I HEART HEDBERG. YOU JUDGE JUDY.

I saw this wino. He was eating grapes. I was like, “Dude, you have to wait.”  -Mitch Hedberg

                

          Until recently, I did not know that I was Irish.  The background information from my adoption was more than a little vague on the paternal side, and I recently set about to… clarifying some things. (This little clarification situation is quite possibly going to result in a posting which I will privately refer to as “Oh Look, Now We Parade The Mean, Mean Man’s Head Through The Village on a Stick”.)  (Sometimes you just gotta have a parade.)

I’m pretty sure that I’m “Not Right” Irish. You know—the Alec Baldwin and Colin Farrell kind. I spend a lot of time tripping over a brambled up mess of lust and melancholy. I write pretentious sentences about myself (see above) and overanalyze things to the point that I actually end up DOING very little. Then, I make fun of myself.  I am Irish. That’s the first bit of background info.

The other thing that seems relevant here is that about ten years ago, I ate a white peach while I was uncharacteristically RAFTING with my friend, Andy. (Andy sometimes spells his name “Agndy”. I like that, and I like him.)

(Agndy and I were neighbors for a while. One day, he had a couple friends over and he was throwing pebbles at my window, because he apparently thought his friends would enjoy seeing him act like an ass. When I couldn’t get him to stop, I said, “Hey, Agndy… Catch!”  And he did… catch an egg which sort of blew up all over his face.  It was funny, but then…aww… poor Agndy and his eggy face sittin’ on the driveway with his girlfriend laughing at him! So sad.)

Anyway, um, this white peach that I ate ten years ago was amazing. It was a drippy, nectary mess on a beautiful, sunshiney day and that jacked up combination of sensory input…the sun and the sticky sweetness on my hands and chin and the smiling that seemed like it might actually become what my face does…if your life flashes before your eyes when you die, I’ll be all up in that peach. (Ahem.)

That is my nature.

                The Gummer… not so much.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought some champagne grapes at Wal-Mart. One of my theories is that Sam Walton and The Family increase the canyon-width of their profit margin by providing inferior produce to their devoted-by-default Wal-Martians. Not today. These teeny grapes were like that white peach on the river. I couldn’t begin to emote properly in the Mart, and I bought a box of those nummy little purple balls so I could take them home and love ‘em up right.

(Don’t get too attached to that paragraph. It’ll get revised when The Gum breaks and I go global mas mondo. I like the nummy balls part, though. Mmm… nummy.)

I digress.

The grapes were so delicious that I figured surely even The Gummer would swoon. I took them into the living room where The Gummer was watching “Judge Judy”. I held them up like it was my first day at my new bear feeding job.

“I bought champagne grapes.” I said it like it was a question.  What a dork I am! Sometimes it’s like I’m on “The Gong Show” and she’s up waving her gonger around (Eww…. Please revise) before I can get to the good part of my tap dance.

She scowled. Excessively. Another face from her repertoire of only child facial expressions.

                I rolled my eyes. A duel.

              “They’re sweet. They’ll cancel out that sour expression you’re making.”

                She took one. The clouds parted.  Even The Gummer couldn’t resist these succulent balls of numness.

                (No, MICROSOFT. They are not “balls of numbness”.  Use the context clues.)

                Now I needed her to acknowledge my victory: “Do you like them?”

                “Yes, but they’re too small.”

“Too small FOR WHAT?”

She scowled and bobbled her head around. “It would take you half an hour to eat them.”

I cavalierly plucked several of them and blooped them into my mouth. “Eat them five at a time.”

She wanted to argue. About grapes. Delicious, delicious grapes. “Yeah, but how many of them have STEMS?”

“I will destem them for you.” I made exasperated Mom-eyes at her.

She resumed her Judying.

                As I walked toward the kitchen to destem the queen’s grapes, I expressed my love for her in the language of my people: “YOU are a pain in the ass.”

A few minutes later, she took a break from her legal seminar and shuffled into the kitchen where I was determinedly plucking away at the champagne grapes in the sink.  She buried one of her talons in a Rubbermaid container on the counter and squawked: “Well, did you wash these green ones?”

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DIXIELAND

     Yet again, this isn't the post that is supposed to be posted here. It's written, but I can't find it. It's about grapes, and it is funny.
      I keep making this logical plan for how these posts fit together, but then my life gets in the way and revises my Diabolical Master Plan (DMP). Some version of this DMP disruption has been going on ever since The Gummer stopped micromanaging me like a babbling little yellow-headed puppet. I'm generally fine with it, but it weirds me out when there are witnesses to my slapdash factor. Yet I continue to invite them in.
    So....
    I have some weird lump in my abdomen that people are sick of hearing about on facebook. I'm going to write about it here.

    Actually, there's just something I want to explain:

    WHY I SHAVED MY PUBES BEFORE I WENT TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM TODAY

    When I was in seventh grade, I had a hernia. To clarify, I had a hernia for ALL of seventh grade. It would poof out...
   
     (Okay, wait.  This post has a seventh grade girl in it. Girls have bodies. If that bothers you, please stop reading, unfriend me on facebook, and seek some Really Big Helpy-Help. Do not watch Nancy Grace or the Kardashians. Just play Angry Birds or something until your appointment. Thank you.)

 ... when I went to the bathroom and it was an effin abnormality. The Gummer was once a nurse anesthetist. The Gummer looked at Effie and said, "Damn it, Lah-rie! You're such a hypochondriac!"      When I had my physical, The Gummer said in extra-nasally, only-child-'cause-somebody-woulda-smacked-that-voice-outta-your-head voice: "Oh, would you just humor her and look at this?"
     And the doctor looked at her like "WTF?" before "WTF?" ever was, and said,"Um, Cookie? That's a HERNIA."
    (The Gummer is Cookie is Betty is Betty Jean. Her dad used to call her "Tootsie" but my Grandma said it made her sound like a prostitute and so a Cookie was born.)
    I bring this hernia incident up every time I can. If I fart funny, we're gonna talk about the hernia incident. If I see a star and she doesn't, we're gonna talk about how she almost destroyed my ovaries before I ever transferred to that Big 10 school. We are competitive people, and that is one of my trump cards.

   So I had surgery. My dad went to the hospital, and we ended up hanging out by ourselves for a while and just kind of chatting. It was weird to be in a hospital with my dad. He didn't do the office-type parenting gigs. My dad did "store" and "car" and "yard" and "baseball diamond".
I was enjoying the novelty of the situation. We were chatting. It was cool. The kitten was conversating.
  Then a nurse came in and said, "I'm here to prepare your daughter for the surgery."
  My dad was like "Okay, yeah" in whatever polite way he would have indicated indifference.
  Then she was like "Um, no... PREPARE her for the SURGERY."
   My dad's eyes went all freaked out and panicky (and he wasn't a freaked out and panicky kind of man EVER) and he started walking backwards really fast and then he was gone.
  I was left with Dixie and her razor...  and her fucking wandering eye.
  It's a strabismus. I just looked it up. It's an Andy Cohen. It's a drifter. It's a childhood memory that you never forget.
   I spent twelve years growing those pubes, Dixie. You need to focus.


 

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KID FEARS

     In high school, Casey always walked on the balls of his feet. He bounced as a means of locomotion. This bouncing was coupled with seemingly constant smiling.  The combined effect was exactly what it sounds like.
   In high school, my best friend was Casey's best friend. I was some complicated girl who showed up and disrupted their conversations about music during our high school lunch break. The combined effect was exactly what it sounds like.

    It was kid shit, and you know what I mean.

    We aren't kids anymore.

   "What would you give for your kid fears?"
                                                           
     Fuck.

     Casey has rectal cancer. He has mantle cell lymphoma. He has a second grader. He has a preschooler. He has a wife.

     When you're a kid, you don't know any of this stuff. You don't know how things turn on a dime and how careful you have to be with people. You have no clue about the stakes or about how you will actually feel when someone who you used to have some petty, kid thing with ends up being sick in a really grown up way.

    They're taking donations of items for a silent auction at Big Daddy's in Soulard on October 8. I don't have much more than a fiber optic Christmas tree, an awesome pair of leather pants, and some pretty cool Duran Duran 12" remixes. I do, however, have this forum. I have your attention.  (Well, I had it until I said that...)

    My friend, Casey, is really sick. He has two little kids.

   My friend, Robin, said I'm a bulldog when I want something. I get all Irish on it. What I want right now is to do something to help Casey out.

   Well, not just that.

   What I want is to not have things like this happening to kids. In my mind, we're still kids. It was easy to get mad when Casey bounced out of the cafeteria to tell Ed something about a guitar when I was busy lounging around and being all fifteen and eyelinery. It was easy to be jealous of their friendship. It was dumb, and it was easy.

  You have to enjoy being dumb and easy while you can. It doesn't last.


If you would like to make a donation to Casey or if you have something you could donate to the auction, please contact Ed at eorlet@sbcglobal.net  
If you are afraid of Ed, you can email me at heller101@yahoo.com


 Thanks.

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Everyone Just Says Whatever (post 1)

      Alright, imagine that the readers of "The Gummer Chronicles" (including especially you) have been forwarding the link to other people, and that those people have been forwarding the link to other other people and that the link has gotten into the right hands and is now an actual book. In this book, the longer essays of "The Gummer Chronicles" are mixed with blurbier mini-thangs called "Everyone Just Says Whatever". The blurbier mini-thangs are quotes of the unfiltered crap that gets said in this house. 
    I was going to make a separate page on this site for these blurby thangs, but I have other things that I can overcomplicate if need be. (It's like a nesting instinct. Sometimes I just need to mess something up. That's usually when I decide I would look better with bangs.)
   Anyway, so the "Everyone Just Says Whatever" posts are going to be mixed in with the TGC posts. They are more likely to include profanity and innuendo. If that is a problem, skip 'em:

That said:

       Last week, I was going to the gynecologist and then to yet another board of education office to submit yet another document which will have no effect on my employment status since educated and experienced special ed teachers who don't coach football apparently aren't in any district's budget.      
      As I was leaving the house, I said goodbye to The Gummer. I made sure that I was making eye contact and smiling my girliest "Girl Who Goes to the Mall to Buy Handbags at Macy's" smile:
               "Bye, Mom.  I'm going to go let a pretty girl look at my vagina and then
                do some education-related stuff. It'll be like being at U of I again."
      She giggled.

      A few days later, I was scheduled for an ultrasound to check out the giganticus blob o' probable hernia in my abdomen. The night before, I told The Gummer that I was going to ask for the big, black probe. (I did. The radiology medium giggled cooperatively and became very interested in pushing buttons on the ultrathing.) (That bit should have gone much better.)
      Later, I told The Gummer about the results of the ultrasound. The focal point was supposed to be the radiology medium's opinion that my gall bladder, kidneys, and liver all appeared to be fine. The possibility that my liver could have survived 15 years of commitment to Athens, GA is stunning. Even with The Gummer's partial information, the liver comment alone should have cued a "Quoi?"
      She was also supposed to hone in on the radiology medium's hernia notion. WITHOUT GIVING THE IMPRESSION OF ANY OFFICIAL DIAGNOSIS (I liked the radiology medium and my gyno said she'd check out "The Chronicles"), she said that Blobbo's failure to appear on screen was typical of a hernia. Hernias are on  the acceptable end of the diagnostic spectrum.
      The Gummer apparently needs to go back and do some of that color-coded (with weird brown and turquoise and magenta and peach and seafoam... and, yes, I scored high on the facebook autism quiz)  SRA crap we did in elementary school. Someone needs to work on identifying the main idea by repeatedly completing the sentence:"A good title for this essay would be...."
      When I told her that I made the probe comment and that the probe was the size of a giganticus curling iron, she said  "Well, you asked for it."











 

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Polyester is Forever

On September 5^th of last year, I posted a facebook status in five parts. I titled it “Polyester is Forever with Grandma”:

Polyester is Forever w/ Grandma: The Gummer still has the beige and green pantsuit she was wearing when she met my dad at Piccato's Tavern. He'd been in a bowling tournament (read: drinking beer) all day. Her friends let her leave w/ him. They went to a bowling alley in the basement of a hotel on St. Louis Rd.

            The Piccatos’ daughter-in-law, Amy, teaches piano to some of the kids in the hood. She is charming and gracious and wonderfully genuine and I will give a shout-out to her travel agency here if she tells me what to write. At the end of the school year, the mini-virtuosos gave a recital. We looked like this:

           

 (Yes, my “Waitress in the Sky” look was intentional. Do not ask why. “Ours is not to reason why/ you ain’t nothin’ but a waitress in the sky.”)             

When the recital was over, Amy invited The Gummer to go into the basement. There, like some kind of dream sequence transition, was the bar from Picatto’s tavern, cash register and all.

        

I filmed The Gummer talking about it, but she’s not the only one talking. This isn’t some kind of tmz, long-lens, tell-all arrangement here.

(That said… my brother was once jogging through the neighborhood. (This story suddenly seems implausible, not because of the way it ends, but because it begins with ‘My brother was once jogging”. There is no way he was jogging in an athletic or health-conscious way. He’s just not that guy. It is more likely that he was jogging as a mode of transportation because walking was taking too long. This makes much more sense when you consider what he was wearing.) He was wearing cutoff Levi’s. These shorts were SHORT. They were…I don’t know…Billy Squier meets Daisy Duke in a cloud of weed and Polo. These shorts were Ozzy and Camaros, Marlboro Reds and “I Grew This Moustache Because I Can”. (Yuck.) Anyway, as he was jogging past the Piccato’s house, he waved at them. When he looked down, he realized he wasn’t the only one waving.  (Maybe I should delete this. But then, it’s not like it’s embarrassing. It’s just like “Wow” and “Ick” at the same time. Alas, I must speak my icky truth.)

Polyester is Forever w/ Grandma Pt. II: Soon after that, he invited her to a picnic. She said no--she had plans to go on a trip with her friends. Bob Heller was not used to hearing no from the ladies. "To this day, I still don't know if he took another girl to that picnic." She has kept an angry 24 yr old girlfriend with the pantsuit.

            I like to think that not attending this picnic is how she got him. I don’t mean that declining his invitation was a tactical decision designed to get him to chase her. She’s not someone who would follow “The Rules” or wear some Jonas Brothers Smothered and Covered ring.  She doesn’t give anything up easily. I’ve played cards with her. She just doesn’t like to lose. She’s not going to set herself up by chasing some boy and then end up looking like a dumbass.

                Way to pass the torch there, Mom. Way to pass the torch.

Polyester is Forever w/ Grandma Pt. III: After they got married, they moved into that tan brick apt bldg on St. Louis Rd, then proceeded to spend enough money at the Horseshoe Lounge to pay for the addition to the building. When my father died, I invited some of the waitresses from the Horseshoe to his wake. They attended.

I invited his barber, too. I buried my dad with Oreo cookies, toothpicks, and a bottle of Tanqueray. We stopped going to the Horseshoe after that. It closed.

This is one of the things I would like to tell him.

That’s one of the shittiest things about death. It’s not the big emotional stuff that you should have said. Not for me, anyway. It’s the little stuff that I want to say. The news and trivia,

“They got Bin Laden.”

Polyester is Forever w/ Grandma Pt. IV: I suggested we go to Piccato's and take pictures of her in her beige & green pantsuit to memorialize my dad (who died 5 yrs ago this morning). She declined. We could've gone to all their places. We could have done a lot of things. (That thought stays in my mind. Polyester.)

        It has been six years now. It doesn’t bother me like I thought it would. Perhaps my feelings are more of a poly-cotton blend. Perhaps memory has a kindness to it and files things away like bags of little bags of photographs. My memory is more like photographs strewn all over the floor. I get used to them being around and forget they are there until something catches my eye and I spend a day on the floor going through it all.

Polyester is Forever w/ Grandma Pt. 5 (Conclusion): The Gummer has suggested that I memorialize my father by cleaning the damn garage. We all grieve in our own way, Gummer. My preferred means of self-expression does not involve Pine-Sol.

             (On second thought, that story about my brother does belong here. Sometimes you just need to look away.)

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