12/23/98
Hohoho

I was at Walgreen's a couple of weeks ago, looking at their book aisle. A woman had her baby, about two years old or so, in the seat of her basket. The kid reached for something on one of the shelves.

"Don't fuck with nothin'," the woman said threateningly.

I am twenty-six years old and I have never heard my mother say fuck. I certainly never heard her say it in a negative way, directed at me.

I bet that can really mess a kid up.




The other night I washed a couple of loads of clothes. The deal at my house is that I wash and Sonya folds. I despise folding clothes. Sonya hates to wash. It works out well.

So I brought the clothes upstairs and put them in the living room floor. Sonya was playing Apeiron. Roxy immediately hopped into the basket full of warm clothes and went to sleep.

About thirty minutes later I asked Sonya, "are you going to fold those clothes?"

"Nope," she said quickly.

I shrugged, got down on the floor, shooed the dog out of the basket and folded the clothes. Then I put them away. No big deal.

Later, we were laying in bed before we went to sleep.

"Did you see if my white bra made it out of the dryer?" Sonya asked me.

"Yeah," I told her, "I put it in your underwear drawer."

"Why?"

"'Cause I folded the clothes and put them away."

Sonya looked at me in the dark. "When did you fold the clothes?"

"Right after you said you wouldn't fold them."

She started giggling then. "Just because I said I wasn't going to fold them didn't mean you had to."

"I know," I explained, "I just didn't want...you know...wrinkled clothes."

The laughter closed over us then, a solid brick of hilarity dropped over both of our heads. We laughed like loons. Whenever it threatened to subside, I'd say "you said no, so I folded them" and the laughter would reset itself.

I can't for the life of me explain why that was so funny. I guess it's an old married couple thing.




Sonya's opinion on the woman who had octuplets:

"She had a litter."

I just love my wife.




The weather certainly has turned to shit, hasn't it? I was really lovin' the warm humid stuff, too. Now, here in Memphis, it is ass-bitingly cold. There's probably about an inch of assorted frozen crap on the ground right now.

That is enough to effectively paralyze the city.

I'm sure there's some yankees out in the audience who would laugh at our snow-phobia. My Uncle Buck (yes, I have an Uncle Buck) certainly does. He lives outside of Chicago and gets a kick out of the way we moan about the cold and shy away from snow-driving. He just wears a hip Shaft-style leather jacket and drives his big-ass Caddie down the road like he owns it. Uncle Buck also has "TRUE LOVE" tattooed across his knuckles.

Uncle Buck is an intensely cool guy.




Oh yeah...Merry Christmas. The holidays should be entertaining, at least. With Jack (the brother mentioned earlier) back in town a shouting match - or out and out brawl - is certainly possible. I will walk quietly away from the whole mess, if need be. That's a battle I don't have to fight anymore.

Last year my nephew broke my niece's wrist. I'm hoping we don't top that, but god knows it's possible. The family, after all, is just two generations removed from sharecroppin' poor white trash. We've done well for ourselves, but we do have some throwbacks to the old ways. As a rule, my family couldn't go on Jerry Springer.

But there are a few members who wouldn't feel out of place there.




James and Jen gave Sonya and I some nice stuff, not the least of which is a pair of X-Files action figures they gave me. They're cool. Scully has a cell phone and Mulder has a flash light. Nifty, huh?

"Merry Christmas Charlie Brown!"





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