Throwback THANKSGIVING!

Time to re-run an old Thanksgiving post of mine. HOPE I DON'T BREAK THE INTERNET.  This originally was posted back in 2008, just after our Thanksgiving that year. My comments from today, as always, are in red.

If you want a unique take on Thanksgiving in the form of wildly creative short stories not a single one of which actually involves a family sitting down to eat Thanksgiving dinner, check out my "Some Thanksgiving Stories" which is available for free on Amazon through Black Friday. You'll meet my newest favorite character, "the regular mouse." And there may or may not be a savage horde of beets with swords.  CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD IT NOW FREE.

And now on with your old post for you to leave a generically bland comment about because you only read about 1/3 of the way through, said "How the #*#$%;$ long is this thing?" and then went to read "Beetle Bailey" instead. That Sarge! Beetle makes him SO ANGRY.

Hark! The Thumping Potatoes... Make Change For A $20.


The sounds of the holidays, in our house, include things that you would not hear elsewhere, sounds like the soothing tones of Foghat blasting out Christmas music accompanied by the pounding beat of potatoes being thrown across the room. Also, there was a Thanksgiving pageant in which Sweetie played two parts.

Pageants have always played a big role in my holidays, so it was nice to welcome them back this year. When I was younger, we regularly put on Christmas pageants not just at the Catholic school we attended for a while, but also at home for all the aunts and uncles who would come over and subtly mock us while we put on the Christmas pageants. My memories of those pageants, both official and un-, are somewhat hazy. But I know that for one, I was the Christmas star: a fat kid with crooked glasses holding up a giant star covered in tinfoil and ringed with garland reciting a poem for the whole Church and for the whole family Christmas gathering.

"Christmas Star" was one of my few starring roles -- pun intended -- as a kid. The other starring role was "narrator" at a choir concert in fourth or fifth grade, during which the whole school sang while I stood uncomfortably in front of them and in between songs gave little introductions for the songs. I was, even at an early age, marked as "not leading man material," except for that year that I was the Christmas Star, and even that wasn't really a "leading man" type of role. You can't see Brad Pitt or Harrison Ford playing "Christmas Star" in a major motion picture, can you? Although that would be excellent: " Christmas Star," the story of a Hollywood celebrity whose ego gets too big, so, to teach him a lesson, an angel makes him into the ACTUAL Christmas star, where he witnesses the birth of Jesus and learns a valuable lesson about what's REALLY important. Starring Brad Pitt as "The Star," and featuring Dame Judi Dench in a double role, as the head of "Herod Productions" and as Queen Herod at the Nativity.

I am aware that I am not quite accurate on who was at the Nativity. I'm also aware that so far this really isn't a Thanksgiving post at all.  

The leading man role in the Christmas pageants my mom put on when we were kids was played usually by my younger brother, Matt, who was recognized as leading man material early on, despite having really no acting ability whatsoever. Matt starred not just as Joseph in the family Christmas pageants, but also as whatever leading role there happened to be in the middle school musicals that were put on every year in the spring. So while I muddled through my own middle school years in roles such as "Lord Growlie" in "The Wizard of Oz," and "Innkeeper" in Annie, Get Your Gun, (and as a Munchkin who was part of the Lollipop Guild, making me the biggest, fattest, glasses-wearing-est Munckin in the history of theater), Matt became "Narrator" in The Fantasticks, a role that he played tongue-in-cheek-- quite literally, as whenever he wasn't talking, Matt would stick his tongue in his cheek, something that you could see easily when the stage was the gym floor and the audience sat in bleachers around it.

Of course, I may just be jealous because Matt got all the girls. Girls always want to date the leading man. The Christmas Star gets very few groupies.

None, actually. Gets none.

For the home pageants the stage was our living room, or at least that portion of the living room between the Christmas tree and the dining room, next to the yellow chairs and in front of the glass coffee table.

It occurred to me as I read this that in the 19 years I lived at home, my parents never rearranged the furniture.  Never.  I can still remember the exact layout of furniture in our house and it didn't move an iota during my entire childhood.  I change my house around all the time.  I've lived in our current house for 11 years and I bet I've had 10 different living room setups in that time. The latest includes a hammock, but technically that is there to replace the swing that we couldn't have any longer.  I think it's weird to never rearrange your furniture. My parents were weird.

 As Christmas Star, I stood in between the tree and the yellow chairs and made my speech, and then Matt and my cousin Shannon would enter as Mary and Joseph, and my cousin Jason had a role, too, and some years also I would double as a wise man with my cousin Joey and my brother Bill, three wise men wearing bathrobes

Why are bathrobes a thing? People wear them over pajamas, right? Why do that? I suppose if your pajamas are scandalous or something you want to wear a robe over them but if the pajamas are just ordinary pajamas do you still wear a robe over them? When we were kids we had bathrobes that we wore over pajamas that were pants-and-shirts combos. That's like wearing an overcoat around the house, but one made of terrycloth. Nowadays I mostly wear pajamas (no robe!) around the house if it's too cold for shorts. I don't want to lounge around in jeans anymore.  Jeans are uncomfortable.  It's all pajamas for me from here on out. That's one of the great things about being 45, almost 46. You can just wear pajamas and not worry about whether anyone thinks you're a dork, because everyone thinks you're a dork already, whether or not you wear pajamas.

 over their Christmas pants and shirts, entering from near the front door to take the gifts of the magi to the Baby Jesus, represented by a bundle of something held by Shannon, while Joseph looked bored and stuck his tongue into his cheek. Then we would all get out of costume and prepare to play the holiday songs that we had diligently practiced on our various instruments: I played piano, Bill played acoustic guitar, and Joey played saxophone. Not all together -- we weren't a jazz combo. Instead, one at a time we'd haltingly pick our way through a couple of songs, the family would clap, and then we'd be free to go off and talk about how we hoped we got an Atari 2600 that year.

PS I am fairly sure eventually this gets around to Thanksgiving.

Holidays for me now are a much more relaxed affair, so relaxed that this was the first time I've ever had the kids put on a pageant. They didn't perform for the family, though; they performed to teach them a Valuable Lesson, something I tried because it came up on the Wheel of Parenting, which is the mental image that I get when I consider the various parenting techniques I try to prepare the kids to take on the world successfully:  a giant wheel just like the "Wheel of Fortune," only it has, instead of dollar amounts, parenting methods: Kind-But-Firm. Yelling. Take Away Privileges. The Dad on "Leave It To Beaver."

Interestingly, on my Wheel of Parenting, there is still Lose A Turn. And Bankrupt.

So yesterday, when a fight erupted while I was cooking Alternate Thanksgiving

Told you! There it is, only 14,000 words in: Thanksgiving!

dinner, I moved on from the earlier parenting method I'd spun up (Sarcastic Comments Hollered from the Kitchen) and instead landed on Overly Dramatic Teaching Method.

I'd used up Sarcastic Comments Hollered From The Kitchen while peeling potatoes, something I did accompanied by the sounds of Foghat. I was listening to Foghat because I was playing Christmas music in the background. I'd have dialed up some Thanksgiving music, but the only "Thanksgiving music" I know of is the song "Alice's Restaurant," and I really wasn't in the mood for that. I was in the mood for Foghat, and specifically for Foghat Christmas music.

You know, what with it being Thanksgiving and all.

10 pounds of potatoes wasn't even daunting to me. 10 pounds of potatoes, for me, is a walk in the park. This is because I was prepared as a kid by my parents for such things as peeling potatoes.  My parents prepared me for all kinds of things as a kid: peeling potatoes, someday having a job and responsibilities of my own, and, of course, how to deal with the fact that every person in the world is just waiting to steal your wallet, rape you, and murder you and your entire family.  (Step one: put your wallet in your front pocket when you go into the big city. That stops them cold: they can't move on to rape and murder if they can't get your wallet first.)

I'm never sure that even with the Wheel of Parenting Method I'm actually preparing the kids for life, because instead of the things that my parents did, I do things like let them sleep in a little while I started preparing Alternate Thanksgiving dinner, something I allowed them to do this day until Mr Bunches intervened and forced me to get them up.

I didn't let them sleep in because I'm nice or was being kind; those two slots rarely come up on the Wheel of Parenting. No, I let them sleep in because I wanted to hear my music while I cooked dinner-that-was-actually-lunch because we were eating at 11:30, and I let them sleep in because the holidays tend to increase the friction between The Boy and Middle, resulting in the kind of dumb fights that they would, in fact, have later on thatday, and I didn't want that. I wanted to stay in a good mood and peel potatoes and jam out to Foghat,

I'm so cool.

both of which got harder when Mr Bunches discovered what I was doing, and discovered that potatoes made a good, solid, thumping sound when you throw them.

I was sitting in the kitchen by the garbage can, peeling the potatoes and whipping right through them, something I could do because, as I said, my parents prepared us for adulthood, prepared us better than we could suspect, given that my adulthood actually does include peeling 10 pounds of potatoes on a Saturday morning. I couldn't have expected as a kid that potato peeling skills would be necessary as an adult. Somehow, though, Mom and Dad seemed to understand that kind of thing was in my future, because we peeled potatoes constantly when I was a kid. At least, that's what it seems like, looking back. Every day, it feels like, there I'd be: peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink and looking out the window wistfully at the backyard, where I could be playing if I didn't have to peel potatoes. We probably didn't even eat potatoes every day; Mom probably just had us peel the potatoes to build character or teach us to be self-sufficient, or as a cost-saving mechanism that we would inevitably misunderstand, the way I misunderstood when she hollered at us about crushing up the milk cartons before we threw them away.

"You have crush them up and put them in the garbage," she'd said, stomping it down viciously and then putting it into the garbage can. "Otherwise, they take up too much space in the can."

From that lecture, I took this: We are too poor to afford to buy garbage bags! I did try to crush the milk cartons after that, but not because Mom and Dad said to do it. I crushed them to avoid us having to live on the streets, because I knew that would be embarrassing.

That's why, by the way, I don't worry too much about my parenting methods and/or changing my parenting methods randomly. I know that whatever method I choose, the kids will inevitably entirely misunderstand or misinterpret the message, the way they misinterpret my telling them about the time I nearly failed Chemistry in college, a story I tell them to show them the importance of studying: Study, I tell them, because if you don't, you might be like me and have an "F" in Chemistry before your final exam, so you will have to stay up all night reading 17 chapters of the textbook you were SUPPOSED to be reading all along, because you will need to get an "A" on the final just to pass the class.

"Did you pass the class?" they ask me.

"Yes," I say. "I got that A on the exam, but I wish I'd studied harder and didn't have to risk it."

"What grade did you get for the class?" they ask me.

"A D," I say. "See?" I add. "That's why you've got to study."

The point of the story from my perspective is "learn from my mistakes: study so you don't have to cram just to barely pass a test, and instead actually get some value out of your education and make your life easier."  But what the kids take from it is first, you got a D so I can't be expected to do any better and second plus it's possible to pass a class by half-assing the studying part and cramming at the end. 

It doesn't matter how hard you parent. It's not going to work.  Even kids raised by wolves will misinterpret what the wolves teach them and eventually stop trying to kill sheep and go off to be chiropractors.

Mom and Dad would never have let us sleep in while they peeled the potatoes, no matter how hard Foghat was rockin'. That's just one of the many things I do differently from them and from other parents. Other things I do differently include letting Mr F and Mr Bunches walk around the kitchen while I'm preparing a dinner/lunch that includes the two turkeys that were not fully thawed out before I had to start cooking them. I hadn't even remembered to start thawing them until the night before at about 7 p.m., and I'd had to start cooking them at 7:30 a.m. the next day. They were still partially frozen when I stuck them in the oven, each in their own little disposable tinfoil pan. They barely fit into the oven together, which caused me some concern, too, because there was no time to cook two turkeys one after the other, so it's a lucky thing I was able to cram them in, bending the foil pans only a little. Well, a lot. But they fit in. That's the important thing.

I don't remember why I was cooking two turkeys. It might have been because by the time we went to buy our turkey, only smaller ones were available. I might also have been unsure of how big a turkey might fit in our oven and bought small. I am not very good at Thanksgiving.

Later, as I was desperately trying to finish up the rest of the meal while the guests -- Dad and Grandma and Grandpa and Sweetie's sister and kids -- milled around drinking coffee and eating the Chex Mix I had grudgingly put out for them, Oldest and The Boy commented that I had messed up because I was cooking the meal that morning. They told Sweetie that if it were them, they would have cooked the entire dinner the night before.


I added that to the mental list I keep of Reasons I Will Never Eat Dinner at the Kids' Houses and kept going with the dual turkeys, etc.

I'd had to wake the kids up while peeling potatoes because Mr F and Mr Bunches were roaming around the kitchen and dining room while I cooked and were starting to be too interfere-y. I was able to live with Mr F throwing the chairs to the ground. He can not stand to see a chair standing upright. We have five kitchen chairs and if Mr F is in the dining room, all five must be laying on their backs or sides. He doesn't even care that this makes it more difficult for him to get around. He comes in, throws the chairs down, and then roams around looking for other things to throw, stepping and stumbling over the chairs.

Throwing things down is his hobby, and he's getting better at it. He used to just take things and drop them to hear the sound they made -- soft like a pillow, clanking like the little drain piece from the bathtub.Now, he hurls them, and he's fast, like he was Friday night when he walked into the kitchen and whipped an arm out and knocked my can of soda onto the ground. I stopped baking pies to clean that up, putting the remainder of the can of soda on the other counter, only to finish mopping the spill up at the same time as Mr F threw the remainder of the can down on the other side of the kitchen. Then, while I began cleaning that up, he grabbed the bowl of cat food off the counter and whipped that down, which had to be a nirvana-like experience for him, as it resulted in a giant clang from the bowl, thousands of tiny little clicks from the cat food, and a howl of despair from me.

Saturday morning, he was content with throwing the kids' trophies off the bookshelf and knocking over chairs. Mr Bunches was bored and came into the kitchen where I was peeling potatoes, and began throwing those, enjoying the thump! thump! thump! they made. But he was slowing me down and interfering with my hearing Foghat, so I began calling for Middle, who had been sleeping in but who now had to get up to do her jobs, which were (a) supervise the twins and (b) clean the bathroom.
It went like this:

Thump! And I'd holler: "Time to get up and get the babies!"

Thump! Me: "Time to get up and get the babies away from the potatoes!"

Thump! Me: "I better hear the sound of people getting out of bed and getting the babies!"

Thump! Me: "Let's get moving before I decide to reassign the potato peeling!"

Thump! Me: "For every potato he throws I'm charging a dollar." ("Make a profit off punishment" had come up on the Wheel Of Parenting.)

Thump! Me: "Mr Bunches, come on! Go throw something somewhere else!"

Finally, Middle had come down and taken the Babies! downstairs so I was able to check on the slowly-thawing turkeys and get The Boy going on his job, which was "deep-frying onion and apple rings/complaining about random things," (the latter one not assigned; he opted to take that on willingly) but the stress of the holidays and of doing a chore must have gotten to both of them, because shortly before guests arrived, the fight broke out and I was forced to do some Real Parenting to assist Sweetie, who was running out of patience with them.

The fight broke out, from what I can tell, about no issue; I say that because no matter what I asked about why either The Boy or Middle was mad I got a different answer -- a new answer cropping up every time I solved the first one. During this all, Sweetie tried to resolve things, too, while Oldest, who had arrived, did her best to keep it from being resolved by throwing in little, nonhelpful comments like "I get it; I don't know why she doesn't," which served only to fuel the fire.

The starting point -- not the cause, but where it began-- for the fight was the division of twenty dollars the kids' Grandma had given to Middle when they'd gone to visit her. Middle and The Boy had driven up on Real Thanksgiving to see their Grandma and eat spaghetti (because, why not?) and bring home what looked to me, when I found it jamming open the freezer later that night, like a bag of blood (only it was spaghetti sauce). They'd agreed/been ordered to split the gas by each paying $7 of the $14 cost of the trip.

As of Saturday morning, The Boy had not given Middle his $7 yet, but Middle had been given $20 by Grandma to cover the cost of gas. So Middle asked Sweetie to break a $20 for her and explained how it all came about and also apparently said that The Boy had not yet given her the $7. (I'm a little unclear on the details of the fight's inception, because I was upstairs collecting potatoes.)

Sweetie had then allowed Middle to keep $17 of the $20, and given $3 to The Boy, doing the math quickly and coming up with the correct result -- The Boy was entitled, she said, to 1/2 the $20, less the $7 he should contribute for gas.

That caused Middle to begin complaining, loudly, about things in this order: (1) The Boy never had to pay for anything (2) as usual, she was paying for everything, (3) The Boy is spoiled, and (4) How come The Boy can yell at Mom all he wants while every time SHE yells at Mom she's in trouble.

That last one was a newcomer brought about when I got into the action and told her not to yell at her Mom.

While Middle was having her Complain-A-Thon, Oldest was throwing in little comments here and there and The Boy was getting mad, too. I'm not sure what The Boy was getting mad about; I think he was mad about not really having anything to get mad about. His complaints were, in order (1) Why is everybody mad at him, and (2) What did he do and (3) He gets in trouble more than Middle, so shut up.

Even though the problem really wasn't the division of the $20, we thought it was because Middle kept alternating between "I'm getting ripped off" and "Why can't I yell at Mom?" so I set up my first ever Thanksgiving Pageant, which we can call "The Gift of the Grandma." It starred The Boy as The Boy, Middle as Middle, Oldest as Grandma-With-$20, and Sweetie as "Gas Station Attendant Who Middle Pays $14 for Gas." This pageant told the Magical Thanksgiving Story of "Why The Boy Should Not Have to Pay $7 and Should Get $3 from the $20 Grandma Gave."

As they acted it out, we were supposed to show Middle how it worked that The Boy would get $3 and not pay her, but we ran into snags because Oldest wasn't sure where she should come in, the Babies! wanted to throw things at the Pageant, and Sweetie didn't have the proper cash to actually make change, resulting in us having to pretend that $7 was, at times, $10, $7, $20, and, for all I know, the Christmas Star. But in the end, the Pageant was performed, chairs were uprighted, turkeys were cooked to a point where they were safe to eat, and Middle learned, as we all did, a valuable lesson, which she summed up at this:

I still don't see why The Boy can yell at Mom anytime he wants and I get in trouble just for yelling at her once.

Words we can all live by in this holiday season.

Marriage is also like other things at a carnival. For example, it's like 'funnel cake,' in that I don't really know much about it.

Marriage is like...

... a tilt-a-whirl?

... a Ferris Wheel?

... a roller-coaster?

...that one thing where you stand against the wall and it spins you really fast and then the bottom drops out and you're suspended there against the wall and you're laughing but also a little scared and you can't hardly breathe?

Yesterday, on my way to the dinner to celebrate Middle Daughter's marriage, I explained to Mr Bunches, and to Mr F, who was with us, too, but who often is not directly included in conversations because he's more passive about them, that we were on our way to a restaurant to have dinner to celebrate Middle's getting married.

The restaurant, I told them, had a Merry-Go-Round in it -- because, I should point out, the restaurant really did have a Merry-Go-Round, although technically the ride was not inside the restaurant itself, it was just outside, but close enough, right? -- and they would get to ride on the Merry-Go-Round, before or after the dinner, sometime, but first we had to sit at the table and meet everyone, because Middle, I reminded them, had gotten married.

"Married?" asked Mr Bunches.

(Mr F just looked out the window).

"Married," I said, and asked him "Do you know what married means?"

"Like a Merry-Go-Round," Mr Bunches said, and that settled that and we moved on to more important things, like whether the restaurant was in New York City (No), whether the restaurant was in "Madison City" (technically, yes, but it's called "Madison") and whether his brother Mr F lives at the doctor's office, an exchange went like this:

Me:  And where do you live?

Mr Bunches:  Madison City.

Me:  No, you live in Middleton.

Mr Bunches:  Middleton City.

Me:  No, just Middleton.

Mr Bunches:  Just Middleton City.

Me:  Middleton.

Mr Bunches  Middleton.

Me: And where does your brother live?

Mr Bunches: At the doctor.

Which is what he says a lot, which is how we know that it made a powerful impression on him when Mr F hurt his head last year and had to stay in the hospital for four days.

We were heading, technically, to the celebration of the wedding and not the wedding itself.  The wedding itself was a small affair -- and would have been smaller, had not State of Wisconsin required at least two people to witness the wedding and at least one person to officiate at it.  I believe, if Middle Daughter could have pulled it off, she might have limited the wedding to just herself and her (now) husband, and, honestly,  his presence was probably optional, too, because he might mess up her plans more than anyone else.

Middle Daughter, as you probably know, got married yesterday.  She has known the guy for, I want to say, about a year, but to be perfectly honest I'm not entirely sure, because I have enough trouble keeping track of my own life to not want to bother keeping track of other people's lives, and so Middle has known her (now) husband for as long as she has known him, probably longer than six months given that I know for sure he was at our Thanksgiving dinner last fall, and that was nearly six months ago now, and it would be rare for someone to invite someone else to Thanksgiving when they've first begun dating.

Wouldn't it?  That's weird, right? I can't say, for sure, because I'm a big proponent of "just being yourself," a philosophy I constantly advise Oldest Daughter to follow.

"Just be yourself," I say, when Oldest Daughter wants to call a guy the next day after her date, or reveals to us that she has already picked out the names of her first two children.  "You should lead with that, on dates," I tell her, and then go one better: "Or just bring it up when they ask for your phone number.  Say, 'Sure, and by the way, I already know what I'm going to name my first two children.'"

That is actually far sounder advice than you think, because the theory behind it is that by being yourself, you will weed out the people who don't want you to be yourself almost immediately, and you can then focus on the people who will let you be yourself.

Put another way: there probably aren't that many guys who would ask Oldest for her phone number, hear that she says she already knows what her kids' names will be, and who would then persist in calling her for a date.  But there are, I bet, at least a few, and everyone who asks her out ought to know that she is the kind of person who brings a guy to meet her parents two weeks into the relationship, and who will ask, about 15 times a day, whether she looks fat.

Did I say 15 times a day? I mean per hour.

So guys ought to know that about Oldest, I figure, and there are guys who won't mind that and those are the guys she should be focusing on, the same way that Middle found a guy who will sit happily at a Thanksgiving dinner where he meets her younger brothers for the first time ever and one of those younger brothers strips naked and runs through the living room to grab Middle's (now) husband's drink and spill it on the floor because that's the kind of thing he does

(Mr F.  It was Mr F.)

(You'd probably guessed.)

and not blink twice and even come back for Christmas, where that kind of thing is bound to happen again.

(It did.)

You've got to be yourself, and you've got to let other people be yourself, within certain limits, and so when Middle told us her plans for her wedding, we let her plan her day exactly the way she wanted, except that I felt compelled to point out certain fundamental things to her,  those fundamental things being that:

A. You have to have two witnesses to a marriage, and
B.  You have to invite your mother, even if you didn't need two witnesses.

Middle's original plans were to get married with just her, and maybe her husband, and possibly an officiant.  This is, I suspect, because Middle is a very private person, for the most part, who will tell you at length about how a person on the phone at her school was very rude but who will not mention for several weeks that her (now) husband has moved in with her and they are living together.  I'm not sure if Middle is private because she likes to keep her life to herself, an increasing rarity these days, or if she's worried that by telling us stuff we'll decide to meddle, the way I did when I broke it to her that, legally speaking, weddings have certain ingredients, and that further, practically speaking, weddings involving Sweetie's daughters include Sweetie.

And so Middle widened the scope of who was able to be at her wedding, limiting it to (I've heard) just her, and the (now) husband, and a court commissioner, and Sweetie and the (now) husband's sister, and the several hundred people milling about Wisconsin's State Capitol building at 12:30 on a Friday afternoon, where (I'm told -- I wasn't there) Middle and Husband got married.

My role in this supersecret ceremony was "to not be there," although that wasn't formally spelled out, and my secondary role was to retrieve Mr F and Mr Bunches from school and bring them to the celebratory dinner later that day, a role I was about 83% capable of pulling off without a hitch.

Sweetie had a larger role, in that she was allowed to attend the actual ceremony, but she wasn't very forthcoming about the details, and I am kind of wondering if she didn't have to sign a nondisclosure agreement or something, as only the before-and-after information was provided, in that Sweetie told me that before the ceremony, they had trouble getting a place to go and after the ceremony they had trouble getting to the place they wanted to go.

Middle and Husband had decided to get married at the State Capitol, and I don't know why other than that it probably seemed more scenic than other places to get married in Madison (City).  Since they were doing a civil, rather than religious, ceremony -- I don't know why and I've tried not to ask, for several reasons:

1. It's her wedding. She can do what she wants.
2. I'm not super-religious, or maybe I am but I'm not super into any organized religion these days, and
3. I didn't really care, and
4. When Sweetie and I got married, people gave us a bad time about every single thing we chose or did not choose for our wedding, from the ceremony to the dress to the weather to the food to the location to the person Sweetie was marrying, probably, and by "people" I mean "including me," although that was inadvertent.

Here is what happened.  Sweetie and my mom and her mom had been looking through one of those 4' thick bridal magazines that are filled with wedding dresses, all of which look more or less identical to men in that they are white dresses and that is all I at least see when I look through a zillion pictures of wedding dresses: page after page of seemingly the exact same dress.

"Oh, no," women are saying right now.  "Each dress is different and unique.  See, this one has cross-hatching," or something like that.

To which I respond: They are dresses, and they are white.  They are all the same.  You don't see me running around going into great detail about what I'm wearing.  Take blue jeans.  I own several pairs of blue jeans.  They are all blue jeans, even the ones that are black.  There are, I suppose, differences.  The pair I have on today, for example, has a hole in the right knee.  But I don't parade them in front of Sweetie and say "Which pair of jeans should I wear? The ones that are a slightly darker shade of blue? The ones with the fringe on the one heel?"  I don't do that because it doesn't matter: jeans are jeans are jeans, and also because I have more important things to do.   I just grab whichever one is on top in the drawer and get on with my life.

So Sweetie and Mom and Mother-In-Law were looking at pictures of wedding dresses and they showed me one that stood out from the others.

It stood out from the others because, and I quote (myself. I said this):

"It looks old and moldy.  Like it's been stored and got wet or something."

That, I learned instantly was because the dress had been antiqued or something.  It was supposed to look like that, to which I responded that that was dumb because who wants a dress to look like it's been sitting on the floor of a garage for 15 years, or something like that.

There was a long silence in the room.

LOOOOOOONNNNNNGGGGGG.

And then my mom said that was the dress Sweetie had wanted to get.

You know, if her (then) fiance didn't think it looked like garbage.

In the end, she did not get that dress even though I tried to reassure that upon looking again it looked a lot less like garbage and a lot more like something people would want to wear, etc., etc., and she got a very nice dress (it was white, I remember!) to wear to our wedding, and my complaints about her dress were added on to my dad's complaints about an hors d'ouevre wedding not being right because "people are going to expect a plate of food!" ("Not if we tell them they aren't getting one!" Sweetie responded) and my brother's complaints that an outdoor reception might mean rain, or wind, or even snow, and my mom's complaints that we should have more trees with Christmas lights on them ("?") and so on, and we got married anyway,  without snow and with trees my mom paid for and without a "plate of food" for anyone, unless they loaded up on hors d'ouevres and Sweetie learned to preface questions about my opinions with information that would be necessary to elicit the opinion she wants, and we've lived happily ever after, the moral of the story being that if Middle didn't want anyone but the fewest legally-required people at her wedding, we were going to honor that.

Besides which, it meant I got to stay at home most of the day by myself, just hanging out and eating pizza and playing Plants vs. Zombies and watching Archer, and you know how many days I get like that? About one every 44 years is how many, so this was long overdue.

Sweetie and Middle and Husband and Husband's sister, I later learned, had to work with the Court Commissioner who was marrying them to even find a place at the Capitol, because there was some kind of band there, and they eventually found a location and swore everybody in or whatever happened, and the marriage went through, which I learned about via text message, and swung into action to go get Mr F and Mr Bunches to take them to the dinner.

Here is the other reason why it probably wasn't the worst idea to not include me in the ceremony, completely aside from the fact that I would be bored stiff and honestly didn't really care to watch the ceremony.  I am not a ceremony watcher, really, I only do it when I absolutely have to and if it was up to me, everyone would elope for everything -- not just weddings, but everything.  People should elope for graduations, and anniversaries, and other kids' birthday parties, and meetings at work.  Put another way: if you don't include me in your boring ceremony I'm okay with that because: boring.

I mean, a wedding ceremony is great for the people getting married.  Or I assume it is.   I can barely remember my own, because I was sort of in a daze the whole day (Sweetie is REALLY beautiful and hasn't changed a bit since our wedding day) and sort of in a hurry to get it over with before she changed her mind (she is at least four levels of hotness above me, and that's being very charitable to me) and so the only thing I really remember about our actual wedding ceremony is when she was having trouble lighting the candle that the Catholic Church makes you light to symbolize something about something. I think she lit the altar on fire.

But let's assume that the other people getting married are less dazed by the fact that they tricked someone into marrying them and so they are paying attention to their own ceremony, and if I assume that then I assume that the people getting married are enjoying the ceremony, but maybe not, because I've been at other things where I was the focus of the ceremony and I didn't enjoy that, either.  Graduations, swearings-in, that time I got an award of a scholarship for something and I had to wear a tie: boring.

The ceremony is not the fun part and I don't know why we bother with it anymore.  Would society be any different if we didn't make high schoolers sit through two hours of lectures about how they can do anything they want to do, or if we didn't force everyone to sit in hard pews and listen to that "Love is patient" poem read by a priest while trying not to look at the bride's butt?

Yes, it would: it would be less boring.   So we should do away with all  that junk and just get on with the part people like: the party.   Imagine how much better the Nobel Prizes would be if the committee just called up Linus Pauling or whoever and said "Come on down to Hooters, we're getting wings and a pitcher and nice job on the Higgs Boson."

(Except that people shouldn't go to Hooters.  Not because of sexism. I don't care about that.  Because it's stupid.  People who go to Hooters are stupid.)

(So you wouldn't want to hold the Nobel Prize Party there, is my point.)

So if you ran weddings and graduations my way, and the way Middle's wedding went for me, it would simply be showing up at a reception, and the priest or judge or Captain Stubing could say "You're married!" and then people could dance or drink or find out that there is actually something called a "Mashed Potato Bar," which is like an ice cream shoppe only it has mashed potatoes that they'll put into a fancy dish and they have, like, forty different kinds of things you can put on them, which is a thing that was at one wedding we went to once, and which is a thing I wish was on every street corner, and then everyone would have fun and nobody would ever say "Man, why do we have to go to this wedding today, it's so nice out!" which, if you're being honest, you've said at every wedding you've ever been invited to.  Just admit it.

(I mean EXCEPT OURS SWEETIE I LOVED IT.)

The other reason I'm okay with skipping ceremonies is because Mr F and Mr Bunches are not very good at sitting through ceremonies.  Or sitting, period.  They have trouble in groups, and trouble in loud places, and trouble around new people, and trouble sitting still for long times, and ceremonies, being a group of new people being loud in a strange place, rattle them.

So many ceremonies, from my in-laws' 50th anniversary to The Boy's graduation to Middle's wedding dinner, are actually witnessed by me and Mr F and Mr Bunches from the outside looking in, or sometimes "from the outside on a Merry-Go-Round looking in."

We had offered, as part of our wedding present to Middle and her husband, to buy dinner for the larger group of people that were invited, including Oldest and The Boy and me, Mr F and Mr Bunches, and the husband's sister's family, including his nephews, and originally we were going to go to a fancier restaurant but Middle downgraded us to the restaurant with a Merry-Go-Round because she recognized that there would be little kids there, including her youngest brothers, who might not want to sit at a table and watch grown-ups make small talk with each other.

Which actually is a pretty incredible thing, if you think about it. How many brides do you know would stop to think that on their day they should maybe make things a little easier for everybody else, even if that means that people won't be staring at them and being jealous of them, etc., and instead people might be outside on a Merry-Go-Round.

(Middle, in that sense, is a lot like Sweetie, who wanted an outdoor wedding reception in part because it was at a park and kids could play there.)

So at the appointed hour, upon receiving the text that they were married, I got up and put on my nicest suit -- I really did, it's the one with the vest that everyone always says looks like an old-fashioned sheriff's outfit, which is a good thing, because old-fashioned sheriff's were the fanciest people America ever knew -- and went and picked up Mr F and Mr Bunches from school, getting them out early, and then drove all the way to the other side of Madison (City) where we got there just as Oldest and The Boy arrived, and ten minutes before the wedding party arrived because the wedding party was led by Middle, who took the longest possible way to travel the six blocks from the Capitol to the restaurant, ignoring Sweetie's advice because the way Middle took "is the way I know," but it didn't matter because the restaurant she'd chosen didn't just have a Merry-Go-Round outside but a bunch of flying, spinning, musical, or otherwise interesting stuff in it, too, which kept the boys occupied for 0.000003 seconds when we sat down, after which I began my afternoon of getting up and periodically walking around the restaurant with Mr F, looking at things, and also of periodically going out to ride on the Merry-Go-Round outside, which we did four times.

It was not the most restful of dinners, but, then, none of our dinners are restful, really,  and anyway I'd spent the entire day in solitude, nearly, and was peacefulled out, so I was ready for the challenge, and, also, I really wanted to get up and look around the restaurant, myself -- who could be in a circus-toy-themed restaurant where the tables have railroad trains or slot cars or Lego sets embedded in them and everywhere you'd look there's another calliope or clown or monkey-on-a-unicycle-on-a-tightrope and not want to get up and look around?

And with Mr F, my ready-made excuse was hand-in-hand with me (literally: I hold his hand because he's fast and sneaky, and he'll grab someone's fries off their tray like he did at McDonald's one day, and I will feel terrible about it, like I did that day, but I will only feel terrible about it until the lady whose fries he grabs turns out to be a total snot about it, even though I have said I will buy her a new french fries anyway, and even though she hadn't started eating them yet, but she's still a jerk, in which case I pay for her new fries but secretly hope she gets warts) and we wandered around the restaurant, stopping back at the table for a few seconds of conversation (me) and watching Youtube on the iPad (him) and cheeseburgers and onion rings (me) and cheese puffs and Hershey's bars (him) and occasionally getting Mr Bunches and the other side's kids and going out to the Merry-Go-Round to take a spin on it, Mr Bunches riding first the pink horse and then the camel and then the white horse, with Mr F always sitting on the bench that had a dragon on the side, with me next to him and my arm around him and him laughing and me keeping a wary eye on him, and on Mr Bunches, and seeing through the window where Sweetie was proudly and happily sitting at a table sharing a banana split with her two beautiful daughters, one of whom was now married, while a little ways away The Boy and his girlfriend joked with our new in-laws and ate cheesy fries.  It turns out our new in-laws like cheesy fries! They'll fit right in.

And then we went home, and everyone went home, and Middle and her husband went off on a brief honeymoon, to Milwaukee.  And back home, everything was the same as it always was: we gave the boys baths and we sat around playing "Buzz Lightyear versus the Mega T-Rex," and we read and we took a ride in the car and we went to bed.

Everything was the same as it always was and yet nothing is ever the same as it was.

I started this off trying to think what marriage was like, maybe to give a little advice to Middle and to me and to everyone else who ever has been or will be married, or maybe to everyone else who ever has been or ever will be alive, and I think that Mr Bunches got it just right when he said it's like a Merry-Go-Round, in that you go around and around and maybe you go up and down or maybe you just sit there and ride, but wherever you look there's someone having fun and someone hanging on for dear life and someone next to you on the ride, and there's bright colors and lights and music, and maybe to an outsider it seems like you're not getting anywhere, but if you're where you want to be in the first place, you don't need to go anywhere else and you can just relax and enjoy the ride.

Congratulations, Middle.

Leave for goonching?

"Goonch goonch goonch."

I'm kind of guessing at the spelling, here.  Goonch goonch goonch is something we've started saying to Mr Bunches ever since Middle went for a ride with us and exposed us to that word.

Middle had stopped by one afternoon, and we were just hanging around, talking, when Mr F decided that he wanted to go for a ride.  That's how Mr F works: He'll just be sitting around, and then suddenly an idea pops into his head, an idea like this actual list of things Mr F has decided would be a good idea:

-- Go for a ride in the car.


-- Jump on the trampoline for 10 minutes and then lie down.


-- Break all of the cheese puffs into tinier cheese puffs and then throw them on the floor.

(There's a sliding scale of approval to these ideas.)  On this particular day, Mr F decided he wanted to go for a ride even though (or perhaps because) Middle was over.  So we got ready to go for a ride even though (or perhaps because) Middle was over and then we ran into a problem in that Mr Bunches did not want to go for a ride.

Mr Bunches wanted to stay home, and he let us know that by saying "Leave for home," which is how he tells us to stay somewhere.  He doesn't know the word stay yet; we're working on it.  So when you're sitting and watching SpongeBob with him and you decide that it's getting time that you got up and went to work because you have a job, you know, and you stand up, Mr Bunches will say "Leave for bed," to get you to stay sitting on his bed with him, and when you say you have to go somewhere with Mr Bunches and he doesn't want to go, he'll say "leave for home."

On the day we took the ride, Mr Bunches really didn't want to go, and all the usual bribes (he could bring his iPad, or his blanket, or we'd stop at McDonald's and get him a soda, the only thing he eats from McDonald's, usually)(and, weirdly, he won't drink soda from anywhere but McDonald's)(in the picture on this post, he's only pretending) weren't working, and each attempt to convince him to go for a ride made him more upset, to the point where he was crying.

(Don't be too worried about that.  Mr Bunches has taught himself to cry.  On cue.  One day, I was telling him to pick up Mousetrap because it was bedtime, and he said "No," and then I insisted, and he said "I'm sad," and I said "You don't look sad," and he looked at his reflection in the window, staring at it and concentrating until he started crying, and then he turned to me with a look of triumph and said "I'm sad," and I had to agree that he looked sad, so he got to do one more Mousetrap, which he insisted on by saying "leave for Mousetrap.")

For a brief moment, then, we tried to convince Mr F that he shouldn't go for a ride, but he was adamant; he even had his Crocs on, so what could we do?  We picked up Mr Bunches and loaded him into the car, where he cried and sulked, and we got Mr F in, and Middle came along, and we took a drive around town, as we so often do because the Babies! like to go for a ride and it gives Sweetie and I a chance to talk without staring at carpeting full of ground-in cheese puffs, which is nice.

On the ride, Middle was telling us about some reality show she watches in which there was a giant catfish that the locals called The Goonch, and when she got to that point, Mr Bunches yelled:

"No!  No Goonch!"

And ever since then, we will periodically say to Mr Bunches: "Goonch goonch goonch," and he's said "No!  No Goonch!"  And then we will debate the goonch with him:

"I think, yes, Goonch." we'll say.

"No Goonch!" he will insist.


And before you think that I am a horrible person for repeatedly reminding Mr Bunches that there is a goonch, keep in mind that (a) Mr Bunches yesterday made me play a game in which he would sit on the counter and pretend to fall off, and I had to then catch him and lift him over the volcano (which was actually our kitchen floor) and lift him to the other counter, where I would place him, and then we would repeat it.

We did that 20 times.  And even then, he didn't want to quit.  "Leave for volcano!" he told me, even as my arms were ready to fall off.

So sometimes, I figure, he can handle a goonching.  Besides, if he really didn't like it, he'd show me how sad it (pretend) makes him.

And (b) he says it to us, now, too.  He'll come up to me and say "Daddy, GOONCH GOONCH GOONCH."

What emotion, do you think, would be "Oh, man, Middle is babysitting us!!?" (What The H?)

Once a week, Middle Daughter sends me a guest post. Once every blue moon, I get around to posting them. This one is from when she babysat the twins while Sweetie and I got a night out to celebrate Sweetie's birthday...

***********************************************************



A Perfect Evening…

So last weekend I had the pleasure of spending my Saturday evening with the two coolest people in the world.

Mr. Bunches and Mr. F.

They are currently the only two men (well, with The Boy, also) in my life.

Our evening was pretty eventful.

To start Mr. Bunches and I baked 18 cupcakes for Mom (Sweetie).

We then frosted them. I frosted some:



and Mr. Bunches frosted his own:



Mr. Bunches was very proud of his two cupcakes.




I would be too.

After the cupcakes we wanted to work on our emotions…

Here is Happy. “He’s Happy” is what Mr. Bunches likes to say:




“He’s Sad.”




“He’s Mad.”





And last but not least “He’s Surprised.”



But I personally love the emotion that Mr. F was displaying:



“He’s bored and wants me to leave him alone….” Would be what Mr. Bunches would say if he was paying attention to Mr. F.

All in all it was the best Saturday that I have had in a very long time.

Middle Daughter wants to steal your ideas for meals. (What The H?)

It's the weekly (or so) guest post from Middle Daughter, who this week shares with you how she shocked a bunch of senior citizens. But in a good way...

***************************************************

For all of you who do not know, I am a cook.

No, I am not a good cook, but I am a cook at a nursing home.

As much as I enjoy cooking there is not a whole lot that I can do with the food to be creative, but at the same time I want to expand my cooking horizon as well as try and get the residents of the nursing home to eat food that is out of their comfort zone but at the same time is a food item that they would want to eat again.

Let’s start with the meal that I had to cook on Saturday. The meal was baked cod with a broiled tomato. Every other cook that I cook with on a day-to-day basis would cut a tomato in half and maybe add a little bit of salt and call it a day.

I, on the other hand, wanted to add just a little bit of something to add some different flavor and be different than what any other cook would do there.

Here is what I came up with…






I added a little salt and a little pepper as well as some whole thyme leaves as well as a little basil.
They turned out beautiful and delicious. They shocked some of the residents, but people loved them.

Now that was the way that I decided to create my broiled tomatoes; what would you do to make a broiled tomato? Would you do anything different? Let me know so I can try out some of your ideas and see the differences…

How Close is Too Close…? (What the H?)

Today, Middle Daughter's guest post, "What the H?" shows you how not to make a good impression on her.

It may be that I am the only one in the world that has a problem with other strange people not respecting personal space but I don’t understand why people insist on standing so insanely close to another strange person.

It has happened many times, not just to me, but I have seen it done to other people and I could tell that they also have issues with people doing just that.

RESPECT THE BUBBLE and RESPECT PERSONAL SPACE!!!!!

I was at Target and I was just buying some necessities and it was around seven-thirty or so on a Tuesday night. Which meant that there are not many people in the store so there are not many workers at registers checking people out.

I got what I needed and headed towards the registers. There were four associates checking customers out and so I hopped in the shortest line since I only had three items I didn’t think that it would take long.

Ahead of me was a mother and her two children. Bless her soul she had a young daughter around the age of six as well as a little son around the age of four. I was staying back because I wanted to give her space because I CAN understand that concept. Plus nowadays when people shop they rarely use cash anymore so when they use their credit or debit cards they don’t want people standing too close to get their numbers or what not.

I had been waiting there a while because the mother before me had a bunch of stuff in her cart and all of a sudden I could feel someone breathing behind me. I turned around and noticed that there was another customer behind me. I looked at him as if to tell him “back off” but he didn’t seem to get the hint.

When the woman moved forward and was ready to swipe her card I did not move forward because I believed that she needed her privacy. The man behind me noticed that I didn’t move and he started huffing and puffing.

I did not place my items on the counter until the woman ahead of me was finished and ready to leave. As soon as she left I placed my items on the convey0r belt and proceeded to chat with the clerk behind the counter. The man followed suit and since he was standing too extremely close to me the woman checking me out asked if we were together or separate. I told her separate and she just checked out my items. I paid with cash and the man was standing so close to me I think that he could see my driver’s license and tell me my driver’s license number. I wanted to turn to him and tell him:

“Listen I would really appreciate if you would please step back because I am not happy with the fact that I can tell what you had for dinner because I can smell your breath. Thanks!”

But I didn’t. I paid and received my change and left.\

AWKWARD!

How many of you have felt the same way? Or is it just me?
*****************************************************************************************

Middle does not know I'm adding this to her post:

Today, Middle asks a question we'd all rather not have to face. (What The H?)

It's time again to hear from Middle Daughter, who weekly sends me things to post and then I never get around to posting them. Here, she shows why you would never want to visit her apartment without galoshes.

**************************************************

Is this Throw up or is this Poop?

It is an innocent Tuesday evening and I have just arrived back home from a lovely day with hanging out with my mother (Sweetie) and my two little brothers (Mr. Bunches and Mr. F) and I walk in and I am greeted by none other than Stormy.

It had been raining on and off all day and so I knew that Stormy was NOT going to be in a good mood because, ironically enough, she is deathly afraid of storms. And when I say “deathly afraid” I mean “cowering in the corner yelping and crying for hours deathly afraid.”

I walk into my door and I see her in the corner, tail between her legs, and she starts yelling and crying. I thought “oh no, how long has she been crying like this?” I try to console her and it seems to be working, so I go about my merry way. I take off my sweater and I change into some more comfortable clothes and then I walk into my kitchen to get a glass of water. I notice that her food dish is almost empty so I go and get her food and I add some more to her food dish because I know that if she can see the bottom of her food dish she is not a happy camper.

After I fill her food dish and get my glass of water and I head over to my living room to turn on some television. As I sit down I saw that I forgotten to turn my kitchen light off so I get up and go and turn it off.

I turned off the light and I walked out of the kitchen and started heading back into the living room as I was walking out of the room I stepped on something. It was not carpet. It was not tile. It was warm and it was wet. I looked down and I saw that it was either poop. Or it was throw up.

I didn’t move my foot and I looked at Stormy.

“Stormy, is this poop or is this throw up?” I asked her.

Of course she didn’t answer but I knew that it was one or the other.

I turned on the light and saw that it was……throw up. And to my surprise I was relieved.

Come on, Norm*, keep it in your stomach!

I guess that is the price you pay for owning a cat that has a sensitive stomach.

***********************************************************

*Note: It's not a typo. She calls her cat, whose name is Stormy, "Norm."