To Chew or Not to Chew?

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Tonight’s dilemma: I just brushed my teeth. Do I really need to chew the end of this carrot to make it look authentic?

Then it occurred to me—I successfully convinced all three children that a human-sized rabbit was going to steal into their bedrooms and fill their baskets with chocolate bunnies and Cadbury eggs. Do I really need to worry about authenticity?

In spite of it all, the kids will wake up tomorrow to three stuffed baskets and a carrot stump with teeth marks, while I secretly hope they’re no more clever than I give them credit for.

At least, that’s my hope. But then I remember Tyler glaring at the Easter Bunny during today’s egg hunt, scoffing, “That’s no Easter Bunny. That’s just a guy in a costume.”

With any luck, forensic odontologists don’t make house calls on Easter.

This entry was posted in 6 Six.

Pocketful of Gold(fish)

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When it comes to luck, there are two categories of people in this world: those who discover a $20 bill in their pocket that they didn’t know they had, and those who turn every pocket they own inside out muttering, “I just know I put my last goddamned twenty dollars in ONE of these pockets…”

I happen to fall under category #2.

There are a million things I’ve lost over the course of a lifetime, and if I sit down and think about it, I would tar and feather myself for a joyous reunion with my losses over the past six months alone. There’s the diamond that fell out of my engagement ring—an irreplaceable symbol of my union with the man I love throughout a decade of blissful matrimony. (The truth? Two thousand dollars for a shiny piece of carbon the size of my pinky nail. It’s enough to make me cry harder than I did at the altar.) Of course, there’s Anna’s toy pony, which she has been pestering/ harassing/ borderline stalking me about around the clock over the past 86.5 days since its disappearance. Then there’s every homework assignment my Hartford students have handed in over the past ten years. (At least, I think I lost them. That’s what they keep telling their parents.) I would part the Red Sea with nothing but a really long shovel if I could find the knob to my computer speaker, which I now flick on and off with a pair of tweezers from Eva’s Doc McStuffin’s medical kit. And last, there’s that missing piece to the Noah’s Ark puzzle from the Simsbury Public Library. Who knew the children’s librarian would actually count all 299 pieces and charge me for the whole damn thing?

And so, with the onset of spring, I decided to give the house a thorough spring cleaning (i.e., ransacking) in search of these items. Among my discoveries was a crayon melted into the heater, an expired 10% off coupon to Bob’s, and a sippy cup full of milk so spoiled I had to run it through the garbage disposal.

Just once, I’d like to reach into my pocket and find that $20 bill, rather than a wad of used tissue or a handful of goldfish crackers I picked off the floor of my car.

Until then, the search continues. Even if I lose my mind in the process.

Catcalls

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When it comes to cat shopping, my method is pretty simple: let the cat pick you.

And that’s just how it happened when we visited “Mary’s Kitty Korner” in Granby this weekend. The nanosecond my boy sat down, this black and white vixen was on him like a hooker in a cheap hotel, paws kneading, tail swishing, as she purred herself a home right there in his lap. And all in that moment, the decision was rendered. It was this cat’s lucky day, along with her twin, although fluffier and even flirtier, sister.

And so, picking out the cats was easy. Figuring out what to call them was the hard part.

The shelter had pre-assigned them a pair of unfortunate names already: Sissy and Prissy. Tyler, who is resistant to any iota of change, quickly adopted their names right along with them.

“Here, Sissy! Here, Prissy!” he coaxed them from their carriers after we’d endured a meowing cacophony all the way home.

“Hey Tyler, that reminds me,” I said. “What do you want to call them?”

“They already have names,” he shrugged as the cats slinked out of their carriers, carefully sniffing every square inch of the house and ramming themselves against every corner.

“Yeah, about that. Of all the qualities I can’t stand in a person, ‘sissy’ and ‘prissy’ are at the top of the list, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend the next fifteen years calling them that.” (Well, I might have said that last part in my head. Mostly because I didn’t want to explain where the cats would be fifteen years from now.)

“I don’t want to,” Tyler simply said.

“The thing is, when you’re sixteen, I’m betting you’re not going to want to tell your friends from the football team that you have two cats named ‘Sissy’ and ‘Prissy.’ You see, I’m planning for your future here. Let’s call them something else.”

“Like what?” he asked, voice full of reservation.

“How about Bessie and Clarabell?” I pitched. “Get it? They’re black and white, so we should name them after cows. Remember, Clarabell is the cow in the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. What do you think?”

One right after the other, the cats discovered the dogs, gated up and whimpering like they would implode right there in the mudroom, staring at them like they were furry little hors d’oeuvres. The cats merged in a simultaneous hiss and ran for cover. Before he had the chance to answer my question, Tyler leapt up and bolted after them.

“Come back, Sissy! Here, Prissy!”

He was at it for the rest of the day, peering under beds and bureaus, inspecting dark closets with a flashlight. “Come on out, Sissy! Come out, Prissy!”

My boy is stubborn. He wasn’t going to budge. My only choice was to compromise.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you Cecelia C. Cat and Priscilla B. Puss (aka, Sissy and Prissy).

As for Tyler’s future football teammates, Simsbury Trojans 2032, be gentle. At least our cats aren’t named after condoms.

Mad Skillz

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With the closing of each trimester comes a phenomenon as inevitable as the sun rising in the East and setting in the West: middle-school kids suddenly begin caring about their grades.

“Miss! What’s my grade? What’s my grade, Miss? Miss! What can I do to bring up my grade? Miss! You got extra credit? Miss! Miss! Miiiiiissssss!” I hear their voices ringing in my head until I lay my head on the pillow each night, when their faces become wavy and blend into one giant, drooling, grade-grubbing 132-headed monster.

Dominique is one such thirteen-year-old grade-grubbing beast.

“Miss! Am I passing math?” she inquired, sweetly, dimples out, eyelashes batting all over creation.

“Dominique, you come in late every day, you write “IDK” on every warm-up, you text message through every assignment, and yesterday you were practicing ‘stop, drop and roll’ all through our test on integers. Do YOU think you’re passing math?”

“Yes,” she said decidedly. “I think I deserve at least a C.”

I had to laugh out loud. And when I say “laugh out loud,” I don’t mean it in the “LOL” sense, like when flippant teenagers (and my mom, who has this annoying habit of hijacking fads and colloquialisms from the younger generation) text it in response to everything that’s ever said without even cracking a smile. I mean I actually burst into laughter, so abruptly I thought a button somewhere would pop.

“Dominique, a ‘C’ implies ‘average.’ If you think your performance this trimester represents the norm, we’re in worse trouble than I thought we were.”

“But I do all my work!” she protested. “I can tell you how to do everything we’ve done in class for the past two months!”

I don’t make a habit of making deals with devils, but this one seemed like a fun exception.

“I’m going to make a deal with you,” I said. “If you can show me everything we’ve been doing for the past two DAYS, I’ll bump your grade to a C-.”

“Let’s go,” she said. She grabbed a pencil (Well, not really. She had to borrow one from me first.) and she was off.

And then something inexplicable happened. Right there before my eyes, Dominique began computing common denominators, adding numerators, converting improper fractions to mixed numbers and reducing final answers to their simplest forms. Step by step she forged ahead, asking for no assistance in between.

It couldn’t be right. An invisible nymph had to be sitting on her shoulder whispering all the answers into her ear.

“But why did you add instead of subtract?” I quizzed. “Didn’t you see the minus sign?”

“Because it’s a double negative, which makes a positive,” she explained. “And when both fractions are positive, you add.”

“And what if one was positive and the other negative?” I persisted.

“Then you’d subtract,” she explained. “And you’d take the sign of the fraction with the highest absolute value.”

It was mind-boggling. Through all the talking, the giggling, the gum-snapping and the texting, Dominique had somehow absorbed every word I’d said, like some freak of osmosis.

“Dominique!” I cried. “You’ve got some mad skillz with a Z!”

She looked at me, sighed, and rolled her eyes in disgust. “Miss,” she demanded, “please don’t EVER say that again.”

Somewhere out there, my mom is in her Abercrombie and Fitch jeggings, downloading Maroon 5 into her iPod and snickering, “Gotta luv it. LOL!”

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