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What’s Your Addiction Affliction?
The TV show My Strange Addiction has certainly brought a lot of bizarre repetitive behaviors to light. I don’t believe mine has specifically been included in their menu of episodes, and since they haven’t called me to be featured on the show, maybe mine isn’t quite as bizarre as my friends and I think. The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Model of Mental Disorders), the Bible of mental disorders, the authoritative voice of health care professionals, has been updated to include behavioral addictions like compulsive gambling, stealing, buying, and sexual addictions, along with the nine more familiar substance use addictions. The reason for this is both philosophical and medical because there…
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Sexy L’Eggs
There are legs and a baton in this picture–it is hard to decipher which are which. Some adolescents try desperately to lose weight; I tried desperately to gain weight. Throughout junior high and high school, I despised wearing shorts and wanted to disappear every time we had to change clothes in the locker room. Name-calling and skinny jokes took their toll on any self-esteem not already destroyed by growing up in an alcoholic household. But the pity party ends there, because as the old adage goes, “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.” It is also true that it will finally either fuel a sense of humor in you or…
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Floss . . . Never Leave Home Without It
Chances are, if you have teeth in your head, you are going to need to floss during a really inconvenient time. You may come to regret the rash decisions you feel necessary to get the job done. Such was the night of a very public Christmas party in a local restaurant’s banquet room. It was a dress-up affair and the guests were from every walk of life. We were eating usual banquet fare: baked chicken, steamed broccoli, fried apples, salad. When a piece of broccoli became lodged in the center of my bottom teeth, I very calmly and discreetly tried to unhinge it by using my tongue of steel, as…
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Work ‘n Roll
Foreshadowing was there from the beginning. About ten years ago, a new Asian buffet was getting ready to open in a nearby town and the humongous bright yellow sign out front boasted “Work ’n Roll”, instead of “Wok ’n Roll”. That should have been our first clue. It was unwittingly being established as either a place of hard labor, a comedy club, or both. And we were about to find out. After eating at the new restaurant, I felt like we ripped the place off–maybe we should have gone to the cashier and insisted we pay more money. For the entertainment. First, our son warmed us up by opening for…
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Memphis Truck Stop
Several years ago, my sister, mother, and I made a trip to Memphis, TN, and ate at a truck stop . . . no, we didn’t purposely go there to eat at a truck stop, but it was the highlight of that two-day trip to our mother’s eye surgeon. We really enjoyed going to Graceland too, but since we measured our fun by tried and true scientific methods, it just didn’t live up to our “fun standards”. Reaching the top of our fun scale depended upon 1) how long and hard we belly laughed, and 2) how close any of us came to peeing our pants. While Graceland was a great time,…
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My Lucky Rock
After hearing all Jim’s childhood stories, I teased him that he was raised by the idyllic Ozzie and Harriet. Ozzie and Violet (their real names), provided a comfortable, suburban, middle class life for their family, and didn’t seem to make many child-rearing mistakes. The time Jim was at a Sears store playing on the escalator while his mother shopped nearby, was the only questionable parenting decision I am aware of (sister Joanne may disagree with this). It was winter and Jim was five. He was going up and down the escalator like his mother told him not to, and his heavy coat became stuck in the handrail. Before he could…
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Captain Mustard
Just like my kids only eating “magic carrots” at daycare or the luxury of having fried SPAM on a toasted bagel as a backpacking delicacy over a campfire, so it is with Captain Mustard, that rare annual treat while on vacation in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Rainy day on Cisco Lake? No problem. Dock the boat. Stow skiis, kayaks, tubes, and head for town. The line of customers at noon, beneath the red canopy attached to the tiny travel trailer boasting signs painted red, yellow, and blue, is made up of tourists, locals, and laborers on lunch break. Reminiscent of the “Soup Nazi” of Seinfeld era, customers overlook the…
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Why Isn’t She Normal?
We are spending this weekend in Minnesota to celebrate our first grand baby’s first birthday. He is a joy beyond measure. My mother always said, “If I’d had these grand babies first, I’d never had you girls!” Now I understand. Greyson is perfect, incredibly smart, and the happiest baby I’ve ever seen. We can’t get enough of him. I suppose my grandparents must have felt the same about the little curly-haired toddler I was. I’m thankful things have changed so much from then to now and there aren’t cigarette ashtrays on every table, because although I’d be curious to know if my DNA runs deep in Greyson, I am hoping…
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Intellectual Ditz
One day while I was sitting at a table in my university’s student union trying to read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a fellow environmental biology classmate came over and introduced himself. It was hard to miss how tall, good-looking, and well-dressed he was–the distinct opposite of me. The crazy thing was, about a month prior to this meeting, I had broken my wire-framed glasses and had literally taped the earpiece onto the frames with black electrical tape. My long hair was in two braids hanging down my plaid flannel shirt, topped off with a bandana spread over my head and tied at the back of my neck. No makeup, ragged jeans,…
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Tornado Alarm
The blasting siren traveled to my six year-old ears, reverberating in every direction inside my skull. Maggie looked to the sky, pulling a Pall Mall out of the tanned, ancient folds protecting her toothless gums and declared, “There’s a tornado com’n!” Terror filled me. I ran in high gear, next door to my two-story red sandpaper-sided house and straight to my personal fallout shelter. Sitting on bathroom scales stuffed between the pipes of our small sink and stained bathtub, I clasped my ears and sobbed, knowing I would be blown to bits. I was a dramatic child. Like “the chicken or the egg” question, I’m not sure which came first:…
