We Promise Not to Make You Dead

My Daddy was in the Navy when I was a little girl, so we spent every single vacation where both sets of my Grandparents were; in a little town smack dab in the middle of West Virginia. I mean, dead center of the state. The way the roads were then, it was a 9 hour drive back then, and there were no DVD players in cars, no gameboys or PSPs. My sister and I had to make do with reading books, or playing "car games" like counting license plates or green cars. Anything to keep my father from killing us on those pilgrimages through the mountains to our little hometown in the middle of the state of West-By-God-Virginia.

My Daddy's Parent's were from the more affluent part of town, lived in a 3 story Victorian House that my sister and I thought was a mansion as little girls. My mother was a farmer's daughter, and while both sets of Grandparents technically lived on the same road, albeit about 5 miles apart, the worlds were completely different. We adored my Daddy's parents, but, we always had more fun out with at my Mother's. That's where my cousins were, and that's where we could be kids, doing summertime things, playing kid games, swinging on tire~swings, hunting craw~dads in the creek, playing with new pups or kittens in the barn, or just running around.

My one cousin was only a year older than I and was our favorite playmate. We would get into all sorts of trouble together and we'd always come up with creative games to play. My sister always hated when it was time for us to figure out what to play. Our (my cousin's and my) favorite game was airplane. One of us would suggest it, and my sister (who was a year younger) would start to cry. We'd look to her.

"Why are you crying?"
"Because I don't want to be dead" (said among a bunch of sniffles)
"We promise not to make you dead....this time"
"You....won't?" (more sniffles)
"No."
"OK, I'll play."

That settled, we would start our game.

My Grandmother had a slightly rickety porch swing. Painted green, where the paint was chipped and peeling a bit. That would be our "airplane". My Cousin would be the Pilot and the Dad, I would be the Mom and a Nurse and my sister would be the little kid. We'd start swinging the swing, making it go higher and higher and all of a sudden my cousin would JAM his foot onto the porch making the swing jar and bounce in all directions. We would all scream, he would start yelling "MAYDAY, MAYDAY" into the imaginary radio and we would all "fall" out of the swing and land on the porch in crumpled little masses. It was VERY dramatic. I think we probably deserved Oscars for our performances.

I would always "come to" first. I was injured (we would take berry juice and smear it on us for blood. I would crawl over to my cousin and throw water on him to waken him and then put rag slings on his arm or something or wrap up a leg or bandage his head because something *had* to be broken. Then together we would crawl over to my sister, laying lifeless somewhere on the porch. I would take her pulse. I would listen to breathing. I would look at the tons of berry juice now covering her prone body. Then look at my cousin with a very sad expression, nearly in tears and say in my most dramatic voice. "I'm sorry, but there's nothing we can do." and then cover my sister up with a blanket and she was *dead* for the rest of the game.

If we played "Shipwreck" it was pretty much the same scenario, only we would drag her lifeless body to shore and do pretend mouth to mouth on her and have to give up because she was *dead* and then cover her up with branches. "Tornado"....same thing. "Bank Robbery"....same thing. She was sort of like the guy in the Red Shirt in Star Trek. You knew every time he went down to a planet on a field mission that he was gonna die.

Every game we played, somehow or other, we made her dead, and we LIED to her every single time to convince her that we weren't going to make her dead so she'd go along with us and play, just so we could ultimately make her dead. As an adult, I can't imagine why she would put up with that. I mean, laying for long periods of time under a stifling blanket in the middle of summer while my cousin and I set up our imaginary signal fires couldn't have been a lot of fun.

Occasionally, we did let her "live". I think that was mostly so that she wouldn't go and tell on us for making her dead "AGAIN". For some unknown reason, my Mother and my Aunt had some major issue with us doing this to my sister over and over again. I figure karma has, or probably will pay me back for the multiple demises of my sister, but I can't help remembering how much fun it was, being a kid on a summer afternoon, out in the country, playing silly games like that.

Kids today just don't know how to play like that anymore.

Your Mommy doesn't have a WHAT?????

My eldest son learned to talk at a very early age. He was using complete, grammatically correct sentences before he was 18 months old, which, I must admit, was pretty funny when watching the reactions he would get from strangers. His vocabulary was enormous and his pronunciation was impeccable. He did, however, have days when his tremendous fluent abilities would cause me all sorts of undue embarrassment, totally unbeknown to him.

For example, he would have, what my WonderHubby and I would refer to as "The Letter of the Day" days. Now, these were days when he would select a given letter and every single word he said would begin with that letter. He started this somewhere around 15 months or so. A psychologist friend of mine was astounded that he had the ability to do this, as this required quite advanced thinking and skill, things not generally found in someone quite so young. In general, The Letter of the Day days were pretty interesting to observe, and rather amusing at the creative words he would come up with. There were, however......exceptions. These would be letters like B, or God forbid, F.

In the middle of the grocery store he announced at the top of his lungs just how ITCHY he was, which, of course, came out as BITCHY. The little white haired ladies and the other young mothers would look at me in disgust that this sweet child would be uttering such a repulsive word. But, F....F was absolutely worse. You simply cannot imagine how many TRUCKS and DUCKS we would find on F-day. "Mommy, Mommy, look at the f***!!!", he would YELL excitedly. We would find them in stores, in parks, always in public places where every adult present would look at me in abject horror to hear the f-bomb being dropped by a toddler. After a while, I merely became immune to the looks.

We were never parents to lie to our son about the names of his body parts. His penis was his penis. Not a willy, not a pee-pee, not a jigger, a penis. He would bathe with my husband sometimes, but, at this point, we already knew that this child was a little too smart for his own good, so he didn't bathe with me anymore. So, he knew that Daddy had a penis too, like him, and one day he asked if I had one too, and I told him no. He didn't ask any other questions so we left it at that. Never tell a child more information than they ask for. Topic closed...or so I thought.

One day we went to the grocery store and we're in the check out line, I'm filling out my check, he's flirting with the check out lady and all of a sudden he blurts out in that loud baby voice of his "Mommy has NO penis!" You could have heard a pin drop in the entire store. The check out lady looked at me horrified, I turned about 15 shades of purple, my son started singing "Mommy has NO penis!" over and over like a new song. I gathered up my groceries as quickly as I could and RAN out of the store.

From then on, my son used that expression as a sort of "Greeting" whenever we went anywhere. He told everyone. Bank tellers, gas station attendants, convenience store clerks, strangers who just happened to stop to talk to him, EVERYONE. The conversations would go something like this:

"My, aren't you a hansome little guy!"
"Mommy has NO penis"
Person looking to me in shock, and quick end to conversation with me purple and running out of wherever I was.

Finally, I just more or less, gave up. I realized he was going to do this to me forever and I might as well just accept it.

One day, I think went to get a slice of pizza for lunch. I ordered the pizza, the girl told him how handsome he was, and out came the the proverbial, "Mommy has NO penis!" The girl looked at me with that same look I'd seen a hundred times or so by now, and I just looked back at her and shrugged and said back to her, "Well, I don't!" This, for some reason, embarrassed HER and she quickly turned around to find something else to do. Like find our pizza.

Out of the mouths of babes.

Out of the Cuckoo's Nest

Someone unknowingly said something to me today about a "Rubber Room". He had no way to know about it, and I had no idea the impact those words were going to have on me. It wasn't really his fault, he truly had no way of knowing. But, being "involuntarily committed" is bad and that's what "rubber room" now means to me.

The hows and whys I ended up there aren't especially important, except to say that I was not there due to the drug and alcohol addiction issues or withdrawal like most of my floormates. I was pretty much a zombie for my first 24 to 48 hours on the floor so I don't remember much. Mostly that I was cold. That was the first thing I remember, actually. Being so cold I was shivering, and thinking that I didn't understand why it was so cold in hell, because I knew I was dead. Obviously, I wasn't. After that is when my partner in crime showed up, and that's when I really started to remember stuff.

Learning the ropes were pretty simple. You were a sheep. They woke you up, they gave you meds, they made you eat, they made you go to stupid classes, and they gave you very little down time. We did pretty well for a bunch of zombies, because, see, I wasn't the only one.

Oh, there were REALLY funny things in there. Like the guy that hoarded EVERYTHING in his room. He would steal pencils from everything so he had like 40 of them when he was released, plus 30 packages of snack crackers, plus packets of sugar. He snagged everything. Then there was the guy that stripped naked and ran ALL over the entire floor before security could catch him. We wanted popcorn for the show. There was the guy that played solitaire all the time and accused himself of cheating (this is way to weird to make up). There was also the girl that I went all through school with that had been fighting serious demons then, and obviously things hadn't changed a whole hell of a lot in 30 years - that wasn't funny, that was sad, and extremely ironic. We had one conversation the entire time I was there, she was there before I got there and was there after I left.

They wouldn't give us dental floss. We had to go ask for it and only then, they'd give us less than a foot, because they didn't want any hangings. Excuse me?? I know dental floss is strong, but hanging by dental floss?? I had to laugh. We couldn't have mouthwash. OK, I can sort of see that, there's recovering addicts on the floor. We also couldn't have deoderant either if it had any alcohol in it ((insert mental image of someone licking deoderant)) I'm sorry, that one made me laugh too. And yes, it was like round up time at the OK Corral when it was time for meds becauase the nurse had to stand behind her little window and hand them to you with your little cup of water and then check under your tongue to make sure you took them.

We DID in fact have our own version of Nurse Rachett, she had no sense of humor and yelled at us all the time. We couldn't have shoe strings or strings in our sweatshirts. OK, OK, there's that hanging thing again, at least those made more sense than the damn dental floss. The food ALL tasted the same. And they monitored ciggarette breaks. They allowed you one ciggarette at 10, at 12:30, at 2 at 4 at 6 and at 9. The smokers would freak if they missed their smoke break.

The place was surreal. There were 2 payphones on the floor, but, you weren't really allowed to have change, so you either had to make collect calls or people had to call you, and there was no privacy. Bedtime was at 10pm period, or Nurse Rachett would be mean to you. We did arts and crafts things, I'm sorry but I found a LOT of humor there. A bunch of adults drawing or gluing or doing paper towel tye-dye. That was probably the most enjoyable part of the day though. It's where I learned to laugh again. I hadn't laughed in months, and I actually laughed in there one day.

I had to be without my partner in crime for 3 days before they allowed me to go home on Christmas eve. I lost a lot of myself before I ever went in there. I found a little of me in that place, and I've been learning me ever since. Parts are gone forever, never to return. Parts are newly discovered that I need to learn to embrace. It's only been 2 years. My partner in crime and I go out on our "anniversary" to celebrate the change in our life that happened the day we met, and the fact that we're here a year, now two years later. I love her a lot, she and I are the only ones in the whole world that understand what we went through together. Because we're the only ones that were there. There WERE funny things. Even in there.We found them. I even make jokes about it now, saying that I'm the psycho-bitch from hell and even have the papers to prove it. Most don't believe or really understand the reference and just laugh it off like any of my other comic relief lines.

It really was just a joke, Mar, there was no malice and you know that. Maybe someday words like that can fly under the radar and I won't feel like I was sucker-punched. Today just wasn't that day.

Why I'm Not a Planet and Who Wrapped Me

First of all, I am not a planet. That would be Mars, with an *s*. I'm Marz with a *z*. I've been that for twenty-mumble-something years. It probably actually started one of those nights up on the mantle, but I digress. I always wanted a nickname. But my Father, wouldn't allow it. "Your name is Martha, if I wanted to call you something else, I would have named you something else". I thought Martha was old fashioned and stuffy and I wanted a nickname that, well....wasn't. However, battling my Father was like battling a brick wall. You're not going to get anything but sore hands.

When I went away to college everything changed. I was away from home, I was living on my own...sort of...I lived in the dorms. Made new friends, and they shortened my name, to Mar. That worked for me. My name, just shorter. I also had the total "little miss innocent face" thing going for me. Nobody ever suspected me of doing anything wrong....Ever. Which, except once, worked to my advantage. We'll save that *once* for another time. My last 2 years I had a single room and as it was legal to drink in the state of NY, we would drive the 15 miles to cross the state line and buy alcohol to take back to campus. Yes, we actually were smart enough to not drink and drive, mostly.

My college was a small State College, now University in upstate PA, and all state schools were dry campuses. So, this contraband liquor was brought onto campus by my friends and brought where? My room. Why? Because I looked more innocent than anyone else and no one would ever suspect me of breaking ANY school regulations. So, I hid all of the booty in my closet, hidden behind a little cabinet i put in there, and no one ever clued in. When someone wanted their stuff, they just came to my room to visit, and we made them drinks while they were there and off they'd go with said drink in hand and no one was the wiser.

Back then, there was a candy bar called a Mars Bar. They were great. Another extinct candy at this point, I think they disappeared somewhere in the 90s. My friends started taking the wrappers from the candy bars and taping them to my door. After all, it was Mar's Bar. I had the only bar on the floor and everyone but the Resident Hall Assistant knew it. I think at one point, there were 30 wrappers taped to my door, amid all of the other things my door was decorated with.

I eventually took the wrappers down, all but one so as not to draw *too* much attention to myself, and I wrote MarZ Bar on my dry erase board that hung on the door for people to leave messages on. Just a little change in the name, but enough to keep the idea intact.

So, I finally had my nickname, even though it never came into my house. My Father to his dying day called me Martha. I didn't have to fight the impenetrable wall and kill my hands, I just had to quietly go around it...sort of.

The End of Ends Part II

About a year after the funeral crashing event, my favorite cousin died, and his death hit me really hard. I was already going through some strange issues in my own life, among them, I'd started finding a few grey hairs here and there and I just wasn't ready to cope with that, not yet. I know it sounds extremely trivial, but in the midst of all of the extremely difficult things that were going on around us, this trivial hair issue meant a LOT to me. I went to my hairdresser and told him I wanted to dye my hair. But, I didn't want to dye it so that there would be any question as to whether or not my hair was dyed. If it was going to be dyed, I wanted the ENTIRE world to know it was dyed. So, I dyed it......purple. Yes, purple. When I was indoors, under normal lighting, it wasn't too dramatic. But when I was out in the sunshine, my hair was OH-MY-GOD-PURPLE.

My mother, toddler son, and I had to make the 9 hour drive to the little town where my cousin's funeral was going to be held the day AFTER one of my hair dying applications. This little town was in rural West Virginia. That's right, West-By-God-Virginia. I'm driving into the upper edges of the Bible-belt with purple hair. Even Satan is going to smite me, and the funny thing about it was, I didn't even give it a thought. UNTIL...

The morning of my cousin's funeral was bright and sunny. When we arrived at the funeral home, the director asked us if we were going to the cemetery, I told him yes, so he had me park on the street and put a sign on my dashboard. There were a lot of people present and there were cars on both sides of the street, leaving only enough room for one car to go down the center of this two way street. My mother, son and I got out of the car and started to walk toward the already crowding funeral home. We were met near the door by one of my Aunts. The sunlight reflecting off of my nearly iridescent purple hair. She kissed us all hello and then the conversation went something like this (please insert HEAVY country accents here)....

"M, do you KNOW your hair is purple?"

"Yes, Aunt V, I know it's purple." (What was going through my head was "OH MY GOD, YOU'RE KIDDING ME!!!!! The Hair Fairy must have snuck in and whacked me in the head turning my hair purple in my sleep!!!....which is actually kind of funny as my hairdresser IS in fact gay so, "Hair Fairy" isn't really that far off the mark...heh)

"Did you MEAN for your hair to be that color purple, or was it an accident?"

"I meant for them to dye it this color Aunt V, really."

"Really."

I had that same conversation about twelve times that day with different members of my family.

Before the ceremony I was a little nervous, so I left my son with my mother and I went for a little walk down the sidewalk to get some fresh air. Again, totally forgetting the whole purple hair thing. UNTIL.....

A car driving down the now narrow street almost plowed into one of the parked cars because he was too busy staring at my purple hair instead of watching where he was driving. Can you just imagine that headline?? "Man dies in car accident as a result of purple hair...Film at 11". It was now obvious to me that not one of these people could handle purple hair. It scrambled their brains.

I was already trying not to laugh. That was obvious enough to my mother who kept shooting me dirty looks, which, I may add, didn't help. Of course, the weird country biker music they were playing in the funeral home was not helping either. The spittoons in the corners of the rooms adding a certain ambiance, along with lots of people with missing teeth added to the overall picture. Scenes from Deliverance as well as strains of Dueling Banjos were playing in my head. All that was missing was the shotguns and everything would have been perfect. Once again, I found myself in the position of trying to cover my face with my hands to hide the fact that I was trying not to laugh. Tears were forming in my eyes, and I was shaking. At least this time, no one would have been curious as to why I would be crying. I truly adored my cousin. Personally, I think he would have thought the whole thing was funny too and knowing him, would have been laughing right along with me, though I bet he couldn't have kept it hidden as well as I did. I will say this much, that one also goes up there with one of the strangest funerals. EVER. Just one more thing, my cousin would have loved my purple hair.

I try to stay away from funerals in general. But, as we get older, we have to go to more of them. I've honestly got to admit though, that I'll take the strange and funny ones over the horribly sad ones anytime.

The End of Ends Part I

My WonderHubby and I actually crashed a funeral once.

The mother of a wonderful woman that I met online passed away, and I got notified in an email and had no way to contact her about arrangements or anything. Her mother's hometown wasn't too far from us, so I grew determined that I was going to that funeral. WonderHubby didn't think I'd be able to find it. After all, ALL I knew was her mother's first name, and the hometown my friend was from. Well, courtesy of the internet (insert superhero music here) I tracked down the town's local paper, found the only woman with that given name that died around that time and with a pending funeral in the next few days. OH, and with a daughter who's name just happend to be my friend's. We were good to go. OK, Mapquest for directions to the funeral parlor, infant son in tow, and we were off to the funeral the following day. We make the two hour drive down there, and arrived about 15 minutes before the funeral is about to start, when I suddenly get cold feet. I don't want to go in. WonderHubby now looks at me like I've just lost my mind because I've made him miss work to go and through all of this, and now I'm too scared to go in. So, after a few heated moments in the car, in we go. We meander our way through the throng of people, find my friend, she bursts into tears and all is wonderful, well, sort of, considering her mother had just died. We talk for a few minutes and go find seats in the back in case we need to escape with the little one and the service begins.

Now, before I continue I feel that I need to point out a few things. I am Christian, I was baptised and raised a Lutheran. WonderHubby is Jewish. We have a wonderful respect for the other's religions and everything is very smooth in our home. It's other places where we run into......issues. This was one of those places.

The service was run by a Holy-Roller Sothern Baptist Preacher. Now, in general, I don't have a problem with that and neither would WonderHubby. We both believe that everyone practices their religion the way they feel works for them. Everything went fine UNTIL...

The Preacher asked us to bow our heads in prayer, no problem with that, and then proceeded to do an Alter Call. For anyone who doesn't know what an Alter Call is, it's the time in the service when the Preacher calls for anyone who has not given themselves over to Jesus Christ to be SAVED to do so by a show of hands while everyone's heads are bowed. Well, I have NEVER, EVER heard of anyone doing an Alter Call during a funeral in my life, and I stole a peek over to WonderHubby and he just had the most perplexed expression on his face, a total WTF??? I proceeded to start to laugh. It began by subtle shaking, and I started to feel tears well up in my eyes and then I had to dessperately try to keep laughter from spilling out amid this totally silent congregation. This was the WRONG TIME for me to get hysterical laughing. I put my hands up over my nose and mouth and hoped that everyone would just think I was crying like the other mourners. Even though there were people staring at me anyway because they hadn't a CLUE who I was and why I would be so distraught over the passing of Miss Mary. But, seriously, here was this Baptist Preacher, now very much on his roll, and my VERY Jewish husband being told to hand his immortal soul to Jesus Christ in the middle of a funeral that he only went to in the first place because he thought I was completely insane, and was no doubt in fear for the life of our infant son, and he's now looking at me like WTF is THIS?? I almost choked myself to death on my own laughter-tears.

Thankfully, I survived the near death experience.

Beginning at the beginning or the beginning of ends

I've been told more times than I can count that I should either do stand-up or write a book. Writing a book seems totally daunting to me. Entirely too much criticism by entirely too many people BEFORE it ever makes it to the public arena. I don't know if my fragile ego could handle that kind of rejection. Honestly, I've done the stand-up bit...sort of. If you consider getting me slightly drunk at fraternity parties and putting me up on the mantle and talking to other drunk people and cracking them up into hysterics as doing stand-up. Apparently I was good at it, because they had me do it on a regular basis. It didn't give me a salary, but, it did provide me with free beer, which, for a college student in the 80's was just about equal. Does that give me any credibility as a comedienne? No, it gives me credit as a college girl who liked to drink beer on Friday nights and talk too much, who other semi-drunk or drunk people thought was funny.

Could I do that today? No. First of all, I don't get drunk and stand on mantles anymore as a general rule. It just doesn't seem like a good plan. Secondly, I don't think I'm actually funny enough to earn a paycheck trying to do it. I do know people that will disagree with that statement, even though I tell them that they're wrong. I think I have moments where I'm funny. I understand and use sarcasm quite often. And, quite frankly, I'm a weird-shit magnet. If something weird is going to happen to someone, it's going to be me. Chances are that usually makes for a comical story. I also think I might not see things the same way others do, and that I'm usually able to find something truly amusing in just about any given situation. Even truly macabre ones, like say....funerals.

Yeah, funerals can be really funny. Maybe not so much for the dearly departed, though, I wouldn't totally rule that out. Wherever they are, I can imagine them watching their collected mourners and making comments like, "Marge, why in God's name did you wear THAT??", or "Dave, what is the deal with that TIE??", or "For the love of GOD, don't let Helen near the bar alone during the wake!!!" Truly a lot of room for humor if you look at it that way.

But, beyond that, things that I've actually SEEN, go sometimes beyond the scope of funny into the realm of just totally weird to the point of actually being afraid I'm going to get thrown out of *serious* places for laughing.

Mostly, though, I think I use humor to help me cope with the uncopeable, to deal with the undealable, to manage the unmanageable. I use that strange ability I have to find something, somewhere that can amuse me so that whatever oddity, or freak show, or tragedy doesn't turn me into a disaster while it's busy wrecking havoc all around me. I think THAT is what I do most with my odd~ball sense of humor.

So, friends, in this weird world of mine, there's almost ALWAYS something funny, no matter the situation, even if I have to look really hard, I am bound to find it...eventually.