In Case Of Emergency, Don't Call Rose

Since having chemo, I have ended up in the emergency room a few times.  (Cancer, the gift that keeps on giving.)

Naturally, my side effects occurred when Tim was not around, so I called Rose and asked her to take me to the hospital. (Bless her little heart, she would do anything to help someone.)  After all, she was a candy striper when she was younger.  All I can say is, "God help the people she was assigned to.  They are probably still trying to recover!"

The first hurdle was getting to the hospital without getting killed.

"Go straight through the stop sign," I directed as we came to an intersection.

And she did.  Straight through the stop sign.

"What?" Hearing my gasp, she glanced over at me, mistakenly thinking the reason I sounded like a beached whale was because my face had swollen up and I looked like a beached whale.  Somehow, she missed the fact that we had just narrowly escaped death due to her driving skills.

"You just blew through that stop sign," I sputtered.

"Well, you said to go straight through it," she protested.

"I meant go straight, after stopping!!!  I do not want my tombstone to read, 'She survived cancer, but not a car ride with Rose' "

Sadly, she was not done trying to kill me yet.

Upon arrival at the hospital, they gave me a mask to wear, and a gown to put on.  Yep, nothing makes you feel more like the expendable crew member in a sci-fi movie who gets some horribly disfiguring disease and dies an agonizing death during the opening credits while the star stands over you, looking like they just finished shooting a cover for Vogue  than having to sit in the ER covered head to toe in paper mache.  Woo-freakin'-hoo.

After drawing blood, taking my pressure and temperature for the fifty-sixth time and assuring me that whatever it was, it was probably not fatal, maybe, they left Rose and I alone in the room and went off to scratch their heads again. (Paging Dr. House...disease of the week in room 4)

Vainly, I tried to get comfortable on the hospital bed (which is like asking a hot dog to get comfortable on a nice, hot grill).  I triple-folded the plastic pillow and scooted up, then down.  I crossed and uncrossed my legs.  I used the side-rail as a prop, went into downward dog, attempted a warrior three and ended with a triple-toe loop, but nothing worked.

"Here, let me help you," Rose offered.  "I know how to put the back of the bed up.  It's just this lever here."

And faster than you can say, "Code Blue"  she pulled something under the bed and the next thing I knew,  I was getting up close and personal with my knees!

"Um, I think I prefer it the way it was," I panted, trying in vain to drag some air into my lungs without rupturing my spleen in the position I was in.

"Oops," Rose muttered, tinkering with the lever again, "Sorry.  I didn't mean to push the top that far forward."

Really?  So you were not trying to fold, spindle and mutilate me?

"There," she announced as the top half of the bed went flying 180 degrees back to its original position, taking me with it, "how's that?"

Gee, I'm not sure.  Let me get this case of whiplash taken care of and then I'll let you know.

"Okay, I've got it figured out now," she announced, pressing the lever of death once more before I fully regained consciousness.

This time, I ended sitting up straighter than a corpse at an Irish wake (sadly, this has actually happened in my family back in the day when some great-uncles and assorted cousins decided the deceased needed "one for the road", but that's another blog).

"Is that comfortable?" she inquired, reaching for the lever again.

"Not really, but I'm afraid if you go for a fourth attempt, I will end up in Ripley's Believe it or Not, or the Guiness Book of World Records, and I've kind of gotten used to having my limbs in all the usual places." I mumbled as I shooed her away from the bed.

Luckily, the hospital staff interrupted at this point, and there was no further experimentation with trying to turn me into a human pretzel.

So just this last week,when I ended up in the ER yet again with my foot, Rose tried to help me move my wheelchair away from a too-close-to-my-broken-foot-to-be-opened-safely-door.

"I know how to do this," she bragged.  "Remember, I worked at a hospital as a candy striper."

What I remember is barely surviving the last time you touched the hospital equipment.

"Put the chair-lock down, back away, and nobody gets hurt," I warned her.

Especially not me. Next time I need to go to the ER, I think I'll call a cab.

Vive la Difference

Question:  What's the difference between twelve and seventeen?

Answer: Enough to drive you to drink!

Recently, Tim and I took our two nieces, twelve and seventeen, to Paris for a few days.  While he worked, I got to show the girls around one of my favorite cities...and lose my mind in the process.

Our second night there, we took them for an after dinner walk up the Champs Elysees to see the Arch de Triumph.  Big mistake.

Oh, we saw the Arch, all right.  We also saw lots of lights, people, noise, and, as a special surprise, a riot.  Yea.

First, we thought it was a parade.  "Hey, look at those people with lights, coming up the street, singing.  Cool."

Oh. Wait.  Those aren't lights, they're torches, and they aren't singing, they are chanting (probably "Death to the Ugly Americans" and "Look! There they are!  Let's Get them!!!")  Except for the fact that there was no hunky Hugh Jackman, bald Anne Hathaway, or annoying little kid with a British accent leading them, it was just like being in Les Miserables.  Well, except that we didn't have any barricades to hide behind, only Tim.

Fortunately?, Unfortunately?,  right behind them came the riot police, all dressed in black, marching with a precision that would make Inspector Javert sit down and weep with pride (except all I could think of was the witch's army from The Wizard of OZ --Oh we oh, yo oh! Oh we oh, yo oh!--and my mother wondered why I had a hard time sleeping as a child!)

Now at my age, the inclination is to move away from the impending disaster, and try to avoid unpleasant situations like, oh, I don't know...jail?  In a foreign country. Where you only speak enough of the language to get a table at a restaurant and buy a really cool pair of shoes.  At seventeen, the inclination is apparently to run toward the men in black with sticks and guns chasing desperate people wielding fire. With a camera. In a foreign country.  Where you don't speak the language.

Fortunately, we must have looked enough like (sing along with me, those of you who are Sesame Street  fans) "One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong..." because we were spared having to explain to my brother-in-law why his children had a prison record.

From that moment on, however, the seventeen-year-old was fascinated by the Champs Elysees. "Can we go there again? Have lunch there? Dinner? Walk? Shop? Try for another riot?"

The twelve-year-old could have cared less.  Champs Elysees??? Yawn.  Hey, but let's go back to the hotel and swim!!! Or how about having a bubble bath???  Oh, oh,  let's watch a movie!!!

Um, okay, cause these are all things we can't do at home, right?

No, no, really.  I can stream the movie Marie Antoinette from You Tube onto my ipod and we can huddle around the 4-inch screen and watch all 4,952 parts they've broken it into in just under 56 hours!  It'll be great!!!

And we can gorge ourselves on chocolate and macaroons, because it's only 11pm, so we'll only be up till around 5am with the sugar and caffeine buzz, but we weren't planning anything for tomorrow, right?  Except maybe a bubble bath and oh, I know, a swim!

Yeah.  Vive la difference.

Then and Now

It is sad and pathetic when your own parents can out-party you.

As Tim and I and my parents rang in the New Year, then toddled off to bed, exhausted, my father reminisced about how they used to spend the holiday, when he and my mother were our age.

Then:  Every year, my parents hosted the same six couples for dinner.  Per our Irish heritage, somewhere in the hour or so before they arrived, there was at least one really loud "discussion" about how much ice we needed for cocktails, whether the roast should be rare or well-done or how many different kinds of bread should be served with dinner.  All vitally important matters upon which the fate of the free world hung.

Now:  We don't eat red meat, we only eat whole grain bread, and the only one using ice is the dog, but she's a mean drunk, so we cut her off after one cocktail.

Then:  After a fairly raucous dinner, the midnight toast, and enough alcohol consumed to keep Charlie Sheen making YouTube videos until his kids are all old enough to collect social security, the real fun would start.  Charades. Boys against the girls.

The guys would stay in the TV room, while the girls retired to the living room to come up with their clues.  Dumb.  Dumb.  Dumb.  What were we girls thinking???  TV room???  Where the TV guide was???  Left to their own devices,  the guy's clues would have been easy to guess.  In those days, there were only three channels plus PBS, so how hard could it have been to guess all the sports shows?

But no, with access to information provided by the guide, they cheated their pants off.

"Oh ho!  You girls couldn't get Two Mules for Sister Sarah?   Starring Shirley MacLaine?  How could you not have come up with that one right away?    It's a classic.  And everyone knows Dora's Dunking Doughnuts featuring the always adorable Shirley Temple.  That one was a gift.   The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse is so a movie.  It stars Edward G. Robinson.  Gheesh.  You girls really should get out more."

We finally figured out how they were able to come up with a movie title besides Planet of the Apes, and began removing the TV guide earlier in the day when we were cleaning.  And that was the end of their vast movie knowledge.  Thank goodness they never tumbled to the fact that there was an entire set of encyclopedia in the room.  They might have actually won a game or two.

At first, we girls were coming up with book titles we were sure they hadn't read like Gone With the Wind, or The Old Man and the Sea, or musical groups like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, you know, obscure stuff.  After we thwarted their little crime ring however,  they had nowhere to turn but to the world of sports.  They began throwing at us the names of every athlete whose name exceeded eighteen letters, only one of which was a vowel.  In retaliation, we mined  my mother's knowledge of music and began throwing dead Russian composers at them.  That went over well.

As some of the arguments got fairly heated, it was a good thing that my parent's house was bordered on one side by woods and another by a cemetery.  Actually,  in retrospect, it was probably a miracle that on the first of the new year, we didn't have a crime scene unit scouring the woods and excavating a freshly dug grave.  It was also a miracle that the divorce rate among the couples didn't skyrocket.

Somewhere around 4am, after losing five or six games in a row, the sore losers, er I mean guys, would have sobered up enough to drive the girls home, then, we would all tumble into bed, hungover and exhausted.

Now:  Somewhere around 5pm, we began consuming our bodyweight in food, ending around 10pm when we threw ourselves in front of the TV and, realizing that with 800 channels, nothing good was on, flipped back and forth between American Pickers and the food network until 11;30.  At that point, we roused ourselves from our food-induced comas, wiped the sleep from our eyes, the drool from our chins and the crumbs from our sweatshirts and tried to stay awake until midnight.

No sooner had the ball dropped then we all dragged ourselves to the stairs, stumbled up them and tumbled into our beds, totally drained from our rigorous workout.  Fork to mouth.  Wipe mouth with napkin.  Repeat.  Paaaaartay!!! Woo-(four-letter word beginning with f)--hoo!

Yep.  That was a trip down memory lane I could have lived without.

Blinded By The Light

When I was young, my Aunt Margie would spend every Christmas with us, and make decorating the tree about as much fun as a root canal.

"No, no!  You can't hang Rudolph near Mickey."

Why?  Are they mortal enemies?  Can we put Dumbo next to Mickey, or do you think that'll start a stampede?

"Stop!  The blue bells go at the top, they're breakable."

Okay.  I'm fifteen, not five, and they are from K-Mart, not Swarovski.  If I promise not to ride my tricycle in the house, can we hang at least one bell under the six-foot mark?  Pleeeease, can we, huh?

"Wait.  String the lights from top to bottom, not side to side.  And start inside and work out.  You want to give the tree depth."

Um.  You are aware the tree is plastic right?  With metal "limbs"?  And since our lights are from, like, 1935, I'm pretty sure just having them in the same room constitutes a fire hazard, let alone  putting them inside the tree.  Besides, don't you think the tree kind of glows in the dark as it is?

With this scene played out Christmas after Christmas, it's no wonder I am scared for life.

So when Tim and I had our first Christmas, I convinced him to get a pre-lit tree, and then I hung glass bulbs on all the lowest branches.  Hehehe (and then I ran with scissors and went swimming 58 minutes after eating--what can I say, I was young and crazy!)

But last year, Tim talked me into getting a real tree.  He promised faithfully that he would do all the lights by himself.  I would not have to re-live my childhood nightmare.

After about two hours, our tree boasted several hundred lights, woven in, out, up, down and side to side.  It twinkled like a float in Disney's Electric Parade.  Proudly, Tim showed off his handiwork.

"You can't even see the wires, and I used ten boxes of lights," he bragged.

"Okay, you're hired,"  I told him.  "You get to do the lights every year from now on."

And then this year, disaster struck. 

After thirty-two years of dealing with a bad knee, Tim needs a replacement.  That means surgery, weeks of rehab, and lots of pain, both before and after the surgery.

But enough about Tim.  Let's talk real pain, my pain.  This year, I had to put up the lights.

I decided to do it while he was at work, so the fool wouldn't try to climb a ladder with a bad knee.  He called as I was plugging in the first strand, and in a moment of weakness (or insanity), I told him what I was about.

"I'll do it," he roared at me.  "You'll do it wrong.  Leave it till I get home tonight."

Gee, thanks Aunt Margie.  I've got to get off the phone now because I'm having a flashback and I can't hear you over the voices in my head.

So with that vote of confidence, and wishing I could start drinking at 9am on a Wednesday, I began to string the lights.

In and out, up and down, round and round I wrapped, unwrapped and rewrapped those stupid lights.  Morning turned to afternoon as I added strand after strand.  Up the ladder, down the ladder.  Stop and back up to make sure I didn't miss any spots.  My lights just had to live up to last year's display, or I would never hear the end of it.

Somewhere around 3:00, I was about halfway done and wondering how Tim was able to finish in two hours when it was taking me six, when another disaster struck.  I ran out of lights.

Dumbfounded, I stared at the tree.  How could I have used all the lights and not be done?  And what should I do now, spend another day unwinding and rewinding the lights?

Nope.  No way.  Not gonna happen.

I took a picture of the unfinished tree and sent it to Tim, then hopped in the car, drove to Target and bought the last nine boxes of lights they had.

In the meantime, Tim called, howling with laughter.  "I'm married to Clark Griswald from Christmas Vacation!"

"Do you think it's too bright?" I asked.

"Too bright?  When we fire that bad boy up, we're going to take down the whole Eastern seaboard.  Good thing we're having a generator put in.  We'll need it just to light the tree.  I think you can see it from space.  But on the bright side, Santa won't need Rudolph to find our house.  He might need sunglasses and SPF 60, but he sure can't miss it!  Hey, I'll bet your parents can see it from Florida.  Tell them to step outside and look north."

Great.  I married Shecky Sinclair.

The abuse continued when he came home, but the worst part was, the extra nine boxes were still not enough, and I had to spend most of Thursday tracking down the same kind of lights, which apparently no one but Target sells. (But I will save that for another blog)

I've made up my mind though.  Next year, we're going to a beach somewhere and decorate a palm tree.  How many lights could that take?

Waaaay Too Much Information

What would the holidays be without family...relaxing?...enjoyable?...stress free?  Oh, did I say that out loud?  I meant boring, sad and stressful . 

I love my family.  Really.  But based on last week and Christmas of last year, I am thinking of joining the witness relocation program.  I hear Antarctica is lovely this time of year.

You see, the problem is that my parents have thankfully enjoyed good health, my father in particular.  He prides himself on the fact that he has not needed a doctor since he was in the navy, so last Christmas, when tragedy struck, it was, well, tragic.

The day after Christmas, my dad was literally blown off his feet by an unexpected gust of wind and thrown to the ground.  Fortunately, he just ended up with a boo boo on his bottom and a pulled muscle, according to the ER doctor.  And our doctor five days later.  And the x-rays.  And Web MD.  And Marcus Welby.  And the entire cast of Gray'sAnatomy,  and The Practice.

But no matter what everyone told him, he was convinced  he might never walk again...and have to live with us instead of flying back to Florida with my mom.

For an entire week, we had to hear, in great and excruciating detail, about his boo boo.  We were treated to vivid descriptions of the size, location and severity of the bruise.  We lived through his brave attempts to walk five feet without the walker, cane, forklift, or tow-line.  We grinned and bore hearing about the indignity of sitting on a glorified whoopee cushion for meals.

We tried to distract him with the Food Network, Angry Birds and his granddaughter, but nothing captured his attention or imagination the way his boo boo did.  He just knew the doctors were all wrong and he had broken something.  He was sure that he had at least torn a ligament or severed a tendon.  It was the beginning of the end.  He would end up bedridden for the rest of his days, eating gruel and making macrame potholders.

So, to ease the pain (ours), we gave him drugs.  The doctor had prescribed pain pills and muscle relaxants, but the man who was never sick or injured a day in his life didn't want to take them.  We told him it was him or us, but those drugs were going to put someone out of their pain. 

This, of course, opened up a whole new set of issues.

While I am totally consumed with my dog's poops--size, frequency, form and texture--I really, really, really do not need to even know about my father's.

"Do you know that it says here this medication can cause constipation?" he demanded, waving the sheaf of papers at me that now come with every prescription.

"It also says it can cause you to cluck like a chicken or spontaneously break into the dance of the sugar plum fairy, but hey, let's look on the bright side, and maybe it will just make you feel better and your biggest worry will be finding a six-fingered glove for the new thumb that will sprout."

Every day, we got a potty update, along  with dire predictions of being unable to board the plane for home when the holiday ended.

"I'm fine flying back alone," my mother chirped, seeing a light at the end of her tunnel.

I believe our response was something along the lines of, "Look, we love dad to death, but he is getting on that plane if we have to buy an extra ticket and strap him to our back like a piece of carry-on luggage."

Fortunately for everyone involved, he got on the plane.

Last week, it was my mother's turn.  She had a doctor's appointment here, so she flew in the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

Monday morning, I drove her to the doctor, and waited for her.  After about a half hour, she came out, looked surreptitiously around the empty waiting room, and said, "I'll tell you what the doctor said later."

Thinking she meant in the privacy or the car or back at the house, I nodded in agreement.  No such luck.

As we entered the elevator, the crowded elevator, she launched into a blow-by-blow account of her visit...which would have been fine had we been at the eye doctor, but we had unfortunately been to a doctor for women's issues.

I am still waking up at night in a cold sweat.

At first, I tried to pretend I was just some poor, random stranger this woman had targeted to share intimate details with.  "Uh huh," I murmured half-heartedly as she used the V word for, like, the forty-seventh time in three minutes.  I wondered what the penalty was for pulling the fire alarm.  I even briefly contemplated actually setting myself on fire.  My mother, oblivious to the lack of response, chattered on.

"So you thought the doctor was nice?" I desperately tried to nudge the subject onto a path strewn with less personal information when I could no longer pretend I didn't know her.

"Oh, yes.  She said..."  And she was off and running again with things that had people bailing out of that elevator like it was a 70's disaster movie, and the director had just called "Action!".

And the best part of it was, it never ended.  Not in the lobby, not in the elevator down to the garage, not in the car, not at Toys R Us where we did some Christmas shopping.  I kept hearing about parts of my mother that I don't even want to know exist.  And there was no escape.

By the time she flew back to Florida, I was waxing nostalgic over my father's boo boo and ensuing poop issues.

Can't wait for Christmas this year.

I'm Late! I'm Late! I'm Late!

My parents came to visit this weekend on their way down to Florida, and it was like spending time with the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland.

First of all, this was the first time they were taking the auto train from here to Florida, and my father had been reading about it on the Amtrak website. I am sooo glad we taught him to surf the net. Next time we have a brilliant idea like that, we should just slam our hands in a door repeatedly. It would be less painful.

"It says you can check in as early as 11:30," he started in on Saturday about fifteen minutes after they arrived.

"But the train doesn't leave until 4...on Monday,". I pointed out. "Why do you want to sit around the station for several hours?"

"I want to make sure we get the 7pm seating for dinner," he informed me, "otherwise, we'll be stuck eating at either 5 or 9."

"So it's first come, first serve?"

"I don't know, but I want to be there early, so we get the 7pm seating for dinner."

Okay. Got it. You want to eat at 7.

"I really want to get there early," he broached the subject again about an hour later. "5pm is too early to eat and 9 is too late."

"What time do they board?". Tim tried a different tack.

"2pm, but I want to make sure we get the 7 o'clock dinner seating," my father stressed.

"So you reserve dinner when you check in?" Tim tried again to clarify.

"I don't know, but 5 is too early and 9 is too late for dinner," said the rainman, er, my father.

"That's a long time to sit in the station," sometimes Tim didn't have the sense God gave a turnip.

Stop. Roll over and play dead. Give up. I tried to communicate telepathically with Tim, but had no more success getting him to listen to me that way than I have when I actually speak out loud to him.

"I'd go around 1," he offered, "otherwise, it'll be a really long day."

"I don't know," my father seemed to waver for a moment, but recovered. "I'd hate to get there too late to get the 7 o'clock seating."

He actually managed to not bring up the subject for at least another hour or two and then only 86 or 87 times more an hour for the next two days.

Each time, we tried to lure him off topic by steering the conversation toward some other aspect of the journey.

"So, does arriving early affect the order in which your car comes off the train at the end?"

"It says it doesn't because of the way they load them on, but it does affect whether you get the 7pm seating."

Shoot me.

"Do you want to order a Netflix movie so you can watch it on your iPad? They have wi-fi on board, right?"

"If we get the 7pm seating, we won't have time for a movie afterwards, so we'll just watch a TV show. That's why I want to get there early."

Shoot me now.

"What do they serve for dinner anyway?"

"I don't know. I couldn't find that on the website, but it says they have three seatings: 5, 7, or 9."

Okay, one bullet for the both of us. We'll stand really, really close.

And while my father was obsessed with getting to the train early on Monday, my mother was just as obsessed with getting to church early on Sunday.

"What time is mass?" she questioned on Saturday night.

"All different times. Sleep as late as you want, and we'll go from there," I told her.

She was up at 7.

"What's the mass schedule?" she wanted to know. "What time do we have to leave? I don't want to be late."

We decided on 10:30 mass at a church less than five minutes away. Rose offered to drive, so at 10:10, my mother decided that Rose was late and she would wait outside for her.

"It's kind of breezy and chilly," I warned, "why don't we just watch out the window?"

"She might park the car and get out before we can get to the door, and then we'll be really late."

Okay, you and dad need to get either a hobby or a prescription for an incredibly powerful drug.

"It's 10:17," she fretted as we stood at the bottom of the driveway getting blown apart. "I don't want to be late."

"I know, but the church is less than five minute away," I tried to soothe her.

"It's 10:20, we're going to be late," she pronounced exactly three minutes later.

Maybe a hobby and a drug.

"It's 10:22. We'll never make it on time."

Hobby, drug and smash the watch.

Fortunately, Rose arrived at 10:25, just as I was getting ready to perform CPR...on myself because my blood pressure shot up sixty points every time Big Ben ticked off another second.

I am happy to say that my mother was not late...much.

I wish I could say the same for my father. Sadly, by the time he stopped for gas on the way to the train, he was late. They were stuck with the dreaded 5pm dinner slot.

"I told you so," he pouted over the phone. "I knew I should have been here early. Now, we'll have too much time to kill just sitting around after dinner."

As opposed to the time sitting around before? I wanted to, but I didn't say it.

Hobby, drug, gun, one bullet.

Love Is A Battlefield

This past weekend, our nephew got married, and like most weddings, family members gathered together to celebrate...and aggravate.

The first skirmish occurred during the rehearsal dinner when a relative of the bride came up to our happy little family group as we were sitting down to dinner.  Trying to make conversation, but inadvertently making enemies with every syllable he uttered, he asked one of Tim's sisters where she fit in the order of the siblings.

"I'm the oldest of the girls," she told him.

"Ahh, but you look like the youngest," he replied gallantly, but unfortunately within hearing of Rose who was across the table.

"Helloooo.  I'm sitting right here," Rose all but growled under her breath while the rest of us snickered.

Oblivious to the daggers Rose was shooting him with her eyes, he continued to dig himself deeper into the hole.

"So how old are your brothers?" he pressed.

"Tim and Tom are celebrating a milestone birthday this year,"  And she named a number I refuse to write because if I see a number that large associated with me in print, I may pass out.

"Really?!!?"  he had the nerve and misfortune to look surprised.  "That's all?  I am ten years older and I thought they were my age.  They are the youngest?"

Uh oh.  Tim's eyes narrowed, while Rose's crossed with the effort it took not to leap across the table and show him who was old.  We all sucked in a collective breath and tried to unobtrusively back away to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.

I don't know what he had done with the money his mother had given him for charm lessons, but I hoped he had invested wisely.  He was going to need a lot of cash to pay the medical bills.

"I don't even dye my hair," he boasted, smoothing back the thinning strands.

"That's what we all say,"  Rose countered with a saccharine sweet smile, fluffing her own blond locks, while Tim sniped, "Yeah.  And the sky is green and the grass is blue," out of the corner of his mouth to me, while I kicked him under the table, hard.

Still not feeling the waves of hostility surging toward him, he continued, "I am the best looking.  See," he pointed across the room, "my one brother is grey and the other is bald."

"Maybe you're adopted," Rose offered, batting her eyelashes at him while preparing to go in for the kill.

Meanwhile, I kicked Tim harder to prevent him from entering the fray.  He subsided with a glare and a muttered, "Mirror, mirror, on the wall..."

"No.  Really.  I, too am the oldest and the best looking," he beamed at Tim's oldest sister, who, knowing he was a dead man walking leaned back while Rose finished him off.

"Well, we can't all be George Clooney," she declared.  As he opened his mouth again, she cut him off.  "One more word and it's off with your head, undyed hair and all."

The foolish man actually laughed, but finally had the good sense to retreat before he was carried, bleeding off the field.

Of course, this exchange was mild compared to the one that took place the day of our rehearsal dinner, oh so many years ago.

It had been a crazy day, filled with a thousand last minute details that needed to be taken care of, but finally it was time to get dressed for dinner.

Since it was ninety-five degrees out, and we were expecting my cousin and her fiance from out of town at any minute, my mother had turned on all three of the air conditioners in the bedrooms.  The only problem was that in our hundred plus year old house, the electrical system could only handle two and a half air conditioners when all the planets lined up and the moon was in the seventh house.

We turned on a light, we blew a fuse.  Plugged in a curling iron, we blew a fuse.  Opened the fridge, we blew a fuse.  Lit a match, we blew a fuse.

And each time this happened, my father would stomp down to the cellar to do battle with the fuse box, cursing a blue streak.  As for the rest of us, this was not our fight, since A. my father was the only one who knew how to do this, and B.  he was the only one brave enough to actually go down there without a silver bullet, string of garlic, bucket of holy water, ghostbuster, exorcist, or team of green berets.

Our cellar made the Amityville Horror house look like a suite at the Ritz.  Even Stephen King could not imagine such a creepy place.

Somewhere around trip number 56 million, my father succumbed to battle fatigue, and lost it.  He charged back up the stairs from the cellar as though something was hot on his heels (which it may have been...an alligator, swamp creature, zombie, Rodent of Unusual Size), made it as far as the foyer and hollered up the stairs to my mother, "Turn off that (unprintable word) air conditioner in the guest room.  I'm not replacing another (string of unprintable words) fuse."

"I'm trying to keep the room cool for Walter (my cousin's fiance).  He won't want to change in a hot room."  My mother was a veteran of many such campaigns, and this did not phase her in the least.

At the end of his rope (which on a really good day is about three inches long), my father exploded like a bomb, "I don't give a s@#t what Walter wants!"

No sooner did the last word leave his mouth than we heard a knock at the screen door behind him, and there was Walter.  A direct hit!

Without missing a beat, my father turned, stuck out his hand, and said, "Oh.  Hello Walter," and then walked away.

Parents Say the Darndest Things

The other day, I called my parents from Bed, Bath and Beyond to ask what color wood, walnut or black, was the furniture at the condo.

For the last few years, they have had one lonely little collage frame on a rather large, otherwise blank wall, so I thought I'd pick up a variety of frames to fill the empty space.  Sort of like a giant collage.

"Don't get too many," my dad warned me.  "I don't think I have that many really good pictures of Cait from this year."

Umm.  Hellooooo.  I am aware that Cait, your only grandchild, otherwise known as the cutest, most perfect, smartest, best child of all time on the face of the earth is the main focus these days, but aren't you forgetting something?  Something like, gee, I don't know, your three children?

I mean, I know we can't even begin to compare with Cait, but maybe you could include us in at least one picture?  Just a group picture perhaps, where we're all standing around looking at Cait.  Maybe you could photoshop her into the center of daVinci's Last Supper painting and do it as a mural on the whole wall.  The rest of us can be in the background somewhere, or hey, we could be the wait staff.

I have come to accept that gradually, over the last three years, our old photos have been replaced with ones of Cait.  Sometimes, I have even been grateful for the Caitmania that has gripped my parents.

 I really don't need to be confronted with photos of me from the 80's looking like a linebacker in drag.  And who wants to be reminded of those unfortunate years before braces, contacts and clearasil had worked their magic?  And did we really need to have the ghosts of Christmases past photos keep haunting us year after year?  Wheee! Look at us frolicking in the snow with our tacky winter sweaters and smiles that make us look like we're trying to pass kidney stones!!

It was beyond time to say good-bye to those photos, but I didn't know that also meant we were being cut out of the family tree as though we had dutch elm disease.

Ahh, but this is just the most recent affront to our vanity.  The last attack was about a month ago.

Tim had had his back surgery and Pat had undergone surgery on her shoulder.  My dad and I were talking about how small their scars were and how good they looked considering the amount of work that had been done, when he said, "Well, it's not as if we have to worry about either one of them winning a beauty contest anyway at their ages."

Slam!!!  An unprovoked attack where he picked off the two of them with one shot.  The best part is, he wasn't even trying!

"I mean, not that they're ugly or old, or anything," he began to backpedal.  "I meant because of the scars.  Not that they're bad, they're not.  You can hardly notice them."

Wow.  Maybe we should just shoot those two poor humpbacked wildabeasts and put them out of their misery.  Maybe we could borrow the elephant man's cover-up and they could take turns wearing it when they go out in public.  You know, so they don't send poor little children running screaming into the night.

Knowing that no force on the planet would be able to keep me from cheerily repeating his comment to said wildabeasts, he kept trying make it better, but it was too late.  It was out there.  In the universe.  And I was texting even as we were speaking.  Hehehe.

Not to be outdone in the faux paux department, my mother has had a moment or two of her own.  The one that sticks out the most was last year when we were throwing Pat a birthday party.

We decided to gather up a bunch of old photos of her and run a slide show during the cocktail hour.  Since my mom had years ago divided up our childhood pictures (to each his/her own), we asked Paqt to bring the photos over to the house for us to pick what we wanted to use.

As we sat at the table, sorting through the pictures, my mom held up one from many years earlier and reminisced, "This was when you were thin."

As Tim and I fell howling on the floor, Pat huffed with indignation.  "Thanks.  When I was thin.  Before I became Tillie the elephant.  Hang on, P.T. Barnum is calling to ask which of the three rings I'd like to perform in tonight."

My nother tried to mount a defense, but at that point, anything she said just made it worse. 

"No, you were young then."  she protested.

"As opposed to the old, fat whale I am now?"  Pat sputtered.

Tim and I, of course came to her defense.  NOT!  And like any good, older sister, I still remind Pat of this any chance I get.  Hehehe.

Can't wait for the holidays to see what they come up with this year.

We Should Have Called Her Houdini

Our dog, Chloe, is crate trained...more or less.  Less than more.

Every night she goes contentedly into her crate (okay, we put it on the edge of the bed where she can't get a toehold, duck her head, tuck in her paws and try to shove her into it while she somehow manages to grow eight more legs and cover herself in grease.  Imagine trying to stuff a giant squid into a thimble and you're halfway there. 

"I was framed, I'm telling you.  I'm innocent,"  she protests vehemently.

Every day, her first order of business is to liberate every item in her crate.  "Run and be free," she tells Bedtime Bear and Mr. Winkles as she tosses them hither and yon around the bedroom.  "Quick, everyone over the wall!"

Oddly enough though, given her feelings regarding anyplace with walls and a door, she allows herself to be put in her playpen during the day with nary a peep (okay, so we have to leave treats, toys, the TV remote, phone, laptop and gold Am Ex card).  Which is why I was excited to find a travel version made of canvas and mesh.  No need to worry about our precious bundle of hair frying herself on a lamp wire or ingesting a couch, bed or other tempting and tasty hotel room paraphernalia that they have for the sole purpose of luring good little puppies down the wicked path of ruin.

Chloe was not quite as excited about it as I.

Where I saw a safe and familiar environment, she saw a network game show challenge.  It was like watching Win It In A Minute as she charged the sides, teeth, hair and paws flying about in a frenzy while she hurled all six pounds  of herself repeatedly at the sides until it resembled a No. 2 pencil instead of an octagon.

She proudly looked up at me from atop the mound of pee pads, dishes, toys and bed crammed into a six-inch space at one end as I surveyed the damage that hurricane Chloe had caused.

"Look what I did, mom,"  she panted excitedly.  "And for my next trick, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!"

Believing myself able to outsmart the dog, I wedged the playpen between the bed, nightstand, ottoman, four chairs, eight maids amilking, seven swans aswimming and a partridge in a pear tree.  Satisfied that would hold her, Tim and I went out to dinner.

Upon our return, I put my finger to my lips and shushed Tim as we silently crept back into the room and peered down into the playpen...to see nothing!

"Chloe, Chloeeeee," we called imagining masked marauders dog napping our precious baby and holding her for a ransom.  Quick, where was the number for the navy seals, the green berets or the A-Team?

Suddenly,we were hit from behind by a small, fuzzy projectile of joy.  "Aren't you proud of me?  See, I escaped!  Watching all those David Copperfield specials really paid off, huh?"

Incredulous, we examined the playpen, looking for the escape hatch.  It seemed improbable that she had scaled the four foot sides, and the zippered door was still firmly zippered shut, but upon closer inspection, we discovered that one of the velcro straps joining the sides had been opened.  What we still can't figure out is how, since it was closed on the outside of the playpen with a buckle!    Like any good magician though, she refuses to share her secrets.

Still thinking I was maybe at least as smart as she, I brought the playpen with me to visit my parents two weeks ago.  This time, I not only surrounded it with massive pieces of furniture, I sprayed all the velcro closures with a bitter apple dog deterrent.  Ha!  I win!

Yeah.  For about five minutes.

I should have just dunked the whole pen in bitter apple, because when she found she couldn't push the sides or bite the velcro, she simply latched her sharp little puppy teeth onto the mesh and pulled.  Faster than you can say origami, she had twisted the shape into something beyond all recognition containing about four inches of real estate.

"Help!  Help!"  she yipped, looking balefully at me as though this were all my fault (the mother always gets blamed)."Maybe I should have said  bibbidy bobbidy boo instead of abracadabra." 

Totally defeated, I was investigating other options like crying, calling Tim up and whining, calling the Super-Nanny and whining, or sending a note up the chimney for Mary Poppins to find, when my father declared he could contain Chloe.  Foolish, foolish man.

"We'll close the baby gate to the family room(which is at the back of the house)"  he rubbed his hands together like a mad scientist, "unfold the pen, brace it against a few chairs, the bookcase, velcro it to the floor and tie it off.  There.  That ought to hold her."  He stepped back, overly pleased with himself.

"I don't know..." I shook my head.  He clearly didn't understand who he was up against.

"She's a dog,"  he scorned.  "If she can figure out how to get out of there, I'll shake her paw tonight."

She met us at the front door when we returned, paw extended, head cocked to one side, superior little smile on her lips.  I just wish we had bet some money on it.

So now the challenge was on.  Chloe vs my father.  They each took it as a personal challenge to thwart the other.  It was kind of like watching Wile E Coyote trying to outsmart the Roadrunner.  You just knew that whatever he's ordered from Acme is going to blow up in his face.  I kept warning my dad that he was outgunned, but he was nothing if not determined.

In the end though, my father did win.  He only had to rearrange the family room furniture, add the kitchen chairs, table, stove and refrigerator as reinforcements, tie off the playpen with kitchen twine, put the lock on the baby gate, and bolt a few things down to the floor.  Chloe was finally safe, and trapped in her playpen.

Victory came at a price though,which was that while she couldn't get out of the family room, we couldn't get in.  No family room.  No TV.  His system made Fort Knox look like it was was secured with a flimsy latch and a battered "Beware of Dog" sign. 

Even though she was well and truly trapped, somehow, I think that putting him to so much trouble might have been Chloe's next trick all along.

A Trip to the Farm

Last week, I visited my family in Pennsylvania.  While I was there, my father ran over to my brother's house every day to take care of his four cats while my brother (Mike) was out of town on vacation.  At one point, one of the cats went "missing" outside and all I could think of is...here we go again.  How do we tell Mike this time?

Growing up, we'd always had a cat or two, but Mike wanted a bird (Hmm.  Cat, bird...Sylvester, Tweety...pretty much everyone but Mike could see where this was going.), so he begged until my parents gave in.

Sure enough, the cat took one look at the bird and said, "Aww, for me?  And it's not even my birthday."  And then proceeded to do her level best to make him a distant memory.

If we didn't hang the cage from the ceiling, it was commonplace to enter a room and find the cat on top of the cage, sticking her paws through the bars and calling, "Her birdie, birdie, birdie."

Summer was the best season for that poor little thing because Mike could hang the cage in a cool, shady corner of the front porch and the cat was more interested in terrorizing easier prey like Alvin, Theodore and Simon.  It worked well until the fourth of July, or the beginning of the end for the bird as we like to call it.

Every year, my dad and Mike would set off a few small fireworks on the street in front of our house.  In a one-in-a-million, couldn't repeat it if we tried moment, one of the "rockets" went astray and shot sideways, just missing my mom's head as she sat on the porch steps, but zooming through the cage before crashing and dying.

It's hard to say who was more upset by the incident, my mom, the bird, Mike or my dad, but at least two of them survived without any deep psychological scars.

Long story short, little Polly was sent to a better home where his life was not constantly in danger of being snuffed out by a cat or an exploding device.  Sadly, no one thought to add exterminator to the list and while my friend was at work one day...

With the resilience of youth, Mike moved on and a few years later adopted a stray cat.  On a good day, this poor old thing looked like Rocky after going sixteen rounds with Apollo Creed.  But he was sweet and loyal, and quite the guard dog as it turned out.

Nobody, but nobody got into our yard without Fred's approval.  We had to escort unwary guests from their cars where he had them trapped or have them wait for one of us across the street as he patrolled back and forth across our lawn, tail up, chest thrust out and emitting a low growl, daring them to try and get past him.

No matter how many times we tried to convince him otherwise though, he always viewed the mailman as an enemy agent, bent on carrying out an evil plot that only Fred could foil.  Day in, day out, this man took his life in his hands as he strove to fulfill his sworn duty, until one day when he had enough.

As reported by a neighbor, who gleefully watched the whole thing go down, the mailman brought along some protection in the form of his German shepard, stood across the street from Fred, who stuck out a claw and drew a line in the dirt, and ordered the dog to "sic 'em".

As the dog charged, Fred yawned, calmly inspected his cuticles, and when the behemoth got close enough, swiped his paw, nine-inch nails extended, across the dog's nose (or what used to be his nose).  The dog cringed, whined, tucked his tail between his legs and bolted back to the mailman who, panic-stricken, threw the mail up in the air and man and dog took off up the street never to be seen again (seriously, we had to collect our mail from the neighbor for the next year and a half).

Fred the brave finally accepted a challenge one day that he lost (I believe it was with a semi) and my dad took him to the vet for one final visit.

Ten or fifteen years later, at a family dinner, we were reminiscing about our childhood when the subject of family pets came up.  Naturally, we recounted the story of  Fred, concluding that it had been a sad day when we'd had to put him down.

"What do you mean?"  Mike interrupted, confusion written across his face.  "Dad took Fred to live on a farm in the country."

Yeah, where he frolics with the Easter Bunny and Santa brings him a big bag of catnip every Christmas.  Hellooo.  The only farm Fred went to is the big one in the sky.

"Mike,"  I chided him,  "you did not have a good track record with pets.  Fred, your bird..."

"Wait.  What happened to my bird?  Didn't we give him to a good home?"

Yeah.  On a farm.

Luckily, this time the cat returned and we didn't have to tell Mike that his cat had joined Fred and the bird on their farm.

I Am Officially Old

As we celebrated out 24th wedding anniversary last month, Tim held my hands, gazed deeply into my eyes and said, "Do you realize that your parents were only two years older than we are now when we got married?"

And they say romance is dead.

Thinking he couldn't possibly be right, I did some quick mental calculations, pulled out our wedding album, double checked our birth certificates, and registered at Ancestry.com.  I vividly remember my parents being old when we got married.  There was no way they could have been as young as we are now.

I remember them regularly falling asleep on the couch, staying home on Friday and Saturday nights to watch TV, and needing glasses and a 3000 watt bulb to read anything. They didn't "get" why everyone from David Cassidy to Don Johnson was cool and Frank Sinatra and Van Johnson weren't.  (Really?!  Frank actually had teenage groupies?  Aww.  C'mon.  You're making that up.)  And they absolutely, positively did not share our appreciation of Aerosmith, Meatloaf or anybody who recorded a song after 1963.

I mean, yes, maybe we occasionally might possibly rest our eyes for a few minutes while watching TV, but we don't ever fall asleep.  And perhaps we don't feel a pressing need to be out every weekend, especially if there is some kind of showdown on the Food Network or a really cool item shows up on Pawn Stars.  As for reading glasses?  Well, if they would stop "Micro"-ing everything these days, we'd be fine.  Just because the microchip caught on doesn't mean they have to print everything in minuscule font.

We are still young, hip and cool.  We not only know who Lady Gaga is, we have her on our ipods and at least one of us knows who Selina Gomez and Demi Lovato are.  We still go to concerts (Okay, so our last concert was Marvin Hamlish and the last movie we saw starred the Chipmunks, but that still counts.  Right?)

I actually had myself convinced that, despite hard evidence to the contrary, Tim was wrong, wrong, wrong.  And then I went back-to-school shopping with our niece last weekend.

Now, years ago when the older kids first discovered Abercrombie and Fitch, I gritted my teeth and went with them.  (Seriously?  You want how much for a shirt that looks like the one I threw in the rag bag last week?)  Ten minutes later, I stumbled out with a migraine and severely irritated nasal passages, swearing I would never, ever subject myself to that again.

But that didn't mean I was old.  Sure the music was loud and the staff all between the ages of 16 and 16 1/2.  Yes, the scent they pumped out with each beat of the music was nauseating, but that irritated lots of people, not just me.  Pretty much every parent felt the same, and they were not all old like my parents were when I was in school.

So this weekend, when we took my niece to the mall, and she wanted to go to Abercrombie Kids, my initial instinct was to recoil violently and make Tim go it alone.  Then I reminded myself that I am not old.  Besides, this was the young kids store, so surely it would be more user friendly for parents and young aunts and uncles.  So I grudgingly, but hopefully went in.

And that is when I discovered that I was old.  Very old.

Not only did they play the worst music I have ever in my life heard, they played it at ear-splitting volume through sixty-seven thousand speakers that were tucked into every nook, crevice and corner.  Standing next to a jet engine during take-off would be quieter. 

Did they not realize that while that may be acceptable in their teenager store where the kids don't want their parents helping select clothes, it was the parents who were doing the shopping here?  Seriously, who is going to give their eight-year old a credit card and say, "Go for it kid."?

I lasted as long as I could.  Honestly.  And it was the longest thirty seconds of  my life.  As I bolted for the door and the lovely, quiet heavy metal music playing throughout the mall, one of the sweet, young twelve-year-old sales clerks asked if she could help me find anything.  (Of course, she had to repeat the question several times, finally using a megaphone before I could hear her over the cacophony of sounds).

"Yes," I bellowed back, without stopping my mad dash for freedom, "my sense of hearing."

We went to GapKids and finished shopping.  Then, I picked up some brochures on retirement communities for Tim and myself.

A Little Bit of Knowledge

Two years ago, my dad wanted an iphone. Okay, so he was dragged kicking and screaming into the store after his phone died and they told him that they had stopped making that model at about the same time the mullet went out of style.

Now as far as him being technologically saavy enough to actually use the iphone?  Hmmm.  How can I put this delicately?  He was still balancing his checkbook with an abacus and using a dictionary from 1942 to look up the definition of "internet".

Needless to say, we were all a bit worried.  He surprised us though by actually becoming fairly proficient on the device.  And by that I mean he could make and receive calls and play Angry Birds.  Eventually, he could even get on the internet.  Sometimes.

Encouraged by his foray into the 21st century, we bought him a basic model ipad last year.

Suddenly, a whole new world opened up to him.  Did you know you can get books to read?  And there are weather apps and news app and you can watch the episodes of Desperate Housewives that you missed because you were watching the Food Network instead?

The biggest revelation though was that he could get email!  Of course, the man didn't actually have a valid email account, but hey, that was just a minor detail.

I believe my mom was more excited about the whole email thing because up until then, she had been the sole point of contact with the outside world.  I think the pressure of that awesome responsibility was starting to make her a bit cranky, as evidenced by small things she would occasionally let slip, like, for example, rapping my father over the head with rolled-up printouts while yelling, "Learn to print your own D**M emails!"  But maybe not.  I might have misread the clues.

Anyway, over the past year, a whole world opened up to my father.  He became king of the free apps, arbiter of all discussions, source of all knowledge and grand-slam champion of Angry Birds and Paper Toss.  He was Judge Judy, Einstein and Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings all rolled into one!

What time did my sister's flight land?  Free flight Tracker app.

What 52nd rerun of CSI (Miami, NY, LA, East Podunk, is there a difference?) was on next Tuesday opposite the encore presentation of Mama Mia?  Free TV Guide app, of course.

Who was the actress that played a hatcheck girl for three seconds of screen time in that 1934 movie starring those two actors that only ever made one movie  He was on it with the free IMDB app.

No topic was safe.  He was faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap to conclusions with a single swipe of his finger.  He was free app man!

Now, my mother was smacking us on the head for getting him hooked on a device that had essentially  become another appendage.  "He's a couch potato," she complained.  "I can't get him to go anywhere  now."  Yeah.  And before the ipad, he was just begging to go to the symphony with you or shoe shopping.

Naturally, being the caring, concerned, dutiful children we are, after listening to her for the past year, we decided there was only one thing to do in order to help her out...upgrade my dad to the new ipad and give his old one to her!

Now, we did have to pry it out of his hands long enough to transfer all of his free apps over to the new one.  And it was  touch and go for most of the operation whether he would survive with his sanity intact or end up in Bedlam.

"Are you sure all the apps will transfer?" he asked for the 97th time on his 4,363rd trip into the room.

"Are you certain  all my photos will be there?" he leaned over my shoulder for the 8 millionth time.

"Will I still have all my books?" he questioned, as he wore a trench in the floor pacing back and forth.

"Yes, yes, and yes.  Geez, were you this much of a wreck with mom when I was being born?"

"Huh?  What?" His fingers curled and uncurled subconsciously with the effort it took not to rip his beloved ipad from me and carry it off to the safety of his room.  "Um.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Sure.  You're more important to me than an ipad,"  he mumbled, never taking his eyes off the screen."

Riiiight.

Finally though, the transfer was complete, and the man who, just a short time earlier hadn't known that safari wasn't just a trip in Africa was now teaching my mother how to navigate "app world".

"Sometimes she messes things up on it," he confided in me, "but don't worry.  I get her all straightened out because I know all about how the ipad works."

And my mother?  Oh yeah.  She's also a couch potato. Hehehe.

Sleepless in Florida

Last Friday, we took our niece on her first "sleep-over" vacation to Florida. She slept. I didn't.

Friday night, feeling a bit homesick, she decided she really, really needed to crawl into bed with Tim and myself. No problem. It was one of those extra large, California King-sized beds. There are mansions with less square footage than this thing. In fact, you need to send out a search party to see if anyone else is even in the bed with you. Which is why I'm still trying to figure out how one little seven year old could make it feel like I was trying to sleep on a postage stamp.

About two hours after we fell asleep, I had that dream. You know, the one where you are falling? Except it wasn't a dream. Her highness had somehow maneuvered me right to the edge of the mattress where I was precariously hanging on for dear life.

Rappelling the twelve feet down to the floor (oh, did I mention that the actual double-thick mattress is on top of a platform bed that you need a pole-vault and a good, strong tailwind to get up on?) I debated leaving her there and taking the middle position, but I was afraid she would continue to roll in that direction and I really didn't want to have to explain to her parents why their child looked like flat Stanley when I returned her.

I very gingerly leaned over and nudged her toward the middle. She hunkered down and snored louder. So much for plan A. I gently put one hand under her shoulder and one under her legs and rolled her over. She rolled right back. And took my pillow. There went plan B. On to plan C: I outweighed her by about six tons, and was going to have to use that to my advantage.

Clambering up onto the one-inch mattress border that she had so generously left for me, all the while wishing I had taken mountain climbing in PE instead of pistol, I simultaneously rolled her and slid in and over as far as I could. Victory! I could now lay claim to a full six inches of mattress real estate. I was ecstatic.

The only downside was that I had to stay on my back and brace myself against the bed frame so that she couldn't reclaim her space. Oh yeah. That was comfortable. Suddenly, the webbed lounge chairs out at the pool were beginning to look like a little bit of heaven.

By some miracle though, I was finally able to fall asleep again only to be woken up an hour or so later by a bad dream--hers. Yep. Nothing gets your heart pounding faster than being pulled out of a sound sleep by someone yelling in your ear, "I didn't do it!" while thrashing around like a really big, really annoyed fish in a very small net. If they ever need a back-up for the paddles on the crash cart at the local ER, I've got just the thing.

After we soothed her and got our heart rates down to two hundred beats per minute, I settled down again to find I had lost half of the space I had fought so valiantly for. Oh well. Sheer exhaustion allowed me to drift off to sleep (you have to pick your battles, I guess), but like clockwork, I awoke from yet a third dream (this one was mine. Score: me=2, my niece=1). In this one, I was Gretel and the witch had successfully coaxed me into climbing in the oven to check if it was on.

I awoke to find a fifty pound plus human heating pad pressed up against my back. Goody. Just what I needed. Something to ward off the cold, Florida night. Oh, and I was once again reduced to hanging off the edge of "our" side.

Resolving myself to the situation up top, I picked myself up out of the puddle of sweat I was lying in and slid down to give the bottom of the bed a try. I might have to deal with feet in my face, but the ceiling fan was positioned directly above the bottom of the bed, so the trade-off was worth it. Or so I thought.

Turns out those ceiling fans actually work. Who knew? Now, instead of roasting to death, I was freezing to death, and guess who was rolled up in the sheet, snug as a bug in a rug?

I decided I wasn't meant to sleep. Oh well, there was always Saturday night. Except that her loose tooth fell out and she was so excited by the prospect of the tooth fairy visiting that she didn't want to go to sleep on Saturday.

Somehow, Tim managed to sucker me into tooth fairy duty by claiming he had nothing smaller than a twenty. If I had known that would be the price of just one nights sleep, I would have let him wear the dress and wings and added another twenty of my own (actually, if there really had been a dress and wings, I would have been willing to chip in two twenties.).

10 pm rolled around, but there was no sign of the sandman. 11 pm came and went. Not one grain of sand in our lovely little niece's eyes, but the sandman sure had knocked Tim over the head with one of his larger bags. At this point, I was considering either spiking a Shirley Temple with Valium for our niece, or a large coffee with No-Doze for me.

By 11:30, she no longer seemed quite so lovely, and I was contemplating just handing her a fifty and telling her to put the tooth under her pillow when she got home and the fairy would match it.

Finally, when I checked somewhere near midnight, her head was down. Moving with a stealth that would put 007 to shame, I crept over to where she lay sleeping, reaching ever so cautiously for her pillow and...her head popped up like a jack-in-the-box.

"What're you doing?" she demanded suspiciously.

"Er. Um. Jut checking to make sure you put the tooth under your pillow. Wouldn't want the tooth fairy to have to pass by. And speaking of the tooth fairy, you know she won't come as long as you are awake." Smooth. Nice save. I patted myself on the back as I crept away.

At 12:30, I slipped back again, sure that she just had to be asleep. Personally, at that point, I could have slept hanging on the side of the bed. Heck, I could have slept dangling on a single thread, suspended over shark infested waters.

Once more, I reached for her pillow, and, just as my hand closed around the tooth...her eyes popped open. "What're you doing?" she demanded again.

Uh oh. I had used up my one and only excuse and my sleep deprived brain wasn't coming up with anything else.

"Er. Um. Uh. Hmm. Something, something, just checking," I mumbled desperately. "Gotta go."

Propping my eyelids open and swearing to myself that the next time, Time was so wearing the dress and wings, I didn't care what it cost, I waited another half hour.

This time, I whispered her name first. Then, I bumped the bed. Finally, I jiggled her pillow. She was, at last, asleep. Fighting not to collapse in a heap next to her, tooth in hand, I made the exchange and stumbled off to catch a few winks myself.

The next morning, she was up and at 'em, calling her parents to tell them that the tooth fairy had found her even in Florida. "But," I overheard her say, "it was the strangest thing. Annie was just obsessed with my pillow!"

Lost (Literally)

No matter where we are in the world, Tim has a pretty good sense of direction. He knew the driver in Paris was not heading the right way, even though he couldn't communicate it to him without his translator.

In Tim's book, there is nothing worse than getting lost or not being able to find a place. It's a total guy thing. But sometimes it can't be avoided.

Years ago, we took a trip with my mother, sister, brother and two family friends to England, Scotland and Ireland. Due to the mountain of luggage we toted around with us, we needed to rent two cars for the duration.

Tim drove car one while I navigated with the map (this was way before nav systems), and my mom followed in car two. The rest of our happy little band alternated between the two cars.

Everything went well enough in England where they believe in putting up fairly accurate signage and have paved roads and maps whose lines actually represent the roads. And then we got to Ireland.

On our way out of Dublin to the west coast, Tim got quite ill, so I had to drive. With much trepidation, I handed over the map to my mother, sister, Pat, and our friend Mary Ann, and told them they would have to lead the way. I would have done better putting on a blindfold and throwing darts at an atlas. Those three could get lost in a broom closet with a flashlight and mapquest. But I had no choice.

True to form, two hours later of careening around hairpin turns and dodging suicidal sheep, we ended up dead-ended at a lake. This would not have been nearly so distressing had we been planning to visit the lake, or even the county, but since we were actually aiming for a major city on the opposite coast, it was not a good situation.

Tim woke up, and I believe his first words were, "Where in God's name are we?" And the really tragic part was, nobody knew for sure.

"A lake," did not seem to be the answer he was looking for, especially when it was not accompanied by the actual name of the lake.

"What county are we in?" he rasped out. Again, his question was met with blank looks and helpless shrugs.

"Are we still in Ireland?" Okay, now he was just grasping for straws. After all, Ireland is an island and we hadn't crossed any water...well major waterways...I didn't think. I don't know, I was too busy trying to keep from plunging over the edge of a cliff every time another car wanted to pass on the wrong side of the narrow cow-pass they laughingly refer to as two-lane roads in that country.

Eventually, we found a native who was able to assure us that: A. we were still in Ireland (so there!) , and B. we were still on the east coast.

After pouring over the map for a good half hour, we were able to figure out where they went wrong, if not why, and plot a course back to civilization (my mother, trying to put a bright face on things by saying, "At least we got to see a place most tourists don't see. Aren't we lucky?" was not helping. It was like the captain of the Titanic trying to put a bright face on the whole sinking thing by pointing out that at least there was plenty of ice for cocktail hour.).

Tim managed to keep it together and climbed back behind the wheel to finish off our journey, which was uneventful until near the end.

The hotel we had booked into in Cork had no actual address that we could find, only a description that it was "on the hillside overlooking the river" (Gotta love the Irish--ask a simple yes or no question of us and you get a forty-five minute dissertation with the most detailed, colorful descriptions you will ever hear in your life. Ask for a little help with directions and you get the vaguest, most rambling explanation that leaves you more confused than when you started.).

But we were young and still had a shred of hope and optimism, so we figured we would find it.

The only problem was, as we pulled into Cork, I looked behind us and there was no blue car following our red one. My mother, Pat and Mary Ann had vanished!

Tim, being gallant, pulled over and waited for them to appear. After all, he reasoned, there was only one main road and we were on it. Foolish boy. Applying reason to my family. Tsk, tsk.

Black cars whizzed past, red cars whizzed past, even blue cars whizzed past, but not the one we were looking for.

Feeling a sense of duty, Tim turned the car around and backtracked to find them, against the strong urging of Mike and myself to "Save ourselves" and not end up dead-ended at a cave or a giant pile of cow-dung which is where they were sure to be.

Much later, after a fruitless search (duh. Tim couldn't have seen that coming?) we convinced him to head to the hotel where we could check in and perhaps marshall some troops for a fresh search party later.

As we drove up the hill and prepared to make a right turn into the hotel, we encountered the blue car chugging down the hill and making a left into the hotel. Turns out, they had started chatting and followed the wrong car! Fortunately for them, the luck of the Irish was with them and they didn't end up back at the lake (which was a real possibility).

Poor Tim. And that was the last group trip he went on. Wonder why?

The Itsy-Bitsy Spider...

When I was a child, my mother had an old, used car that I believe they paid my parents to take off the lot. Mint-green and white and the size of the QEII, I'm sure it was the cat's meow in it's heyday, which I'm guessing was around 1936. By the time we got it, the green was no longer so mint, and it more closely resembled the Titanic--after eighty years at the bottom of the ocean.

I'll never forget the day that we were driving up the street, and a nice, big Daddy Long Legs spider decided to pop up out of the ripped upholstery on top of the front seat "bench" and say hello. Suddenly, the half-acre back seat dwindled to the size of a postage stamp as he began his inexorable march towards me.

My mother's claim that "you're so much bigger that he's more afraid of you than you are of him" did not impress me. I might have been bigger, but he had six more legs and a definite gleam in his eye that said, "Mmm. Lunch!" I can still remember bolting from the car with speed that would make a cheetah sit up and take notice.

Despite my mother's most fervent assurances that she had killed it and he was the last of his kind on the planet, I was constantly on "spider watch" every time we got in the car, sure that he was just biding his time and as soon as my mother turned her back, he was going to resurface and get me. And so began my lifelong hate/hate relationship with bugs.

Yesterday, I was once again terrorized by a multitude of the hateful little creatures.

I picked up my six-year-old nephew from school, then swung by his house to get the extra car seat Tom had left on his porch for when I picked up my niece from school later that day. Plopping it down on the back seat, I noticed a few little ants cavorting merrily on its seat. Brushing them off, I got in the car and started down the street only to hear my nephew say, "Hey Annie, there's more ants."

Thinking it was a mere one or two, I breezily told him to just "Squish 'em."

Two minutes later, he spotted more. And more. And more. It was like the entire ant population of the east coast had taken up residency in this car seat.

Flashing back to my own childhood, I knew I couldn't put my niece into this ant farm disguised as a car seat. She is even more of a drama queen than I am, and I don't want to have to read on her facebook page in a few years about how her aunt had traumatized her and made it impossible for her to ever lead a normal life. She should blame her mother like the rest of us!

My first thought was a gas station with a really strong vacuum to suck the evil little creatures out into oblivion, but since it was in the middle of a thunder and lightening storm, I decided against holding a metal tube in my hands. I opted instead to swing by the house and 409 them to death.

My nephew and I took the offending piece of car furniture up onto the porch and found a whole colony of the nasty little buggers had taken up residence under the seat cover. I sprayed and he squished any escapees that tried to head for my front door, which he informed me was okay to do since these were "wild ants" and therefore untrainable unlike the ones in the household ant farm he hoped to get. Yeah. Whatever kid. Just keep stomping.

After coating my back seat with the spray cleaner, and still sure that the next time I get alone I'll be swarmed, we headed off to get his sister.

I probably should have bribed him with some chocolate to keep his mouth shut about the whole incident, but I didn't think about it (probably because I couldn't get past the little voice in my head that was shrieking, "Ewww. Bugs in the car, bugs in the car!") and so he regaled my niece all the way home with the gory details.

And as if that wasn't enough bugs for one day, one of the critters must have escaped and sent out some kind of signal that I hadn't been sufficiently tortured because later that evening when we were down in the basement doing an arts and crafts project, we found ourselves under attack again. But this time, the bug world called out the big guns.

As I ran water in the utility sink, suddenly, from up out of the drain came the T-rex of spiders. Seriously, this thing had its own zip code.

Trying to play it cool, I managed to trap it under a plastic container (I was not going to squish it and have to clean ten gallons of spider-blood off my walls) so that Tim could deal with it when he got home (he he he). Of course, this drew the curiosity of the kids who eagerly rushed over to see the spider...and then even more eagerly rushed for the nearest exit (although my niece did seem to consider, for the briefest of seconds, throwing a saddle on the behemoth and trying to ride it).

Within minutes of reaching the safety of the TV room upstairs, during which time I had to repeatedly lie to the kids and tell them that the spider couldn't possibly get out from under the container, come up the stairs and murder us all out of revenge, Tim arrived home.

He barely had time to shut the door behind him before he was inundated with pleas to "Kill the spider!" Scoffing at us for being afraid of a little ole' bug, he went off to do his duty, and I followed close behind to make sure he didn't chicken out when he saw the size of his opponent. The other bravehearts stayed abovestairs.

Reaching into the sink, he pulled up the edge of the container, and I believe his exact words were, "Oh my God!" as he jumped back and the monster scuttled back down the drain.

Tim ran the hot water and pronounced him dead, but in my heart of hearts, I know he just probably cracked open a new bottle of shampoo, fluffed himself and is lying in wait for the next time I enter the basement alone and unarmed.

Bugs. I hate 'em.

From Bad to Worse

I begged Tim. I pleaded. I scolded, nagged and even berated him. Nothing worked. He still continued to tromp in through the back door onto my carpet without taking his dirty, wet sneakers off. So I locked the back door.

It was Sunday and there were two guys outside power-washing the house, porches and deck. Tim, myself and our twenty-three year old nephew, George, were trying to facilitate things by moving the porch furniture off and then back on to the porch. The off part was easy. George and I had done most of it earlier that morning. We were just waiting for it to dry out enough to move the stuff back on.

Tim, on the other hand, was mucking about with the grill, the shed, the utility area and God only knows what else. He was in looking for a cleaner. Back out. In for paper towels. Back out. In for a garbage bag. Soda. Phone. Snack. In. Out. In. Out. Not to mention the fact that he kept leaving the back door open. A blatant invitation for every bug in a three mile radius to sashay in and take a stab at me! So I finally, firmly closed, then locked the back door.

Soon enough, the porch was dry and the three of us headed out the front door. Tim. Myself. George...who pulled the front door shut behind him.

Tim whirled around. "You did not just shut that door."

"Uh oh. Yeah."

The three of us looked at each other, knowing it had automatically locked.

"Tell me we can get in the back door," Tim demanded, turning on me.

"We could if you had listened to me just once and taken off your sneakers," I defended myself. George wisely backed away and looked for a nice, cozy hole to crawl into.

Deep breaths.

"Does our next door neighbor still have a key?" Tim asked hopefully.

"She did until recently when she was having work done in her house and gave it back to me so that nobody could get into our house," I answered, daring Tim with a look to point out the irony.

"How about the guy across the street?" (our neighbor and friend)

"Nope. But, hey, wasn't he with some special unit in the military?" I enquired as inspiration struck. "Maybe he knows how to pick a lock like McGyver!"

Tim threw me a withering glance.

Hey! Like this is my fault, Mr. I-can't-be-bothered-to-take-off-my-sneakers?

More deep breaths.

"What time is it?" he tried another tack. George and I both held up bare wrists. "Where are all our cell phones?" he asked, already knowing the answer. We all looked at the closed, locked door.

"We'll use the neighbor's phone and call Rose,"he decided.

"Duh. She's getting her hair done or else she'd be here locked out right alongside us." Okay, so maybe I shouldn't have pushed it.

He actually couldn't breathe any deeper at this point, so he settled for gritting his teeth.

"Fine. Then we'll call a cab, and I'll go to the salon and get the keys from her. Now, who has their wallet with them?"

Was he kidding?? We were moving patio furniture around the yard, had no watches or cell phones, but he thought we had our wallets tucked away in our sweats? Now that was reaching.

"Does Tom have a key?" (last resort since he lives a good thirty minutes away)

"Uh, maybe. He did, but I'm not sure if his key is from before or after we changed the lock."

George was now looking for a major mound of dirt to pull in on himself after he got to the bottom of his hole.

"Do you think you could possibly go next door and try calling either Rose or Tom to see if they can come and let us in?"

I was going to suggest that he do it, but I decided it would be nice if the neighbors didn't witness a murder/suicide. I dutifully trotted next door.

"Of course you can use my phone. You should give me a key in case this happens again," she said. I didn't bother to point out that I had given her a key, but she had given it back!!!"

Since it is one of the few numbers I know by heart, I dialed Rose...and got her voicemail. I tried again...and got her voicemail again. I tried Tom at home...and got his voicemail. I couldn't remember his cell, so I went out and yelled across the fence for Tim...who chose not to hear me. I yelled louder. He was still playing deaf. So I had to go down the steps, over and up the steps to get Tom's number in person.

Miracle of miracles, he actually answered.

"Honey," I began without preamble, "do you have a key to our house?"

"What?"

"Do you have a key to our house?"

"A key? What do you mean?"


I wanted to beat him to death. "This is not a hard question...yes or no. Do...you...have...a...key...to...our...house?!" I enunciated each word with excruciating clarity.

"Uh, I think so," he didn't sound too convincing. "Why do you want to know if I have a key to our house?"

"Our house?" I repeated blankly.

"Yes, our house," he confirmed.

"Not your house. our house," I was getting exasperated again.

"Annie?" finally the light dawned.

"Yes."

"Oh, I'm outside. I thought you were Beth calling to ask me if I had a key!"

"Why would...never mind. Do you or do you not have a key to my house?"

"I guess. Hey, by the way, Rose just called here complaining that you people aren't answering your house phone or cell phones."

Counting to ten, I answered, "Yes. I know. That's because all the phones are LOCKED IN THE HOUSE!!! Now, do have a key or not?"

"Oh yeah. I have a key to your house. I'll be right up (yeah, in half an hour)...How did you get locked out?"

"It's a long story..."

I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means

Last week at dinner, I was telling my parents how Tim had been chased by a pig out in Arizona. Without missing a beat, my mother enquired (and she was completely serious), "Why was a cop chasing Tim?"

After we picked Rose up from the floor where she was rolling around laughing, and I stopped choking on my salad, we asked my mother why she thought I meant a cop. Her brother was a cop, and nobody in our family has ever called a police officer a pig (maybe not so much because of my uncle, but more because we are not extras on an episode of Dragnet).

"Well," she offered, "I didn't think you actually meant a real pig!"

In her defense, she comes by it honestly. Her mother was forever coming up with some doozies. The Pocono mountains were the Pinocchio mountains and her nephew was training at Pepsi-cola in Florida.

And her mother before her, as family legend has it, once told a waiter that she didn't want the sorbet, or intermezzo course, he was trying to serve her before her entree. Except that she yelled it to him across a crowded restaurant and she didn't exactly say intermezzo course...she called it intercourse.

Fortunately, Tim cannot say much about my family's propensity to misuse words, since it runs in his family too.

For many years, my mother was the director of a choral group called The Interludes. They were a fun, and let's say, um, colorful group of people that Tim decided should more aptly be named The Quaaludes. Sadly, he neglected to tell his mother that was not their actual name, and one day she innocently asked my mom how her "Quaaludes" were. Even more sadly for Tim, he was within striking distance of both moms at the time.

Not to be outdone, his brother Tom had the misfortune to refer to something as "friggin" in their mother's presence. When she rebuked him for his foul language, he adopted his best wide-eyed, innocent look and explained that, contrary to being a bad word, it came from the Latin meaning "to hit".

Congratulating himself on his narrow escape from a lecture, he went on his merry way only to be confronted by his mom about a month later.

Seems she had let the word fly at work to refer to a jammed copier that needed "hitting". Her boss, shocked, asked her if she knew what the word meant, and then had to delicately explain to her that it was slang for another word that began with the letter F.

This probably wouldn't have been too bad if not for the fact that she worked in a church rectory and her boss was a priest.

And the cycle continues...Just a few weeks ago, Rose and I were on the phone one morning and she asked what Tim and I were doing. Kidding around, I told her that we had just had "breckie".

"What?!!?" she shrieked, "Too much information!"

"Well, you asked," I replied, perplexed as to why she found my shorthand for breakfast so offensive.

"Yes, but I did not need to know that." I could all but hear her shudder.

Turns out, she actually thought I had told her we had had a "quickie".

You can't escape your genes.

It Had Better Be Broken

Friday afternoon we drove to Pennsylvania to spend the weekend with my family. My dad limped to the door on an ankle that looked like he was smuggling a grapefruit under the skin, explaining that he had fallen down the attic stairs a few hours earlier. It took some doing, but we convinced him to go to the emergency room to have it checked out. Our mistake.



Upon arrival, we were told that there would be a two hour wait to see the doctor. Oh goody. Two hours in a waiting room filled with people who were hacking, sneezing, wheezing, whining, moaning and complaining. I wish we were that lucky.



Finding four seats together, we all sat down, and Tim, my mother and I all pulled out our ipods, intending to turn on, tune in and drop out. My father found a three day old newspaper and checked out the obits, looking to see how many of them had expired in the waiting room of the ER.



My sister, who was at a local fair, began texting me, so I turned over my ipod to my father, thinking a few games of Parking Lot would take his mind off his ankle, which he was still insisting was not broken. Being the anally logical person he is, I figured a game that consisted of moving cars around to free the one yellow car in the back would be right up his alley. Not even close.



"Why can't you move the cars sideways?" he grumbled, repeatedly trying to slide a limo across the screen.



Um, cause Henry Ford foolishly put wheels on cars that only had the ability to go forward and backward?



"This one is impossible," he growled, somewhere around move 287, still trying to push the offending cars sideways. Then, "I don't even know why we're here. It's only a sprain."



I knew we would never hear the end of it if it wasn't really broken.



On the other side of me was my mother, who was watching an old Judy Garland movie on her itouch, and periodically making comments like, "Boy, this place is crowded" and "Honestly, those people over there are soooo noisy", at the top of her lungs. I had to keep explaining that she was the one with the earbuds, and the rest of us could hear her just fine if she spoke in her normal "indoor voice". It really wasn't necessary to compete with the ambulance siren to see who could be louder.



Then there were the two girls across the room who had obviously mistaken this for the waiting room at the American Idol tryouts, and were serenading everyone with renditions of currents hits that made William Hueng sound like Placido Domingo. Even Paula would have been telling them to give it up.



Into this mix, about every fifteen minutes or so, a nurse would come into the waiting room with a clipboard and call out a name to which no one would respond. A beat. Call the name again. Another beat. Try once more. Finally, someone would say, "I think they already took that person back." A shrug. Last look around, as though the person they were paging might be playing hard to get and hiding under a sofa cushion, then they would amble off until it was time to come back in and call the next name to which nobody would respond. Way to stay on top of things, guys. Hey, if you can't find the elderly man with chest pain, you might want to check the maternity wing.



An hour or so into the fun and games, a nurse came in and gave my father a bright pink badge to wear, explaining that it was so that they could "track" his location. Yeah. Is that the same system you've been using to keep track of all the other patients? Because if it is, I gotta tell you it isn't working so well. Ever think of switching to Lojac?



Finally though, someone came out and called my father's name. Still grumbling and insisting that he didn't need to be at the hospital for a sprained ankle, he disappeared into the mysterious "back room".



Shortly thereafter, my sister arrived (she didn't want us to have all the fun) and managed to get into the back with my mom to see what was going on. At this point, we were all pretty much in agreement that if the ankle wasn't really broken, we would be subjected to such excruciatingly painful hours of , "I told you so", that it would make the last few look like a walk in the park. Hospitals and my dad do not make a good combo.



While I waited for them to come out, Tim continued his own personal ritual of the last two hours. He trekked back and forth between the emergency entrance where he could use his cell phone, the vending machines where he could buy me chocolate cupcakes and cookies and himself soda, and the bathroom where he could recycle the soda, using the chair next to me as a pit stop to get updated on the ankle.



It so happened that one of his brief visits coincided with Pat and my mother coming out with the news that the ankle was indeed broken, but that it was a clean break, easily set and easily mended. Learning that we would be spared endless haranguing by my father for taking him to the ER for nothing, we whopped and high-fived each other... much to the shock of the other people in the room. Apparently, it is not a normal reaction for people to be overjoyed when they learn a loved one has broken an appendage. Go figure.



Three hours after leaving, we pulled back into the driveway at the house with one broken ankle, one drained ipod battery, one drained cellphone battery and one newly-filled prescription for Vicodin which we were all eyeing with longing.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

I was talking to my sister the other day while she was in Florida visiting my parents. Since the weather was not conducive to sitting at the pool or going to the beach, they had instead gone to the mall. God help them all.

For my mother and I, shopping is necessary for survival. Like the hunter/gatherers of old, we can spend hours ferreting out a good sale, pouncing on the perfect shirt to go with a certain skirt or pair of pants. The poor thing doesn't stand a chance.

We dig through massive racks of end of season clothing for that one bargain that will be the envy of shoppers everywhere, then head off to the dressing rooms clutching our prizes all marked: fifty percent off the lowest ticket price!

The smell of new shoe leather makes us dizzy with delight and an expensive bowl hiding on a clearance table sends us into spasms of joy. It is all we can do to contain ourselves when we spot a dollar store or outlet mall.

My sister shares some of these traits...as long as she is shopping for jeans, T-shirts or outdoor type clothing. Take her into Ann Taylor or Sephora and her eyes glaze over faster than you can say "free makeover". Within seconds, she is searching for the nearest exit and/or easy chair and googling "Foot Locker" on her iphone. Our best shopping trip together was when she came with me to a great little boutique and they offered her a glass of wine to kill the pain of watching me try on dresses.

Conversely, when she gets into an L.L. Bean or Hudson Trail Outfitters, you need a crowbar to get her out. Her goal there is to try on one of everything and fill as many shopping bags as she can carry and then order the rest online. Searching for the ultimate sneaker or work shoe with her can suck hours out of your life and make you want to run screaming into the night.

My father, on the other hand, views any shopping expedition as more or less a seek-and-destroy military operation.

He interrogates you on what stores you expect to try and visit while at the mall so he can park the car in the optimal spot for a quick invasion and an even quicker getaway. Before leaving the car, there is the mandatory synchronization of watches so that you don't go over your extimated time and cut into lunch hour.Then, using the mall directory which he keeps in the car for planning purposes, he maps out the plan of attack highlighting the quickest route from store A to store B.

Once in the mall, he forges ahead, calling out directions such as, "Left at Williams-Sonoma and then a right at Starbucks!" like a general leading the invasion on Normandy. Although he has factored in some time for a few side trips to stores that were not previously run through the appropriate channels, the quickest way to drive him crazy is to tell him you just want to browse. It just throws the whole battle plan off.

Now this is not to say that he doesn't try to be gracious about things. He amiably agrees to wait outside any store you want to go into and he will even follow you right through the larger department stores. Sometimes you can even get him to browse through the men's section on his own or stop by a gadget store to check out the latest guy toys...for about three minutes. But the whole time you are shopping, you are aware that you are on the clock. And the longer you take, the less like General Paton he becomes and the more like the Rain Man.

"It's getting near lunchtime," he'll say. "It's almost noon." "If we don't eat lunch soon, we'll be running into dinnertime and then we won't be hungry for dinner." "Maybe we should just eat a small lunch." "We could eat at the food court, but a restaurant would be better." "Maybe we should leave the mall and go to that place down the road before it gets too crowded." "Did you get what you needed?" "We can come back, if you want, but right now, it's getting near lunchtime."

And so he marshals the troops and marches everyone back to the car.

Yeah. God help them all.