So I made myself run some errands this morning before I would allow myself the luxury of watching All My Children while I worked. (It’s online now.)
It was about 15 minutes into the story when MY FUCKING MONITOR BLEW. Now, I got my money’s worth. It’s a used Dell I bought for $90 five years ago, so I’m not exactly bitter. But there’s $138 I didn’t plan to spend this month.
I spend an hour online looking for a good deal and found one on Amazon. Okay, I figure I can use my laptop in the meantime, right? Wrong. I spent an hour trying to hook up my keyboard and get it to work, the same keyboard I was already using with my laptop for months. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was a Mercury retrograde.
I was visiting friends at their house, and they handed me a baby to hold. There were large waves breaking on the side of their house, and I was swept under one of them while holding the baby. “Oh no, how is the baby going to breathe?” I thought, panicked. When I got out of the water, I saw he was blue and floppy. I sat him on a table and bent him gently at the waist, and water started to come out. I did it several times, and he started to pink up. He coughed, then looked at me. I was happy he was okay.
I like cemeteries, I always have. They’re peaceful. But I don’t visit them to talk to dead people, and I’ve never in my life gone to one to commemorate a holiday.
I used to have this frazzled neighbor, Irene, who always had to take flowers to her grandmother’s grave: “I gotta get over to the cemetery tomorrow. Mom-Mom would miss me.” I’d think to myself, “Would Mom-Mom really miss you? If dead people still live on in some form, why would it matter where you remembered them?”
A lot of people believe this. My sister sends cell-phone photos from the cemetery to the rest of us, texting, “Mom and Dad wanted to know where the rest of you were.” (I think she thinks this will make us feel guilty. Nope. I seem to be missing the Catholic guilt gene.) I miss my parents, but I don’t need to drive to the western suburbs to look at where their bodies are buried. That seems sort of… morbid, especially when I can always talk to them right here.
Long ago, I decided that the Grave People (as I called them to myself) weren’t really Catholics who believed in the resurrection of life after death — they were members of an Etruscan burial cult. And all weekend, I watched from my kitchen window as people came with flowers to the small cemetery next to my house.
It seems strange to me. But it’s harmless, and brings people comfort, so what the hell.
So I’m in bed, reading a book, when I notice that this one fly that’s been hanging around for a few days is in my bedroom. But I can’t find my flyswatter, and I really don’t want to get out of bed, anyway.
I grab a magazine and figure if it comes close enough, I can get it. But it’s as if the little fucker can read my mind, and flies just out of reach. (Bastard.)
Then I have another idea. I have a pile of six rubber bands on my bedside table, and I start shooting them at the fly, which is now happily poised on the top of the teevee. One after another, I let them fly at the fly, but I’m wide every time. I’m down to my last rubber band, and I’m muttering to myself, like Bill Murray in “Caddyshack.”
“Be the rubber band, become one with the rubber band,” I tell myself, and fire. Bullseye! Now I can go to sleep without worrying about a goddamned insect flying into my mouth. (Flies are attracted to the carbon dioxide you exhale. Now you can worry, too!)
And when I wake up this morning, I hear: “Bzzzzz…..” Little fucker survived. This is war.
So I’m working at my desk, sipping on what is euphemistically called a “meal replacement shake” (although let’s be honest, it’s nothing like a meal and the reason I’m using a straw is so I can’t actually taste it) and I realize I forgot to shake the bottle. For some reason, the idea of blowing bubbles in the bottom to mix it up makes sense to me — but it’s a full bottle.
No, this is not my niece’s wedding. But it would not have been totally unexpected if it was.
So I went to my niece’s wonderful wedding yesterday. I started out the day a bit frazzled because I had to battle construction traffic on I-95 to get to her house on time (I was bringing an antique pendant that belonged to my mom for her “something old”.) The pendant looked perfect with her dress, and my niece looked even more beautiful than usual.
Now, the bride and her siblings, a creative and whimsical bunch, have a total of eight kids under the age of three, including a boy-and-girl pair of twins. A couple of the bridesmaids were carrying their babies as the wedding party gathered at the altar, while the priest greeted the congregation.
He talked about how great it was to have the sounds of children as part of the celebration, and how we had to “see as little children to enter the kingdom of heaven.” And then he proceeded to the vows.
And that was when the girl twin (who’s maybe two-and-a-half, and holding the hand of her little sister, who’s one) just sort of nonchalantly starts crawling up the side steps of the altar, pulling her baby sister with her. Everyone in the seats stops paying attention to the vows (you can’t hear them, anyway) and we’re fixated: What happens next?
Well, the two girls disappear behind the altar and their mother, who is the maid of honor, finally sees what’s going on and tries to catch them. But they’re too fast, and there’s some Three Stooges-esque running back and forth before their mom finally corrals them long enough for Dad to come get them. (By this time, I am laughing so hard, it sounds like I’m crying.)
I turn to my nephew’s wife and observe, “You’ll notice the priest isn’t talking about the happy sounds of children anymore.” And then I start laughing even harder.
Mercifully, it was a short service. And as we all piled out of the pews into the aisle, people were cracking jokes about how the church could always use a few women on the altar.
