Family and/or Autobiography – Page 6 – Hey, Look! A Writer Fellow!

November 10, 2021

New and Noteworthy

Not my handiwork. I would never waste time feeding my family lettuce.

As a house husband, I am responsible for pretty much all of the daily domestic chores. One of those chores is Lunch Making. Each evening, I spread the peanut butter or slather the mayonnaise, wash the apples, and parcel out the Halloween candy into my wife’s and son’s respective lunchboxes.

Packing my son’s lunch is fairly straightforward: Just Lunch and Nothing Else. He’s too obsessed with building and maintaining his social circle to tolerate anything that may cause embarrassment, so I do my best to curb my whimsical instincts.

Ellen, on the other hand, gets a little something extra: a Lunch Note. These notes are nothing special, just a line I blearily compose before my first sip of coffee. When she opens her bag, she might find something like:

This sandwich was made with LOVE!

You’re all that and a bag of chips!

Stay cool, hot stuff!

Not my best work, but Ellen seems to enjoy it.

My point is, these notes never communicate any information that can’t be written on an average sized Post-It note—and that’s usually what I use. The other morning, however, I found myself fresh out of Post-Its, so I dug into the living room desk drawers to see what I could find.

I found no Post-Its. No scrap paper. No cheap notepads from various charities trying to guilt me into making a donation. I did, however, find some pretty nice note cards. Really nice. In fact, they were too nice to warrant my typical brand of tossed-off correspondence.

So I composed something more.

My Dearest Ellen, 

Oh, how I long for your warm embrace. 

I do so miss the simple pleasures of our days together. Your peach cobbler. Long talks by the glowing hearth. Bouncing our dear son on my knee. I can only imagine how he must have grown in the many months since I’ve been gone. 

I sometimes fear this war will never end. Every day we march further south. Talk amongst the men say that we’ll face the Rebs tomorrow at dawn. Sometimes I think I can hear them just beyond the next hill. I hope not, for I am sick of fighting and wish to wage war on nothing more than the crabgrass invading our lawn.

Pray for my swift return, my sweet. Stay strong. Kiss little Alex for me. Take solace in knowing that no matter what may happen to me, we will reunite in this life or the next.

Your beloved,

Michael

It seemed appropriate.

To give the lunch note just the right hint of pathos, I later texted Ellen some suitable background music.

Go ahead. Give it a try. Read my note aloud while the music plays.

Ain’t it great? It’s powerful, emotional stuff! You could play that music while reading a birthday card or a grocery list or a fart joke and it’ll make you bust our crying!

Anyway, long story short, Ellen thinks I’m nuts now.

October 28, 2021October 28, 2021

Gourd Almighty

I love fall.

I love the colorful leaves. I love the crisp chill in the air. I love not mowing the lawn. I love not sweating.

And boy-oh-boy do I love pumpkin spice. Muffins, donuts, lattes, and breakfast cereals. If someone sold a pumpkin spice sirloin steak, I’d fire up the grill. If there was a pumpkin spice can of Pledge, I’d never stop dusting. If there was pumpkin spice toilet paper, I’d wipe my hiney with rigor and keep my nose on alert for subsequent pumpkin spiced farts.

Such is my pumpkin spice addiction, that I find myself greeting each fall with elation.

And, almost immediately, this elation is replaced with a kind of hysteria.

I must buy pumpkin spice anything! In bulk! Because it’s only available for a limited time! Three months at most! I have to act now and act decisively before my perfect flavor is unceremoniously tossed aside in favor of stupid peppermint!

And is it just me, or do they keep bumping up that peppermint flavoring every year? It used to show up after Thanksgiving, but I’m almost positive that last year toothpase-inspired cappuccinos invaded the Starbuckses three days after Halloween. What’s up with that?

So my point is, I have to stock up on pumpkin spice! I have no time to lose! I need to be alert! I need to stay vigilant! I need another grocery cart!

What irks me about all of this is that pumpkin spice doesn’t need to be for a limited time. It’s not like anyone is marching out into autumnal fields and tapping ripe pumpkins for their pumpkin-spice-y goodness. The flavor is made in a lab. There’s nothing natural about it. It could be made all year round. But it isn’t made all year round because The Powers That Be want to create an artificial, urgent, seasonal demand.

And their evil plan works. I overbuy. To prepare for the future. If I start jonesing for pumpkin spice pancakes next June, I will be ready.

But here’s the thing about that. I never jones for pumpkin spice pancakes next June. Never ever. I have the pancake mix–boxes and boxes of mix–and from December on, it just sits there taking up valuable pantry space.

I don’t know why, but eating pumpkin spice in the summer feels weird to me. I can’t do it. I’ve tried. But it just doesn’t quite…work. It never has. I know this about myself. I’ve watched myself behave this way year after year. And yet, year after year, in a fit of panic, I buy pumpkin spice.

In bulk.

Because it’s only available for a limited time, you see.

October 20, 2021October 22, 2021

Spidey Senses

Have you ever looked at a spider close up? They’re cuter than you think.

Ever since I was a little kid, I had an agreement with the spiders in my room: “If I need to get a stepstool to kill you,” I told them. “Then I’m not gonna kill you.”

This was a very fair arrangement. The spiders had the entire ceiling and a perimeter of about two feet of upper wall space on which to putter about. The spiders had more navigable square footage in my room than I did. All they had to do was stay up there — and much to my surprise, that’s exactly what they did. I don’t know if spiders understand English or what, but they always kept out of reach, spending their days weaving web hammocks the size of industrial fishing nets.

I liked the webs. I was fascinated by them. Late at night when I was unable to sleep, I would sometimes flop on my back, turn on the reading lamp clamped to my headboard, and puff a lungful of air skyward to watch the webs dance in the breeze. It was a serene and pleasant way to wait for sleep to overtake me.

I liked my spiders.

Mom didn’t.

“Oh, my GOD, what is going on up there?” she announced one Saturday morning.

Saturday was cleaning day in the Allegra house. Every week without fail Mom would scrub the house from top to bottom. The only room she didn’t scrub was mine. That was my job. She might sometimes check to make sure I didn’t shirk this responsibility, but she didn’t have to worry about me much. I was a tidy kid and she knew it, so her snap inspections were largely ceremonial. She’d only glance to make sure the carpet was lint free and the bureaus wore a lemon-scented Pledge shine.

Until that day she looked up.

“Why didn’t you tell me you had all these webs up there?!”

When Mom took this kind of tone with me, my first instinct was to play dumb. “Hm?” I looked up and feigned surprise. “Oh. I… I never noticed.”

“Never noticed? You spend all day every day farting around in this room and you never, not once, looked up?”

“Uh…”

As usual, Mom’s BS detector struck me mute.

“There’s more web than ceiling!”

Without another word she tromped down the hall, off to get her canister vacuum. Mom’s vacuum was an amazing machine. I have no idea where she had bought it, but it was a weapons grade force of nature, loud as a Harley and armed with enough suction to rip a hole in the fabric of space and time. Like Excalibur or Thor’s Hammer, I always had the sense that Mom was the only person on earth capable of wielding it.

And wield it she did. In an instant, the spiders with whom I had shared such a cordial cohabitation were sucked into oblivion.

I wasn’t exactly sad to see the spiders meet this fate — they weren’t my friends or anything — but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that it all felt terribly unfair.

Now I’m a homeowner. Mom and her vacuum no longer hold sway over my life. But my views on spiders have hardened over the years. I kill them now. Often and with extreme prejudice.

I don’t exactly know when or how I changed. Maybe it has something to do with me getting older and crankier. Maybe it’s because I am no longer charmed by the entertainment value of a web hanging over my bed. Or maybe it’s because — like my Mom before me — I do most of the housecleaning. Those webs really do make a house look filthy, don’t they?

But that’s a pretty shallow reason to commit murder, really.

Maybe someday my views will shift back to where they once were. My eyes are getting worse; maybe the webs won’t bother me so much if I can no longer see them so well. Maybe I will rediscover my childlike sense of wonder. Or maybe, with a little work and a little patience, I can learn to follow the philosophy of Live and Let Live.

It’s a nice thought.

But in the meantime, spiders take note: I have a stepstool and I’m prepared to use it.