Surely You Jest

As a glutton, I sometimes ask my stomach to do more than it’s comfortable doing.

As I embark on some misadventure in eating, it’s usually as excited about the prospect as the taste buds. But it has to find a place to put everything. The taste buds don’t. Nor do I. So it’s is often ready to call it quits long before we are.

Consequently, when my taste buds and I keep partying, the stomach may find itself in the position of having to find somewhere to put those last few cookies even though it announced several cookies back that it had reached capacity.

Later, I may have the audacity to chastise it for aching. No question, the stomach’s job can be a thankless one.

When I am more composed, I try to make it up to my stomach by putting its wishes first.

The other day I found myself in King just moments away from the Dairi-O. The Dairi-O serves up one mighty fine hot dog. Some people consider Pulliam’s the home of the best-tasting hot dog in this area. I wouldn’t dream of saying otherwise.

But I was not moments away from Pulliam’s. I was moments away from the Dairi-O. So it was a Dairi-O hot dog that I had on my mind.

“Stomach,” I said, “how would you like to have a delicious Dairi-O hot dog?”

“Not hungry,” said my stomach.

Oh, no!

“Are you sure?” I asked just to be sure.

I could feel my stomach checking to make sure.

“I’m sure,” it said.

Masking my disappointment – who knew when I would be this close to the Dairi-O again? – I said, “OK,” and set a course south for Winston-Salem.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot at work. I parked and turned off the ignition. As I was pulling out the key, my stomach rumbled.

“Surely you jest,” I said.

“No, no. I really am hungry,” it said.

Next time I’m not going to ask.

An Artist Called Sparkle Girl

If you wondered how many hairs I had on the top of my head, you could start counting during a commercial break of your favorite show and be done before it came back on.

I say this so you will know what Doobins meant when he said, “Kim, your hair is broken” as he rubbed the top of my head the other day.

“Yes, it is,” I said.

“Are you going to fix it?” he asked.

“I would if I could.”

I enjoy the fresh ways that Doobins and Sparkle Girl have of looking at the world.

After a light burned out in their bathroom, it was noticeably dim in there for the couple of days that it took me to remember to bring over a new 60-watt bulb. After I put it in, Sparkle Girl stuck her head in the living room and commented on how bright it was in there.

“It’s just like the mall,” she said.

Another day, we were making a gift for her mother. The project called for Super Glue, which Sparkle Girl had never used. I had heard somewhere that it had been invented to glue together the skin of soldiers wounded in battle. So I threw that in when I was explaining that Super Glue was less forgiving than Elmer’s.

In retrospect, I may not have been showing the best judgment in bringing up war wounds to a 7-year-old. At the time, I just saw it as a handy fact to bolster my point.

Later, knowing that my head is chock full of “facts” that even the most cursory research reveals as untrue, I did a little cursory research and found that, once again, I had it wrong.

On that particular day, though, I was operating in good – if delusional - faith.

After we were done with the present, Sparkle Girl returned to the subject of the origins of Super Glue. She was under the impression that all people who are wounded die. So she didn’t understand why anyone would bother gluing wounded people’s skin together.

In fact, I said, most wounded soldiers don’t die. What else happens to them? she asked. I listed possibilities that included losing an arm.

Without missing a beat, she said, if there was a party and someone asked you to get the punch bowl and carry it outside, it would be really hard to do if you only had one arm.

I could have spent two days and not come up with a better example of something that would be hard to do with one arm.

Her gift for coming up with apt images stems from her gifts as an artist. (At least that’s what I think.) Sometimes, we sit and draw pictures at the same time. It’s a given that hers will be far superior to mine.

Mostly, we leave that fact unspoken. One day, though, I said, “Yours is a lot better than mine.”

“That’s OK, Kim,” she said.

Bill and the Flip-Flops

At coffee the other Saturday, we got onto the subject of slobs.

Julie, who wants to run His Dogness’s Reading Club if it ever becomes a reality, suggested that I recount the tale of “Bill and the Flip-Flops.”

I did.

In case you haven’t heard it, here it is.

Many years ago, in the days before Bill married Susan and they had four children, he lived, for a time, in the house that I now share with His Dogness. You would be hard-pressed to find a more generous, likable and funny fellow than Bill. I mention this not only because it’s true but also to establish that Bill had many excellent points that more than offset the nuisance of him being a slob.

Fairness also requires me to mention that he claims that he is no longer a slob. After he moved to Arizona, he would call up and tell me how neat he had become. He waited in vain for my words of congratulation.

When he lived at my house, Bill exhibited traits that have irked neater members of households since the invention of pottery. Because he would have been content to leave dirty dishes in the sink until the cabinets contained not a single clean saucer and because I tired of only a marginal return on nagging, I ended up washing his dishes as well as mine more often than not. What really annoyed me, though, was expecting me to praise him whenever he did take care of the dishes.

In addition to the classics, he also had idiosyncrasies that I have not heard reported elsewhere. One related to the mail. When Bill came home, he would open his mail and sort through it as he strolled to the kitchen for a snack. If he was done with a particular envelope or sheet of paper, he would simply let it go, and it would flutter to the floor.

When I expressed annoyed dismay at his expectation that I pick up his trash, he expressed genuine surprise. He didn’t expect me to pick it up. As far as I could tell, from his point of view, the paper ceased to exist after he was done looking at it.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that, given the wholly unsatisfactory nagging-to-results ratio, my mental health was better served by minimizing complaining and keeping the public areas of the house clean on my own. I told him that he was on his own when it came to his room.

And so it had been for some time when, one cold Saturday morning in February, he emerged from his room and announced that he was going to buy some flip-flops. Did I want to come?

“Bill, it’s February. Why on earth would you want to buy flip-flops?” I said.

“There’s all this crunchy stuff on my floor,” he said.

I mentioned that either the broom or the vacuum would take care of his crunchy stuff quite nicely.

What?

I no longer remember whether he was able to find flip-flops in February.

The Gold Girl Diner

Sparkle Girl and Doobins were strapped in their seats in the back of my car.

We had just pulled out of my driveway when Bill Whitfield, who lives just above me, came along.

I stopped and rolled down the windows so that he could say hello to the kids. Bill was on Doobins’ side of the car. If Doobins weren’t so cantankerous, he could easily build a substantial college fund by modeling, and, during the visit, Bill said, “That boy has the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen on a child.”

I didn’t want Sparkle Girl to feel slighted. So, after we pulled away, I said, “You have really beautiful eyes, too, sweetie.”

I need not have worried.

“I know,” she said. “He just couldn’t see them very well from where he was.”

At the age of 7, Sparkle Girl still has a wonderful innocence about her prettiness.

Sparkle Girl’s favorite restaurant is the Silver Diner. She likes all that chrome. So, before letting her pick where we’re going to eat, her mother and I check with each other to make sure that we’re both in the mood to eat there.

We were on our way there one night when Sparkle Girl said, “I wonder what it would be like if the Silver Diner was gold.”

Sparkle Girl is Sparkle Girl. But, in another world, she could be Gold Girl because she has blond hair. So I said, “When you grow up, you could open a gold restaurant and call it the Gold Girl Diner.”

She thought this was an excellent idea, and we spent the next few minutes imagining possibilities.

At the Silver Diner, the hostess gives kids a bundle of crayons and a picture to color when they come in. Sparkle Girl thought it would be great to give kids who came into the Gold Girl Diner a picture of her to color.

“Yeah!” we said.

Her mother and I threw in our ideas.

Hang pictures of her on the wall.

“Yeah!” she said.

Paint the backs of the chairs to look like her.

“Yeah!” she said.

“And, in the back,” Sparkle Girl said, “we could have a room where people could get tattoos of me.”

“Yeah!” we said.

Although, if the Gold Girl Diner ever comes to be, I might suggest that she make them temporary tattoos.

Doobins and the Camel Crickets

Doobins still visits the worlds of firefighters and Thomas the Tank Engine from time to time.

But, these days, he mostly spends his fantasy life armed with a sword and shield.

For a while, although he had several quite-satisfactory swords, the only shield he had was one the size of a pack of cigarettes that he commandeered from a Lego soldier.

Although it was all he needed to defend himself, I thought that a Doobins’-size shield was in order. I cut one out of foam board and fashioned a sleeve for his arm to go through by cutting the bottom out of a plastic cup and securing it to the back with duct tape.

That night, Doobins insisted on sleeping with the shield and a sword. Stretched out on his back with the sword and shield crossed on his chest, he looked like some great warrior put to eternal rest.

Of foes, there is never any shortage. For one, Doobins’ mother and his sister, Sparkle Girl, believe that camel crickets are vile creatures. When one appears, they raise a great outcry and demand that I dispense with it. If these were snakes, it would be another matter, but I am ready to do battle with a camel cricket.

If I can, I capture it. If capture is not practical, I crush it. Having witnessed only panicked uproar before my day, Doobins, too, fled camel crickets in the early days. But, when he saw that they were mere mortals, he joined my camp and helped me pursue them.

When we capture one, he escorts me to the front door to send it into exile. When we crush one, holding it by one leg, he takes it into the bathroom, drops the remains into the toilet, flushes and watches it swirl into oblivion.

The camel crickets that we capture in the main part of the house are scouts. The camp is in the basement. They come out in force at night, and Doobins’ mother refuses to go down there after dark. That means I am the one called upon to retrieve the fresh sheets from the dryer. If I didn’t know that her distaste for camel crickets is sincere, I might wonder why I am always the one making the descent into the netherworld.

The other day, Doobins and I were playing in the living room, when his mother opened the door to the basement and cried out, “Camel crickets!”
Without a word, he raced into the Green Room (known by some as the Toy Room) and emerged seconds later with his shield on his right arm and his sword held high in his left hand.

The stairs to the basement are steep, and, at the age of 3, Doobins does not yet have the legs required to safely descend on his own.

“Kim, help me down the steps,” he said.

I went before him and held his sword hand as his carefully descended the steps one by one like some arthritic champion hobbling to face the dragon that has been terrorizing the town.

Looking below us, I could see that the camel crickets had massed in force along the concrete floor and block wall.

At the bottom of the stairs, Doobins released my hand.

“Harge!” he cried as he raised his sword and charged the enemy. This was no ancient warrior. This was a young champion just tasting his powers.

The veterans among the camel crickets quickly recognized that they were outmatched. They fled the field. The foe vanquished, Sparkle Girl and their mother came down to celebrate the victory.

Mr. Whitfield

On Tuesdays, I lug my recycling bins to the curb. (I like to have one for paper and one for the rest.) I usually come home from work to find the empty bins up on my porch.

The first time I thanked Mr. Whitfield for putting them there, he claimed complete ignorance. No idea how they got up there, he said.

He likes to do that – do something nice and then pretend that it’s a mystery to him how the good deed happened.

Wednesday is trash day. When I signed up for one of those carts that wheels to the curb, it didn’t occur to me that Mr. Whitfield would be the one wheeling it back after it was emptied. But so it was.

He is 79, and life is catching up to him in certain respects. Some days are not as good as others. He apologized to me one day when I came home to find the trash cart at the side of the house rather than all the way at the back.

Sometimes, I do things for him. When he wants to write a letter to one of his buddies from the service, he is more comfortable if I am the one who puts the words down on paper. He thanks me as if I have done a big favor. But I just ask him what he wants to say. He says it. I add a comma here and there.

Mr. Whitfield likes to tell me that he was mean in his younger days. He asks Pearl to back him up on that point, and she does.

He grew up in a culture in which fighting was considered recreation. One story comes from his days in the Navy toward the end of World War II. When the ship was in port, he said, the sailors would go out drinking and looking for trouble. They would get into fights, and the MP’s would come round them up.

In San Francisco, the MP’s had limited holding space and rowdies galore. They would round up a batch, put everyone in the holding area and go back out to round up more. When they returned, they would release the first batch so that they would have room for the second batch.

With a distinct note of pride in his voice, he told me that he set a personal record once by being rounded up and released three times in one night.

When I reminded him of that story the other day, he said, “There was a time when I could have held my own in most any fight. I had the staying power. The staying power is what wins most fights.”

It’s coming up on 20 years since Mr. Whitfield and I became neighbors. When I bought my house, I didn’t have the good sense to wonder what the neighbors would be like. All I did was look for a house that I liked and could afford in a neighborhood I was willing to live in.

When I moved in, I didn’t even know the bare neighbor basics – that my house was flanked by brothers ­– R.L. and his wife, Pearl, on one side and Bill and his wife, Lumae, on the other. As it happened, without even realizing that I was buying a lottery ticket, I won big.