School Drop Off

I attempted to make an effort this morning. At the impossibly early 7:20 school drop off I contorted my face into what I thought might look like happiness, bared my teeth in what could be construed as a smile, turned around and said, “Have a good day. Be nice to your teachers. Learn a lot.” In reply my daughter said, “Master the art of poop scooping.” Then she slammed the car door. 

It’s good I practiced that smile because when she comes home and discovers the cat box has been moved to her bedroom and asks why, I will just show my teeth again.

An Easy Way To Clean Your Attic

My neighbors are about to move back into their house after it burned down over the fourth of July week. Actually, it was really only their attic that burned, but telling people that it “burned down” elicited expressions of such shock and horror that it has always been worth the slight exaggeration.

After the attic burned I watched the “property restoration” trucks pull up every morning to remove the contents of the entire house. It all got carted off to some magical place where the water damage was repaired and the odor of smoke was removed. I’m imagining it all got replaced with Febreez, Gentle Fresh Scent. If that’s the case I could have probably done it for them.

One morning was different, however. I looked out and a whole yard full of belongings was out on their lawn. A feeling of excitement ran through me. A yard sale? On a Monday? Sweet. But then I noticed a guy in a tie and suit pants walking through it all with a clipboard. Guys in ties are rare at garage sales, so I knew this was something different. The woman who lives in the burned house was trailing behind him. The contents of the yard were so hodge podge that it finally occurred to me that these were the actual contents of the attic that managed to survive the fire. There was a set of chairs so impossibly unattractive that they had to have been purchased before everyone started watching HGTV. A wicker basket. A black plywood cutout of a witch and a cat riding a broomstick. A couple of hideous lamps. And a bunch of other crap that was so dumb I instantly forgot what it was.

I started thinking about our own attic. It has a beautiful set of stairs that lead up to it which means I don’t have to crawl through a hole in the ceiling to put stuff in it. So I put A LOT of stuff up there. Sometimes I go up there and think, what is all this JUNK? I don’t need it. Yet I find myself unable to part with it.

I looked out at my neighbor again. She was smiling. Like cats who purr to reassure themselves when they are scared, Scandinavians have an unnerving habit of smiling when bad things are happening to them. I imagine our ancestors experiencing life-threatening events like the Plague, the Dust Bowl and grasshoppers destroying crops repeatedly and our Scandinavian relatives would be grinning through it all. I studied my neighbor’s face and realized that this was not a smile of fear. Rather, she was extraordinarily happy as her insurance agent was cataloging the items and a worker tossed them one by one into a dumpster. Yes, my neighbor was in the process of GETTING PAID for all that junk and SOMEONE ELSE was doing the labor of ridding her of it.

I seethed with envy. That was when I realized I had a problem on my hands.

I envisioned my grown children after my death, trudging up to the attic, pissed and annoyed and muttering under their breath, "What IS all this crap? Why did she save this shit? God DAMN her! " There’s one particular box I imagine them carrying down and one will say to the other, “Who is OJ Simpson anyway and why is he on all these magazines?”

One of my plans when I’m dead is to come back and haunt my house so I will wait until they are asleep that night utterly exhausted with the effort of it all (and based on my family’s luck they will have to do this in the middle of July when the attic temperature rises to a balmy 150 degrees) and I will float down to their lovely heads and whisper in their ears, “OJ was the guy they acquitted because the glove didn’t fitted.” My adult children will wake up confused and while eating their Lucky Charms that I never bought for them while I was alive, they will compare notes on a strange dream they had about their mother and what horrible grammar she had. It won’t occur to them to be shocked that they had the same dream because their minds will already be on the horrible job they have ahead of them - the emptying of the second half of the attic. My daughter’s despair will be greater the second day because she’ll get confirmation that there really is nothing in it she can make a dime from.

So yes, I have to get up there and clean it myself, but first there’s something else I need to do. I need to crawl into my neighbor’s dumpster and get that plywood witch. I know exactly where I can keep it until next Halloween.

A Thanksgiving Recipe

Dear Mother of my Son’s Classmate,

First off, I am sorry that I told you that your son was the only one who voted for Romney in the class election and you were still at work and couldn’t immediately punish him. For any bad feelings that you suffered throughout the rest of that day, I apologize. I’m not sure why he came home crying - my son said he didn’t say anything mean to him about his being a Republican.

During the Friendship Feast at school yesterday when I commented to your son on how much he seemed to like mashed potatoes, he mentioned that you don’t like making them because they are “too much work.” In case you are not sure, here is the recipe:

Boil water

Peel potatoes

Drop them in the water

Wait about 20 minutes

Drain the water

Mash them with a little butter and milk

I hope this helps. Please enjoy your Thanksgiving.

Sincerely,

Me

PS. You know what I'm thankful for? That over half the country does not share your son's love of Mitt Romney.

A New Member of the Family

We adopted a new kitten last week. This was after years of our children begging us for a pet. I had joined my husband in issuing curt “nos” every time the subject came up, and then I discovered that having a pet is social currency for children. When children meet they ask each other names, ages, grades, and then what kind of pet they have. Once I realized the humiliation my children were going through when having to answer “none,” I, too, joined the clamor in the pet discussion. 

Cleaning a cat box is worth my children being able to save face.

Finally, my husband acquiesed in the only way he knows how, which was to say, “Do whatever you want, but I’m not touching it, cleaning up after it, paying for it, or carrying its dead body out of the house.” I thought this was sort of amusing since I don’t work and have no money of my own, so of course he would be paying for it. Also, I can guarantee you right now that none of the three of us will be carrying any dead bodies out, so unless he wants an animal to rot in the house he paid for, he most likely will be carrying it out when it dies.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We went to the Humane Society, brought two kitten sisters into the “Get Acquainted” room and after 20 minutes decided to take the one that was the most playful. Actually, we chose her because she was cuter, but that would have been too shallow to tell the Humane Society workers. We brought her home and she quickly integrated herself into our family system. 

Her first night she slept alone on the first floor of the house. We’d gone upstairs and being only eight weeks old she must not have been able to figure out where we were. Cats are quick learners, though, and the next night she joined us. At some point in the middle of the night she found my husband’s chest where she laid down and began to purr so loud it sounded like a Harley was idling in our bed.

By the third night she was smitten with Mr. I’m Having Nothing To Do With Any Pet. Now when he is going up and down the stairs in preparation for bed, she’ll stand on the landing like a creepy girl at a party waiting to see where he is going. Then she’ll follow him and if he turns and goes a different direction, she does too, acting like that had always been her ultimate destination. And when he finally lies down, she climbs on his chest and begins that idling Harley sound. He pets her and she stays all night. The little whore. 

My husband, that is.

Spelling Words

Drilling kids on their spelling words is tedious work, to say the least, so something I like to do is come up with really awful sample sentences. For example, “Breath. I ran out of BREATH cleaning the house all day.” Or, “Steam. Steam will come out of my ears if you keep fighting with your sister.” Most of this week’s words all have the EA combination in them and one of the words is “dead.” So my sample sentence last night was, of course, “One day I will be DEAD.” Both of my kids were sitting at the table and this didn’t get a reaction at all which kind of annoyed me. The next word was “each.” My sentence was “When I am dead, EACH of you will fight over my stuff.” 

This did get a reaction. My first grader set down his pencil, looked me in the eye and said, “When you are dead I am going to take six of your $50 bills and go to the bank and get three one hundred dollar bills.” I wasn’t sure what was more disturbing: his incredible grasp of math at such a young age, or his belief that I will only have $300 to my name when I die. I didn’t have time to think about it, though, because then his sister, who is nine, said, “When you die I’m going to take all your jewelry and sell it for money.” Who raised this unsentimental, coldhearted brat?

Time away from them gives me the perspective I need to reflect on our conversations and I realize now that what I should have said was, “Good, because you’re going to need that money for my funeral costs, you little shit.” Instead, I returned to the spelling list and said, “Street. I hope you don't get run over in the street."