Six

"Mom, can I play with the Old McDonald game?" 

"Huh? What Old McDonald game? We don't have an Old McDonald game..." 

"The one in the closet."

"The one in the closet? What closet?....Oh, No. Oh, No."

The horror dawns. Tunnel vision. Sounds echo.  Face flushed. Sweating.  Everything in  slow motion.  I try to get up from my chair and run to the basement, but I can’t seem to move or breathe. Air...too....thick....feet...won't...move.....Finbar cries in the distance. I see her through a fish eye lens as she drawls, "The closet....in...the ...basement....next to the ....Barbie...slippers...." 

Yes, you've guessed it right, the hiding place I thought was so smart wasn’t so terribly smart at all. The storage room door was wide open, the light was on, the giant bag from Toys-R-Us wide open and its contents spread out on the floor. And there, in all its glory, what was to be the main event this Christmas: The Fisher Price Farm. 

So much for doing my Christmas shopping early.  

It finally snowed!  We awoke yesterday morning to big, fluffy golden era of Hollywood flakes, the kind that make you want to curl up with some cocoa and listen to Bing Crosby.  Or go for a run, which is what I did.

About fifteen minutes in, my friendly, swirling, feathery weather turned on me.  A vicious wind came up and the snow felt like a spray of bullets.  Did I mention I have just gotten over the death flu?  I didn’t think I would make it home alive.  I wept at the thought of never again seeing my loved ones and started fantasizing that I would have to eat someone.  Maybe that old lady who just sprinted past.  It was the longest four hundred yards of my life.

Now I’m trying to decide if the extra eight bucks in shipping is worth doing the Christmas shopping online, or if I should brave the elements and go to Sears.  Yes, I’m doing the shopping over, refer to the last letter when my clever daughter found all the loot I had already bought.  But we had a long talk about the difference between presents from mom and dad and presents from Santa, and how if she’s naughty she’ll get coal in her stocking.  Has anyone ever actually done that? Telling kids something horrible will happen if they’re naughty…it reminds me of when we lived in Texas and we went to see The Man Without a Face, or as I like to call it, The Man Who Was Ted Danson.  This woman sitting next to us brought a little girl about five.  First of all, it was a late show.  Secondly, why would anyone bring a kid to that movie anyway?  The kid was acting squirrelly and the lady finally said to her in a  loud stage whisper, “If you don’t stop doing that, she (points to ME) is gonna smack you!” The kid spent the whole movie staring at me, terrified to move.  I should’ve smacked her mom.

I better get moving. 

Eight

I am optimistic that the plague has left our house at long last.  I have my fingers crossed, because I said that last week and spent the next three days yakking up everything I've eaten since third grade and praying to die.  I even feared I might be preggers, but I did the test and I’m not. (Doing the test:  stuffing face into the spice rack. If I wretch, it’s a yes, if I think, “Cumin, yummy” it’s a no.) 

Meg kept saying things like, “Mommy, someday when you’re better, can we go skating?” adding guilt to the mix.  Finbar took advantage of the situation by sneaking a tub of fudge frosting out of the fridge and eating the whole thing.  His ensuing diarrhea didn’t make me feel any better.

Mike is in San Diego, he ran his first marathon yesterday. I talked to him last night, and while I’m enormously proud of him, a small but mean part of me wanted to hear that his kneecaps blew off at mile two.  They didn’t, and now that I’m better, I’m glad.

It’s 10:30 pm, and I can still hear Meg banging around upstairs.  Last time I looked in her room, her jammies were in a heap on the floor and she was wearing Finny’s Winnie-the-Pooh robe and rain hat.  Oh, here she comes—now she’s got on a purple blouse and a Barbie dress wrapped around her head.  Back in five.

OK. So anyway, Mom and Dad left town and I’m once again in charge of their crazy dog.  I went over there this afternoon to walk him, opened the back door and he bowled me over and took off down the street.  I had the kids with me so I couldn’t exactly embark on a comprehensive man-hunt for him. I guess that would be dog-hunt, anyway. Instead, I leafed through a magazine and muttered expletives.  Luckily the dumb mutt came back on his own, all frozen and whiny.

I took the kids to the Y last night.  I accidentally lost my grip on my almost constantly in place vise-like grip on Finny, (not easy since he is completely round, not an angle to be found on his entire person,) and he took off like a bat out of hell.  A wild chase followed.  He veered into the women’s restroom and dove under a stall door…..that was occupied.  Can you imagine this poor woman minding her own business in the loo, when this wild  two year old comes rocketing under her door?  She was hemming and hawing and “Well I never!”-ing and he was giggling like a hyena. I tried to coax him out with vending machine candy.  I finally had to reach under and yank hard on whatever I could get my hands on.  Yikes.

Nine 

Just read an e-mail from a gal pal of mine, lamenting February and all the evil that comes with it.  So true.  There’s something about February that just makes the world seem gross.  So gross that to brighten it, you may do something rash like chop off all your hair. 

“Oh, it feels soo great!! It feels ten pounds lighter! Stack it way up in back, like Meg’s!” (It doesn’t occur to you that Meg is four, and very often, what looks good on a four year old doesn’t look so good on her mother.) 

It also doesn’t occur to you, as you watch the giant hunks of hair swirling to the floor, that now your face has to carry the whole load.  Wow. That’s an awful lot of wrinkles, idn’t it? Can’t even call those ‘fine lines’ any more.  When did I get Rosacea?  I had no idea I had Austin Powers’ teeth. 

For two solid days, I startled every time I went past a window.  Mike still can’t look directly at me.  The night I cut it, he came home and with a fixed smile, staring at the wall just above my head, mumbled something about Sandy Duncan being under-rated.

He then proceeded to laugh way too hard at ‘Friends’; you know that laugh that you do to cover up that you’re laughing at something totally inappropriate? One winter I was taking a walk around the lake with a girlfriend of mine and this older gentleman came jogging past.  He wiped out on the ice right in front of us and had a huge ice chunk stuck to his head. My friend was very kind and helpful, ran over to him and tried to help him up and whatnot.  I couldn’t stop laughing.  Trying to stop was like putting a lid on a pot of boiling water; it just made the laughs come out harder.  It sounded like I was barking. I had to pretend I was laughing at the ducks, even though they had all gone south. Then, to protect my friend, I pretended I didn’t know her at all and just kept walking.  Walking and laughing.

But see, I didn’t just cut my hair, in my February induced madness I also gave the OK to putting huge blonde streaks in it.  Like if Sandy Duncan were into snowboarding. I have to start wearing cargo pants and listening to Limp Bizkit. 

That’s a band, right?

Ten

From:   McCollow

To:       Jgpunk 

I viewed what can only be called the longest, most boring Oscar telecast in the history of mankind at my gal pal Liz's house this year. She was nice enough and adventurous enough to have people over to watch, and to provide us with a fabulous spread and a full bar while we made nasty comments about Charlize Theron's nipples. Or, more accurately, while I made the nasty comments, and got absolute bupkis from what I can only describe as a very tough crowd. 

For me, the Academy Awards is a spectator sport: a night to gleefully sling cheap shots at gorgeous people who wouldn't have me in their homes, and who hopefully chose something unfortunate to wear on the most important night of their lives. So there I was, happily pointing out that Faye Dunaway's hideous frock at least detracted attention from her wrinkly face, Keanu Reeves as usual looking like he'd been hit with a stun gun, or wondering out loud whether or not that kid from the Sixth Sense was on heroin yet, when I looked up and came face to face with a silent room full of shocked looking suburbanites. 

“Who’s with me?”  I said weakly.

 Long Pause.

"You're very cynical," pointed out a round woman in a purple sweater.

And  that pretty much set the tone for the entire evening.  I couldn’t wait to go home so I could work out my love/hate relationship with Hollywood in private.

I'm not cynical.

 © Katie McCollow, 2004 • katie.mccollow@mac.com