Now I get it: I’m living in a Twilight Zone episode.

One thing that’s really fun about having kids is watching them experience things for the first time that are old hat to you. Disneyland. “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” Snow.  That kind of thing.

My thirteen year old son discovered Twilight Zone reruns in July, 2007, when some cable channel ran a marathon over Independence Day weekend. He was enchanted, and it was fun to watch him mesmerized by the story lines and astounded by the conclusions, most of which are so old hat and cliched to us decrepit oldsters that we use Zone synopses to describe situations: “You know what I mean! It’s like Burgess Meredith with his glasses broken!”

We’re still wading through the recordings of the July, 2008 marathon and last night watched a classic: Little Girl Lost. The boys were entranced! Where is the girl? What if the dog gets lost, too? Can I make my own voice come out of the TV set?

I was entranced, too, only now I was looking at this through different eyes…If I went upstairs and couldn’t find a kid, I would assume that he or she was stuck under a carton of engineered hardwood flooring. Who do you call, by the way, when you can HEAR your child but not see her? The police? The fire department comes to mind, but they’d probably rip down all the drywall. I can see calling a trusted neighbor, but would it occur to me to call a physicist?

I would hope that my child, if he rolled under his bed and into the Twilight Zone, would think of something creative to say or do, as opposed to the piteous bleating that Bettina Miller cranked out. I do know that if we sent Elmer The Basset Hound in after her he would NOT retrieve the girl but would instead wreak such havoc that the denizens of The Fourth Dimension would probably declare war on us and hilarity would ensue.

And what does finding another dimension in the second bedroom do to your property values? Is this a detriment or an advantage? “Who cares if the house only has one bathroom? It has an extra dimension!” Who needs a swingset when there’s a cool place where everyone is upside down just on the other side of your wall?

And now a recorded word from your doctor.

Or my doctor, rather. Thanks to those pesky HIPAA laws, I’m not even sure anyone’s allowed to admit that they even *have* a doctor anymore.

Remember Marcus Welby, MD? Remember Joe Gannon? (Remember TV doctors from the 60’s and 70’s? They never joked around and did silly things? They took my health seriously. That’s what’s wrong with our healthcare system now. Too many Grey’s Anatomy docs doing the horizontal bop in the supply closet and not enough Alex Stones who kept their pants on because they were married to Donna Reed and that should be enough for anybody!)

Remember when they had just diagnosed The Disease of the Week and they had their hapless victim patient in their clutches and they had to share the news that the damned thing was going to be impossible to cure, Marcus and Joe and Trapper John would always haul the doomed, wan-looking young woman (well, for Joe it was always a young woman, with whom he’d fall hopelessly in love…Marcus was always looking for a good cup of decaf and was immune to the charms of his patients, and Trapper John passed off the gorgeous ones to Gonzo, who apparently worked a stripper pole to get through med school and why don’t my doctors look like that????)…

Oh. Did I say that out loud?

Anyway, the proud owner of TDOTW would always get the news in a book-lined office. Always. Never sitting on the exam table clutching a paper gown around them, or trying to make the ends meet in the back as they limped down the hall clutching the urine sample no one told them what to do with.

No, everyone sat around looking very grave in the doctor’s office hearing about the prognosis of TDOTW.

I just got done with most of my annual well-woman exam, which is called that because I am, technically, well. Right now. But my dear doctor, who looks nothing like Gonzo or even Joe Gannon, is determined to root through every molecule of my being until she finds something wrong, at which point I will cease to be a ‘well’ woman and then I’ll become a wet-my-pants-worried woman. (In two years, when I turn fifty and become colonoscopy-bait, she’s going to start referring me to spelunking professionals who will *really* leave no stone unturned, but that’s for a different day.)

So, to fulfill my doctor’s quest for peaked-looking molecules I got referred out for bloodwork and ultrasounds and mammograms and whatnot and I obediently complied. And then I wait for the phone calls, because she’s not going to schedule an appointment for me to sit in her office. I’m not even going to get a phone call from a live human being.

Instead, I get Terror Waiting, a diabolical new way to deliver the news that I have TDOTW. It works this way:

1. Phone rings.

2. I answer with the traditional “hello?”

3. I am greeted with a Perky, automated Voice, informing me that I have A Message From My Doctor. (The perky voice has never even dreamed that she had TDOTW, so she remains unsympathetic.)

4. I am told to call a number. I frantically try to find a pen. There is no pen. There might be a crayon. No, wait. There’s a pencil with no lead. Oh, crap. Why don’t I just slice open my finger with a steak knife (that, I can find) and scrawl the phone number in blood on my wall???? Because there is no way I will be able to sleep tonight if I don’t get that message; I’ll lie awake for hours wondering if maybe the Perky Voice sounded sad there because she knew something???

5. I manage to transcribe the number.

6. I call it. I verify that I am, indeed, me several times. And then the Perky Voice deigns to deliver my message.

7. Which tells me that everything is fine. I have cholesterol levels that would make Marcus Welby weep with joy. And no TDOTW.

For now.

 

Cover me, I’ve got playground duty.

First, the third-graders organize: http://mominterrupted.wordpress.com/2008/04/02/chickens-are-not-organized/

So it follows that the teachers would get wise: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-teacher4apr04,1,2917312.story

Insert your own joke….here.

That was no basset hound; that was my wife!

Just in case you’re wondering, that’s not a picture of me up there. That’s Elmer, the Infamous Basset Hound, being carried around by my husband (see back of head to the left). What makes that picture really delightful is not the sheer length of that dog’s ears, nor is it the befuddled expression on his little puppy face as he perches six feet off the ground.

No, the real humor lies in the backstory: that when we got Elmer (the day before that picture was taken) my husband decreed that if we must have a dog, well, that was one thing. But the dog was to be raised with the strictest limitations during his formative months: if Elmer was not playing with a family member, he was to be in his crate. Period. End of story.

So it makes perfect sense that He Who Decreed turned out to be the one to carry the dog everywhere like a gigantic purse. Crate? What crate? I don’t see any crate. I’m holding the dog. It made even more sense that the dog’s feet didn’t touch the ground for weeks after he came to live with us. All that sense explains the irony in that, if we find Elmer hiding under the couch nursing the telltale remnants of a bedroom slipper, the remnants are usually HWD’s.

Speaking of dogs, I’d like to discuss looks for a moment. Not dirty looks. *My* looks.

I spent most of my own formative years, not in a dog crate, but in a pre-pubescent haze wishing I were better looking. I spent my college years being the ‘friend.’ (You know what I mean: two frat boys debating who gets the pretty girl and who gets the ‘friend.’)

It was only when I was in my thirties that I came to appreciate what a gift it is not to be Gisele Bundchen’s stunt double.

For example, when you look like me and a guy likes you, there’s better than even money that it’s because he really likes you, and not because he’s just filling time while his best friend sweet-talks the pretty one.

When you look like me:

• There’s no chance anyone will be unpleasantly surprised when they see you without makeup.
• There are no looks to lose. There’s even a chance you might get better-looking with age.
• No photographer is going to live to get a picture of you in a bathing suit, because it’s a foregone conclusion that your rear end looks like Fang (Hagrid’s dog from the Harry Potter movies), so where’s the story?

For the record, this is what I look like: http://mominterrupted.wordpress.com/avatar/mominterrupted-128.jpg?1207200941 The picture is notable in that

• I’m wearing lipstick. It’s the first thing my mother noticed and 
• at no point can you see the resemblance to Fang but
• you may start wondering about my resemblance to Hagrid.

© E. Stocking Evans 2008

Chickens are not organized!

But apparently third-graders are: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23905909

This horrifying, yet fascinating little story comes from Waycross, Georgia, where a group of third graders were apparently ticked off at their teacher because she had the gall to chastise one of them for standing on a chair.

So they put together a plan to take her out of the picture, as it were. A remarkably well-thought out plan involving assignments, gear, and no doubt one of those little rappel lines so one of them could shimmy down through the laser beam security system to the teacher’s desk as they kept time to the Mission: Impossible theme song. It leaves me with more questions than answers:

Who is the kid who dreamed this up, and thought ahead well enough to assign jobs to his or her minions? I bet it was a girl. I have a seventh-grade boy who wouldn’t have considered such details as covering windows, or clean up. (Especially clean up. If my boys ever turn to crime, it will be a short-lived venture at best. Fingerprints? They’ll leave entire wallets and mapquest directions to our house, along with video cameras with time-stamped film detailing their role in the crime.)

What has happened to the fine art of tattletelling? This group sounds like it has its act together better than the Russian mafia if not one kid out of nine, in an age group that makes an art form out of ratting each other out, sang like a canary.

What kind of kid plots what appears to be a murder for a teacher who made a reasonable request for classroom safety? When I was a kid, you’d have to come home missing an eye before a parent would start to get suspicious. And even money says that, if I had managed to convince my parents that the nun had, in fact, been responsible for the missing eye, I’d get in trouble for getting a nun so pissed off that she felt eye removal was necessary. (And if you’re thinking, “Hey, that sounds like a Bill Cosby routine,” let me tell you: that bit was funny because it was true.)

Edit to add: What kind of kid? One with a brilliant future in project management, that’s what kind. This is a kid who will know what to do with a PERT chart, and God help the employee who falls asleep in one of this wiz’ staff meetings.

I’d shake my head and wonder what’s up with kids today but I have to go hide my steak knives.

Caulking guns don’t kill people, but really pissed off wives threaten their husbands with ‘em.

For any men in the audience: At what point does a request become a nag? How many repeated requests, with how much time in between each request, are allowed before the aforementioned simple request becomes what www.dictionary.com calls “an old, inferior, or worthless horse”?

This column ran in June, 2007. The story is true; the names didn’t have to be changed because it’s just perfectly obvious what’s going on.

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In the beginning, there was the Newly-Built house, and the House was indeed in sore need of fixtures, and so the husband and wife didst visit the Design Center, and they didst descend upon the perky Design Center Coordinator and select their cabinets, and their window treatments, and their floor coverings.

And they didst select carpet, and the pad was upgradeth to flat rubber, and it was good.

And they didst invite their friends, who dranketh of the wine and beer, and the wine didst spill on the new carpet, and as it is written it was always the merlot and never the chablis that didst tumble.

And the babies didst arrive, and the babies were placed on the carpet to play, and they didst commence to frolic and emit noxious odors and substances and smear the concoctions directly into the pile and the parents didst look upon this with dismay and cry, “It’s your turn to clean that crap up!”

And a puppy didst come to abide with the family and didst take forever to housebreak, and so the parents were causeth to buy products like Urine B Gone and didst crawl over the surface of the carpet with handheld fluorescent lights and they didst marvel at the mess and placeth the puppy once more into its run, all the while wondering whose brilliant idea it had been to select white berber.

And so it came to pass that one day the wife didst weary of plying the carpet with chemicals in a vain effort to keep it presentatable, causing her to say to the husband, “If we don’t get tile in here soon I’m going to leave and then YOU’LL have to keep this stinking mess clean.”

And while the husband didst indeed long for three-day weekends of football and basketball playoffs and kegs of beer and cigars and all-night poker, he didst recall which side his bread was indeed buttereth, and so he didst suck it right up and call professionals who descended upon their abode and didst rip out the offending mess and replaceth it with sparkling ceramic tile.

And the puppies and babies did cavort and frolic and the wife didst look upon it and smile, and it was good, until strawberry jelly wert smeared into the grout and there was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

But satisfaction didst finally settle upon the land until one day the wife didst realize that not a single wall of the entire downstairs had a single baseboard, destroyed in the Tileapalooza that had grippeth their house for almost a month.

And the husband didst protest that ’twas no big deal; that if he couldst only purchase a $150 miter saw complete with laser optics he wouldst be able to finish those up, lickety-splitteth.

“Lickety-splitteth” apparently meaning “six months” in biblical terms.

And the miter saw didst draw dust and when the wife didst ask gentle questions about when, mayhap, her living room might not look like a construction site, she was accused of being entirely too picky about the caulking gun that wert permanently installed on the coffee table.

And the wife didst not smile, and when gentle reminders wert called ‘nagging’ she didst the only thing that she really could do:

Writeth a column.

 

©     E.S. Evans 2007

And fer Pete’s sake…

One of the most enduring memories of my childhood is a vivid flashback of me standing in a ladies’ room stall while my mother impatiently stripped toilet paper off the roll and lined the seat for me.

I can understand the impatience; when you have five kids and you’re at a rest stop or a department store and they all have to go to the john, I can imagine that the drill of lining five toilet seats with bulk-grade toilet paper has to get really old, really fast.

Like most kids, though, I didn’t understand why. I could barely be coerced to wash my hands after using the bathroom, much less caring about the toilet in a public john. So I have to admit to being a little embarrassed (well, to put a fine point on it: humiliated) when mom would give an exasperated sigh and start lining toilet seats. I mean, what was the big deal?

Years later (about 40 of them, to be precise) I understand. Twice today I’ve had to run into a public bathroom and, when I stopped to look more closely at the seat in the stall, I found it again…telltale drops.

I’m tellin’ ya: for all the complaining that women do over men not lifting the lid, and putting the lid back down, you’d think that more women would be more careful about the lid when they’re through with it.

Apparently, there’s a bunch of you who just, well, don’t finish the job properly and leave telltale drops on the lid when you’re done.

There’s apparently another whole sub-culture of women who, mindful of the first group, were taught never, ever, ever to sit down on the danged thing in a public john and so wind up whizzing all over hell and creation because, quite frankly, we just don’t have the control that men say they have when they’re signing their names in the snow but mysteriously lose at 3 a.m. in their own bathrooms.

I have gotten so aware of this that I have other, vivid flashbacks to the delight I felt about ten years ago when I found out that I could order my own little toilet paper liners and carry them around with me, just in case a public john was understocked. I imagine that my own daughters have a vivid flashback of their own of the day I chased after them at a softball game, heading into the loo, waving my little plastic polka-dotted case and urging them to take one.

(Note: I called my mom when I found those little gems and told her how she could order them. She responded with a pause, and then a carefully worded, “You know, even *I* wouldn’t do *that.*)

So, lady, I don’t care what you do in the stall. Do backflips. Read tarot cards. Call your broker. Sit down. Or not. Use those handy little liner thingies. Or not. But when you’re done, please oh please spend a moment and review your handiwork, such as it is, and clean up.