I actually combined several exciting incidents in a chapter in a book about being me so--lucky you!-- I can replicate it IMMEDIATELY!
CHAPTER 21
We have a case of demonic possession in our home. I kid you not. I’ve seen The Exorcist; I know the signs. I don’t know how long I can hold out. Send a priest, please- preferably that goodlooking young one from the movie. You smile. Skeptic.
I am standing in the kitchen gazing at Mr Coffee, the only man I can love at 7:00 in the morning, when CW enters, frowning.
“I told you I needed socks.”
“And good morning to you. I told you I bought some last week.”
“Well, where are they?”
Not having consummated my relationship with Mr. C yet, I am slow to recognize that this is not my sweet, polite, loving 16-year-old. “They’re on top of the dresser in a package.”
“No, they’re not. I must have worn those already. Everything’s dirty.”
I put my mug down gently. “I did all the laundry yesterday. Everything is CLEAN.”
He’s in the pantry, muttering about how there’s no cereal that he likes. I look over his shoulder and see 15 boxes lined up neatly on the shelf. I cough suggestively.
“I told you I hate all these kinds.”
“I’m going to the store today. What do you want?”
“I’d like something besides cereal. Every day for sixteen years, all I get is cereal.”
I go to the refrigerator and get an egg out. “Here,” I hand it to him. I think I’m very funny for it being so early.
He rolls his eyes and sighs, “Feeding me is your job.” He puts the egg in my coffee and turns back to the cereal. This is when I know something has gone very wrong. No one in this family would mess with my coffee -especially the first cup.
“Let me show you what a frying pan looks like, “ I say.
We gaze at each other, eyes narrowed. “I’d rather see a clean pair of socks,” he hisses.
Stomping upstairs, I go through an enormous mound of clothes on the dresser- where did they come from?- and find the unopened package of socks. Stomping back downstairs, I place the package neatly in his cereal bowl with the Cheerios and wait. He glares at me but even the demon knows enough not to use that evil Exorcist language in front of me. I admit I’m hoping that his head might spin around, though.
After a moment, he removes the package and says, “Thanks.”
The demon placated temporarily, I take my coffee out onto the front porch where I notice two of the sprinkler heads are stuck which explains why there are some lovely stripes of healthy green grass surrounded by dead yellow straw. Dan tried to make up something about drainage and inclines when I told him last week. Then he said it was artistic and we could call it Zebra grass and pretend we meant to do it. He just didn't want to go out in the heat and fix them. Not that the 110 degrees kept him from pitching a ballgame yesterday. Isn't that funny?
Anyway, these two are still stuck so I run out and start digging at one of them. The St. Augustine grass has wrapped itself around the thingiemabob and is holding it captive. I impress myself greatly when my attempts work and it starts to turn again. Gracefully I leap over the stream as it passes and run to the other dead head. I dig up the second one in increments, grabbing a handful of grass and then running out of range when the first one’s spray comes back by , returning after it passes and grabbing some more grass. (Why, you are wondering , didn't I just go in the house and turn off the system? That would have been too easy. And then how would I know if it were fixed or not?) The second sprinkler head begins turning! Only now there’s nowhere to run. I start screaming and jumping around while Blue Kitty, thinking this is a new game, or perhaps fearing he is about to drown, leaps up and claws at my nightgown. I finally give up and decide just to walk through the streams, nightgown and hair dripping. And hear my neighbor say, "Great show!" He’s standing in his driveway with his dogs, watching the whole thing. I gather as much damp dignity as I can muster, and say haughtily, "I'm so glad you enjoyed it," and just as I start back to the house, the damn cycle shuts off, the next one clicks on, and one of the sprinkler heads comes up and shoots me square in the face.
Dried and dressed, I decide that a trip to the grocery store would be a good thing, since I had promised the demon new cereal. And maybe a nice bottle of Chardonnay because the way this day was going, I was going to need it.
So I’m standing in the wine department, staring at the Texas wines and wondering why upstarts could demand such high prices, when there is this huge explosion. As I turn to look, large, deadly shards of green glass fly by me, missing me by only inches-- well, that may be a little touch of literary license- the closest is maybe three feet. After a moment of stunned silence, a woman one aisle away comes rushing over to me. It is a testimony to the strength and depth of a good guilt-ridden Catholic upbringing that my first words are, “I didn’t do anything!”
We hesitantly edge over to the source and find that a bottle of champagne has exploded on a top shelf. At first I think it popped a cork, but we discover the top intact on the floor. Still on the shelf was the round green bottom, neatly sliced off. It had taken out two other bottles as it shattered; we find their tops intact on the floor, too. Big chunks of glass lie around us in fizzy puddles of Moet et Chandon, some having travelled as far as twenty feet. I am pretty shaken up as I realize that had I been contemplating champagne rather than Texas wines, I could be lying on the floor at this moment, a victim of a Texas wine bottle massacre. I take my groceries and head for the check out, still a little shaky. In my cart is one of those big cardboard boxes of wine. At least if it explodes, I’ll only get a papercut.
When I get home, I call Dan and tell him of my brush with the Grim Reaper. He says, “Gee, three feet closer and we could have been rich.” You can see he wasn’t raised Catholic and is a lawyer to boot. When I protest, he at least has the good grace to say, “Well, I didn’t mean I wanted you horribly maimed and disfigured...just a little scarred.”
After I talk to him, I listen to the messages on the machine. There is one for Lauren which says, “This is Macarena Inc. We’re just following up on the work we did for you to make sure all was satisfactory. Call us at 329-****.
So I decide to do this really nice thing-- I’ve read that close encounters with death can cause personality changes like this-- and I call and say, ”I wanted to tell you that you left a message on my machine accidentally.”
A woman says,”Who is this?”
I say, “Well, that doesn’t really matter, because you didn’t really want to talk to me in the first place.”
“Well, who was the message for?”
I think you said it was for Lauren. Someone you did some work for?”
“Lauren who?”
“Well, um. I don’t know. You didn’t say. You wanted to know if she was happy with your work, and you haven’t done any work for us, although I feel sure if you had, I’d be very happy with it.” I add this last because I am Southern.
“Well, I just made a lot of those calls.”
“This number is 329-****,” I say helpfully.
There is a pause. “Oh, yeah. Here it is. I remember that one. Well, you didn’t have anything on that machine to tell people if they have the right number or not!” Her tone is very accusatory. I immediately feel guilty.
AND I APOLOGIZE!!!!! Can you believe it??? I feel guilty and apologize to some stupid woman who can’t even dial a phone number correctly!!!! And whom I had the courtesy to call and tell! And there I am apologizing because I didn’t have a message on my machine telling her how stupid she was (“Hey, stupid! This isn’t Lauren! You dialed the wrong number!!!”)
Do you think this is another one of those Catholic guilt things?
I decide it’s too early for wine and start putting the groceries away and as I take the soap upstairs to replace the sliver in the shower, which no one wants to use and which will sit in the soapdish until it dries up and I finally throw it away, feeling guilty and wasteful, I have a revelation about existence, and balance, and harmony. Do you want to hear it? It could be life-altering for you, too.
The "church ladies" in my little hometown church were always doing projects and one of these was collecting the remains of their soaps. My mother did this; she had a little margarine container in the bathroom closet and she would put the slivers in it when they got acceptably small. (When my mother died, she had an entire kitchen cabinet packed with little empty margarine tubs-hundreds of them. Why? Did she think she would go through that much soap in her lifetime? Could margarine containers become a fetish of some sort?)
And then all the ladies in the Women’s Club would get together in the church kitchen with their little containers and melt all those little soap slivers in a pot and make new bars and send them to Africa. Those bars of soap fascinated me. They had so much character-such history. I would hold them and smell them and look at the different streaks of color and think how much more personality they held than the plain gold bar of Dial on our sink.
But what's more fascinating (here's the revelation part) is that those women had found a way to not have to use the slivers!!! A way that even allowed them to feel good about not using the slivers! Why-It was even better if the sliver was bigger!!! Maybe you could even claim a tax deduction for your slivers!
Doesn't that just seem like such a great way to deal with life? Finding a way to turn your irritations into someone else's solutions?
It just seems to have a certain symmetry to it. |
