Sunday, January 30, 2005

Monkeys

My Dad’s birthday was January 25. He is 59 years old. I’d say that’s pretty good! Anyway, his having the flu last weekend caused us to put off the celebrating until today. We had fun because of darts, chickens, an accordion, a Turkish spike fiddle, salad, the guy who urinated his way out of an avalanche, and stories from my parents about the olden times.

When a guy gets to be a certain age, he assumes he knows at least the important things that ever happened to his parents. So you can imagine my surprise when my Mom laid this one on us. Out of no place, she started talking about when she spent the night with one of her friends when she was a little girl. She said it was pretty gross because the house smelled kind of funny and everything – including her bedding – seemed a little bit damp. And, oh yes, there were a lot of monkeys living there, un-caged. Maybe that’s the kind of childhood experience that keeps her from touching all but certain very limited parts of my dog, Albert. She’ll gladly touch him on the top and back of the head. In other words, she’ll touch him where his tongue can’t reach. My Mom’s a little freaked out by moisture that comes out of animals. I’m freaked out by gravy. I guess that’s why we’re related.

Then I found out that my Dad was chased by a bumblebee around a baseball park ten years after he’d been stung six times in the eyelid by the same bumblebee. To me, that’s incredible! But he insists it’s true, and I’ve never known my Dad to make stuff up. Getting stung in the eyelid caused him to holler, “Son of a bitch!” His mother made him eat a soap, and my Dad has cursed seldom since.

The mother who made him eat a soap turned out to be my grandma. Once, when I was spending the week with her and my grandpa in West Virginia (my grandpa went to work in a pants factory there), Elvis died. That night I wanted to sleep in my socks, but wasn’t allowed on account of “We don’t sleep in our socks here.” I got mad and took off all my clothes. That’s the last time I appeared naked in front of people who aren’t me (and even when it’s just me I try to quickly put on my briefs).

I remember when I was a kid. My parents weren’t much for grounding me, and I can’t recall getting slugged or anything. The only discipline I can remember was my Dad saying, “Damnit!” He cursed so infrequently that all he had to do was say that word and I knew that I’d just about had it. My Mom, on the other hand, likes using curse words. Her problem is that she thinks it’s funny to cuss, and she’s one to laugh at her own jokes. Once I did something to really make her mad and she called me “Shit Head”. If my Dad had called me that, I would’ve started crying. But when my Mom called me it we both started laughing.

Oh! There was a guy last week that was driving along when an avalanche landed on his car. Fortunately for the guy, he had beers in tow. He started drinking the beers while he was stuck there, and then he thought to roll down his window enough to urinate on the avalanche. Sixty beers later, he managed to urinate the avalanche away. Authorities found him walking around the side of the road in a drunken stupor. This has been a story about how a man used his urine to defeat Mother Nature.

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