual game in order to loosen you up. Melees, therefore, are not to be confused with all-out combat. Melees are skirmishes fought in a confined area, like a doorway or a bath tub. Combat is full engagement fought across great expanses, like grocery store aisles or high school football stands.

The children converged at the door simultaneously and, shoulder-to-shoulder-to-shoulder, forced their way in. All arms and mouths. Abusing each other with elbows thrown into ribs and accusations hurled at faces.

In fact, these episodes become a case study in dialectic inflection. Where you place the emphasis in the delivery of your argument makes all the difference in conveying the force of said argument.

"I'm sitting in the first stool, Griffin!" Gabrielle said. This means she is the center of the universe and is entitled to the best seat at the table.

"I'm sitting in the first stool, Gabi!" Griffin said. This means this particular stool is the center of the universe and its lower-class cousins, stools two and three, are for stupid girls like Gabi or Bailey.

"I don't like broccoli," Bailey said. This means the food is paramount, and if it makes him barf, the stool upon which he sits won't matter. His life will still suck.

"Knock it off!" one of us shouted above the din, because we abandoned the principles of reasoning and redirection long ago for the more primal response of grunting and shouting and swearing and spitting. If we had clubs we would use them.

(Dear educators, mandated reporters, and self-nominated parents of the year: this is a work of nonfiction sprinkled with satire and exaggeration by a lazy, untrained, non-professional, beer-drinking father of 8. It is up to you to figure out which parts are true and which are bullshit. See: #getalife).

Arms were unwound, voices were deescalated, seats were taken at the counter. Mom and Dad got their own plates ready and, once seated themselves, got the call that parents always get just after they've sat down.

"Can I have a drink." one of the children said. It's never a question, because the voice doesn't rise at the word drink, it lowers, which denotes a statement. Everything I've learned about the parts of speech I've learned from the masters: Strunk, White, Turner, Turner and Turner.

"Eat some food first," Corrine said.

"We have eaten some food," one of the children said.

"Eat some of the food from this meal," I countered.

"I eating," Bailey offered, then showed us a mouthful of pureed mash to prove it.

"But we're thirsty," another child whined.

"Jesus Christ," Corrine said. "It's alright. It's not like I wanted to eat today anyway." And she dropped her fork onto her plate, hoping the dramatic clang of it would in some way fling the children into dark pits of guilt. It didn't. That only works on me.

"I'll do it," I said, stopping her with a raised palm.

"No, I'm up already."

"I'm closer to the refrigerator," I said, and suddenly we're Olympic speed walkers, bumping into each other on the way toward the cupboard just to prove who could be the World's Biggest Martyr.

"I said I'll do it," she stormed ahead, taking the lead position. I reined her in by grabbing her shirt tail and swinging past her, a whip-it maneuver I saw in a roller derby movie once.

"I'll get the drinks," she barked.

"I'll get the drinks," I responded. Emphasizing two words in a sentence almost never fails to win the argument. My father was a master at this.

"In or out," he would say. Or "Feed the dog," or "Go to bed."

The children, meanwhile, watched us with eyes as wide as their mouths, the same way they watch our two male dogs hump each other in the back yard.

I swung the door to the cupboard open and plastic tumblers flew out at me like sprung birds. I chose the first three at my feet and left the others to be picked up later.

"I want the race car," Griffin said.

"I want the ballerina," Gabrielle said.

"Me too," Bailey said.

"You want a ballerina?!" Griffin teased and laughed. When he laughs, he throws his head back and opens his mouth wide. He's missing the teeth between the incisors so he looks like a bat. This is an image that recurs in my dreams and wakes me: Griffin standing at my bedside, fangs exposed, laughing at my expanding bald spot. I just know he's going to go for the neck one of these nights.

"No!" Bailey said, and food fell from his mouth back onto his plate.

"Ewww!" Gabrielle shrieked. "Bailey is eating with his mouth open again!"

Bailey laughed and scooped up the food and shoveled it back in. 

"Ewwwwwwww!" both Gabrielle and Griffin screamed. The dogs bolted.

"Knock it off!" I shouted.

I lined up the cups next to each other on the counter and fetched the milk from the refrigerator. I poured equal amounts, more or less, into each cup. Because if you don't my children become chemists and measure each quantity to prove just how unjust I am. It's not a fair jury, either. What they don't realize is that each cup is a different height and width. We have squat, fat cups; long thin cups that expand in width toward the rim; and cups that are equal in circumference top to bottom. To pour equal amounts means using the time-measured practice of counting to four and stopping.

 "I want the race car," Griffin said.

"I want the ballerina," Gabrielle said.

"Me too," Bailey said.

"I heard you!" I barked.

There was no race car or ballerina cup. There was a Cinderella cup, a Lego Movie cup, and a generic green cup. I handed them out according to the order in which I had them lined up on the counter and corresponding to what order the children were sitting around the counter: Griffin, Gabrielle and Bailey.

"The princess cup?!?" Griffin yelled.

"Legos?!?!" Gabrielle yelled.

"Woo hoo! Milk!" Bailey yelled.

"Just drink it," I warned them as I walked back to my own meal.

"The princess cup?!?" Griffin shouted again.

"Heh heh hee," Gabrielle snickered. "Griffin got the princess cup."

"Shut up Gabi!"

I whipped around and they became statues in a museum. I turned back to my food.

Corrine, sitting across from me and therefore facing the criminals, ignored them by looking out the window. She ate and stared, lost in whatever world she saw out there. Because what we've learned is that there comes a moment in every day that the best way to face tough parenting situations is to pretend we are not parents anymore. To turn inward and make believe we're 18 again and sitting in a high school guidance counselor's office, saying "I'll join the Marines. Anything. Please???"

Here is when the war began. When the UN Security Council is daydreaming over cold plates of broccoli and cheese casserole, the troublemakers start throwing it at each other.

Over a princess cup.

I whipped back around to catch Griffin just as he was reaching across his plate to punch Gabrielle in the temple. Gabrielle, flinching, caused her fork to catapult across the counter and to the floor. The dogs converged on it and began fighting over its tines like they'd not been fed in years. Gimli, the pug, growling and licking and growling. 

"Knock it off!" I shouted. I jumped out of my chair and began to approach. I was met by Bailey, who intercepted me. 

"I done," he said hopefully. He had cleared his plate of the cheese, leaving the broccoli.

"Really?" I said. He slunk back onto his chair and pouted over his plate.

"I hate broccoli. I not live here no more!"

"Fine. I'll pack your bags for you," I said, continuing toward Griffin and Gabrielle, who were now taking full swings at each other and shouting.

"STOP. HITTING. ME!" Griffin yelled, swinging away.

"YOU'RE. HITTING. ME!" Gabrielle said, her head tucked into her chest to avoid his blows, her own fists thumping Griffin in the shoulder and side. Seated as they were, their torsos twisting and turning, they looked like featherweight wheelchair boxers.

"KNOCK. IT. OFF!" I bellowed.

I grabbed Griffin's arm in mid swing and lifted him off the stool. I planted him on his feet and pointed down to him.

"What is the matter with you?!?"

Through tears he claimed Gabrielle was teasing him about the princess cup.

"Who cares?!?" I shouted. "It's just a cup!"

"I don't like that cup."

"I don't care, Griffin. Get up there, finish your supper and drink your milk."

"I go live with Aunt Annette," grumbled Bailey.

"Shut your mouth, Bailey!" I said. He crossed his arms and began biting them.

"Bite yourself. I don't care. It doesn't hurt me."

Bailey stopped biting himself, buried his chin into his chest and glared at me. 

Gabrielle snickered.

"Something funny?" I asked her.

She didn't answer.

I took the princess cup and placed it in front of her. I gave Griffin the Lego Cup.

"Nooooo!" she protested.

"Heh heh hee," Griffin sneered.

"Knock it off, Griffin!" I shouted.

"Harumph," grumbled Bailey, kicking the counter. I pointed sharply at him. He stopped harumphing.

"The princess cup is for girls!" Gabrielle said.

"You're a girl!" I explained.

"I'm not a princess girl!"

"Yes you are," Griffin said with a bat grin.

"So help me God, Griffin," I said to him.

"Shut up Griffin!" Gabrielle shouted.

"Broccoli," Bailey sneered, poking the food in his plate.

"I'm going to make you eat that plate," I warned him. He glowered back.

Gimli snipped at Sammy, who tucked tail and trotted away. The fork was lodged beneath the refrigerator and Gimli was becoming apoplectic. His flat face made it impossible for him to reach it. I bent over, tore the fork out from beneath the refrigerator, stood up and brandished it at the children like a man fending off wolves.

"If you three don't shut up and eat your food, drink your milk, and stop touching each other ..."

The kitchen went silent. The three froze, staring. I don't know if it was the bent tines of the fork, or the fact that my right eye was twitching, but they stopped what they were doing.

"Eat. Your. Supper," I fumed.

I turned slowly, walked back to my seat, sat down and began eating my supper. I didn't care that it was now cold. I didn't even care that I was using that bent fork.

Peace at any price. That is our motto.

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Sugar and Demons

The littles attended a Halloween festival this past weekend at their grandparents' seasonal campground. The festivities were replete with ill-fitting costumes, camper-to-camper panhandling for candy, a Haunted Hayride and the kind of late-night engorgement of sugar that always leads to arm-flailing rage. By the parents.

Why, you ask, would they have Halloween in August? Because this campground is cool. It does thematic weekend events for kiddos all summer long. For example, they held Thanksgiving in July where children were separated into groups of Pilgrims, who wore the traditional L.L. Bean limited edition black and white garb we've all come to associate with Pilgrims (all covered in the company's lifetime return policy of course); and Wampanoags, who wore buckskins recovered from a deer that a drunken camper ran over the week before with his golf cart. The Wampanoag children served the Pilgrims a hearty gluten-free turkey dinner and the Pilgrims gave the Natives smallpox. Just like the good old days when America wasn't yet overrun by all those pesky immigrants from, you know, Ireland. And Africa.

Speaking of Ireland. They say we get our Halloween traditions from the Irish and their festival of Samhain. Which is pronounced sah-win, for those among you who just happened to have attended a high school that offered Gaelic but have forgotten all you learned, or who are pathetically nerdy enough to give a shit about the Gaelic pronunciation of a word you will never use in conversation. Even when you're drunk, horny and trying to pick up a girl in a Southie baah.

Good old Samhain, to whom all parents in modern-day America can raise the middle finger for justifying the celebration of the dead, the dying, the undead, the tortured-to-death and the disemboweled, all in the name of  Ju-Ju-Bes, candy corn and Tootsie Rolls. They say they practiced Samhain to celebrate the end of the harvest and the end of the year, a time when the crossover to the dark days of winter presented a thin veil that allowed for spirits of the dead to pass through and return to their homes. Samhain appeased those spirits with fires and celebrations in order to maintain stability for the coming long months of winter. It was a form of exorcism.

Bailey, who is Irish; as well as Gabrielle and Griffin, who are a quarter Irish; and Maren, who is part Native American, won the weekend's prize for "closest blood relative to heathen enemies of the Church." They were given crucifixes and made to feel guilty for 10 minutes of every year alive.

Corrine, who is in charge of everything, dressed our little Pagans in costumes and materials found in our home. Because we are cheap and do not believe in giving them hope. We believe that someday they will come to appreciate poverty as much as we do and that they will embrace it with open arms and empty wallets. For example, we have them each drive our soon-to-be repossessed car around to the back of the house where the tow truck cannot see it. In this small way they learn that it's ok when things go badly and you need to say "Fuck You" to the man...or to people to whom money is owed and who are just doing their jobs.

Bailey was dressed as Iron Man, the same suit he has worn since we adopted him. We call him "High-water Iron Man", a joke lost on him. What? He's Irish. He doesn't fucking care so long as he gets his Guinness. And cabbage.

Gabrielle was dressed as Medusa, a character she requested to be.

Medusa.

My 8-year-old knows who Medusa is. I love her.

And Griffin decided to be a boxer. He had a six-pack, a boxer's robe, and his knuckles were taped in white gauze, just like a very short Robert De Niro as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. We called him Raging Hobbit and he punched every tree he came up against. The kid is a contender.

Trick or Treating began at around dusk, just like it does for other Satan worshipers on October 31. The kids set out from their grandparent's campsite, treat bags in hand, costumes secured with glue gun and tape. And, like normal Halloween, what started as a slow stroll together as loving siblings turned into a verbally abusive, sprinting, blood-letting free-for-all. How quickly they turned on one another. How quickly we, as parents, came to hate them.

"Griffin, don't walk through people's gardens," we said.

"Gabrielle, don't slap Griffin's ass because he deserves it," we said.

"Bailey, don't point and shout 'How you like me now?!?' to perfect strangers. It scares them and makes us want to send you back to Jesus," we said.

I understand their excitement. I was a kid once, too. I went out with my sister every year to the homes that line Pleasant Street, Norway, wearing costumes thrown together in 10 minutes by mom, carrying our pillow cases as candy receptacles. It was a heavenly time. Dad driving the Plymouth station wagon, stopping in front of houses every two yards to the screeching strains of brake calipers on the verge of collapse, the snow forming ice on the windshield too heavy for the wipers to disperse, because back before global warming it snowed starting on Labor Day. Alison and I were not allowed to bicker. Not like kids today. Nor were we allowed to eat the spoils of our plunder when we got home. We argued with Mom later when Dad was upstairs.

"Just one piece!" we demanded of her.

"No!" she said.

"We won't ask for any more ALL MONTH!" we hoped she didn't realize that a new month started at midnight. Yes, we were once retarded. Just like you.

"If you ask me again I'll get your father."

We of course shut up then, whimpering bitterly, and went to bed without candy. Or pillow cases, now that I recall.

In 2014, in a campground in Maine at the end of August, kids are allowed to eat all the shit they want. I'm not sure if that's an indication of the degradation of parenting, or the recognition by our generation that kids eating candy right after trick or treating is not going to expedite the disintegration of tooth enamel. Like waiting 30 minutes to go swimming after eating, the candy rule seems a bit mythological and fascist to me.

We finished our rounds, hitting every campsite in the campground, and egging those who were shuttered (Corrine's idea. She had a bitter childhood).

At 8, on the nose, we sauntered up to the campground store where we stood in line to await the hayride. An ingenious idea, when you consider it properly: sitting on hay bales, one of the least stable and most uncomfortable platforms for one's ass, on a wagon pulled by a pick up truck, in the dark woods among seizure-inducing strobe lights and screaming adults.

The line for the wait was, itself, horror-filled. At least for Corrine and I. The kids were tired. Their bedtime, 7:30, long abandoned. They had dark circles under dark circles. Bailey, when not medicated and in bed by then, becomes an asshole. That's the psychological term. I don't know the layman's expression.

Griffin and Gabrielle, meanwhile, become slap-happy and whiny, respectively. And the Turner triumvirate, together, as if angels from Hell, exposed to the world their true natures, erasing all the platitudes they'd received from the ignorant, the blind, and their grandparents.

"Griffin, stop throwing rocks at your sister's ass," we said.

"Gabrielle, stop telling people you have fart bubbles," we said.

"Bailey, stop. Licking. Your. Fucking. Friends."

We said.

Our turn on the hayride came third. Sometime near 1 a.m., I think, when even the goddamn vampires fled from fear of the vile natures of our children. Gabrielle insisted on sitting next to me. Griffin, next to her, but next to Corrine on his other side. Bailey sat somewhere down wind, near the back, chewing the ear off a teenage girl who, I felt, deserved to feel uncomfortable. She looked like the kind of teenage girl who rejected me in high school. Bitch.

"You wanna see my sah-win?" I heard him ask at one point. That kid rocks. When he isn't sniffing his own toe jam.

I'll spare you the details of the ride itself. It was well-done. Loud, gory, and with just enough scare in it to make Gabi and Griffin cry, which in turn made Corrine and I laugh with crazy-person glee. The kind of tension-releasing laugh that comes rarely. Usually at the end of a trying day, the end of a difficult stretch, the end of a period of time when it just seems everything the children do is a purposeful test of our resolve and sanity.

Sometimes, you just need a Samhain, a sah-win, a festival that appeases the demons, if only in your soul. A hardy laugh at the expense of children can do that. Exorcise the mischievousness from them. Put into perspective that they, after all, are sometimes under the influence of something otherworldly, but cherubs at heart nonetheless.

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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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