humor

Raising the Dead

Poor Uncle Joe was dying.  No doubt about it.  He’d been in bed for days, getting weaker and weaker.  Family “sat” with him around the clock.  Cousin Frank who’d been sitting for hours, finally just had to slip out to the bathroom.  Uncle Joe opened his eyes for the first time in days.  He smelled apple pie.  He was hungry!!  He just had to have some pie.

“Sally.  Sally”  No answer.  That pie was calling him.  With his last strength, he slid out of bed, so weak he melted to the floor.  Creeping on hands and knees, he finally made it down the long hall to the kitchen.  As he pulled up to the table and reached for the pie, Aunt Sally turned and smacked his hand, “Leave that alone, you old goat!  That’s for the funeral!”

Vagina, Boobs, and Poop

surprise

This is the start of a twelve part series posted eight months ago.  I am now expanding into a book.  Enjoy.

This post has nothing to do with any of these.  I am doing a post on crazy things my mother has said and done and wanted to see if this garnered interest.  Mother is sensitive about her age and height, so I can’t mention the fact that she is past eighty, and “not tall,” but besides that, has said and done some interesting things. Continue reading →

Bill and the Bed Slat

Biil and his mean mama

Biil and his mean mama

My mother was hard on my brother, Bill. Totally unconcerned about his tender psyche and self-esteem, she spanked him when he was a tender child. She was a tiny, “not tall” woman with a squeaky voice to match, sounding a lot like Minnie Mouse. It was ridiculous seeing her flap away at one of us with a plastic fly swat, but she gave it her best shot from time to time, anyway. Not wanting to be part of such a ridiculous show and avoid further embarrassment was the most likely inducement to better behavior.

Bill maintains he got more than his share of spankings, but most of us feel she neglected him. One day when he was about six, he confronted her, “Mama, you wupped me five times today!” Stricken by this accusation, she answered him, “I know son. I should have wupped you more, but I can’t give you all my time. I have four other children who need wupping.”

The last time she brutally beat him, he was eighteen years old, over six feet four inches tall, and had ragged her one day till she wanted to murder him. After a final smart remark as he went out the back door, he bent over and waggled his behind at her. Overcome with fury, she grabbed up a bed slat conveniently standing beside the back door and threatened him.

“Bend over and grab your knees, boy!” He thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. He bent over, grabbed his knees just as she demanded, and waggled his behind at her again for good measure, just in case she hadn’t seen enough the first time. She drew back and smacked him across the rear as hard as she could manage. POW! The percussion verberated across the woods like a rifle shot!

Bill fell to the ground, proclaiming, “You broke my back! You broke my back!

Terrified, she imagined herself going to jail for child abuse, even though he was past eighteen and towered more than a foot above her, leaving two little girls without the comfort of a mother. Mustering bravado, she threatened. “Get up from there or I’ll get you again, boy!”

He hopped up and strode around the corner of the house, laughing to my dad who’d enjoyed the whole episode. “That smarts! I didn’t think she could hit that hard!”

Happy Birthday Bill. Watch out for Mother!

Miss Tillie’s Troubles With Samson

Miss Tillie, my Sunday School Teacher held my attention like no other before or since, giving the class candy, bubble gum, and tiny little paper umbrellas if we learned our Bible verses. Mother thought she ought not to bribe us to do our lessons. I thought Continue reading →

Let ’em Get Their Own Damned Cheesecake!

A simple comment can say so much.  For instance, I overheard a comment from my seventeen-year-old son that cleared things up for me far more than hours of counseling ever could have. He was trying to enlist his sister in some planned mayhem, probably because he had no money for gasoline, and she replied, “Now, Mom and Dad aren’t going to be happy when they find this out.” Continue reading →

Rubbernecking

 

Rubberneck 1Rubberneck 2

Though they were not actually deranged, they might have been described as teetering somewhere between pleasantly eccentric and moderately maddening, depending on whether you met them just met them socially or had to interact with them on a regular basis. Both held Master’s Degrees, Cookie’s in Education and Uncle Riley’s in Mathmetics. Cookie was head of a large public school system in Texas and Uncle Riley Continue reading →

Fifty-Two Pies

I love a well-stocked pantry. It makes me feel good to can and freeze food so that I can pull out good, wholesome “fast food” to serve at a moment’s notice. My husband, Bud loves pie. One summer, we had a bumper crop of butternut squash, so I reasoned it would be a great idea to make some of these up into pies and freeze them. I rolled
enough piecrust to build a driveway, prepared large kettles of pie filling, and kept my oven going till I had fifty-two beautiful butternut pies ready for the freezer. My kitchen looked like a bomb had gone off, but I was proud of those pies as I wrapped them and stacked them in the freezer, anticipating the pleasure of pulling out a pie from time to time to enjoy after a good meal with family and friends, along with a good story.

It didn’t exactly work out as I planned. I hadn’t taken Bud’s love of pie into consideration but I did get a good story out of the deal. Bud was delighted with “his” pies. All the food at our house undergoes an immediate conversion the minute it is cooked and becomes “his” as in, “Is there any more of my apple pie?” or “Who ate the last piece of MY pie?” I wouldn’t dream of making a dessert to take to work without making an identical one for home. I don’t know if he would be more hurt if I “ran around” or “cooked around” on him. He still hasn’t forgiven me for giving away a strawberry-rhubarb pie over twenty years ago and still brings it up regularly.

Anyway, Bud and I had pie after dinner that night. It was delicious. He finished the pie off the next day after lunch. When he went to get “his” pie after dinner that night and found the pies all frozen, he was horrified. I explained to him, again, that I made them to freeze and serve over the next few months. Apparently, my first explanation had gone straight over his head, like so much of my mindless babbling. (We’ve been married fifty_two years. That’s how it works.) Frozen, in relationship to food he was planning to eat right then, is the F word at our house. We try to avoid it.

Heartbroken and betrayed, he self-righteously pulled a pie from freezer and left it on the counter to thaw overnight. He consoled himself with butternut squash pie for breakfast the next morning, adding it to his new breakfast menu. That was just the start. Unless there was another dessert on the menu, you can bet Bud had butternut squash pie, sequentially going through that mountain of pies in less than three months. When I had the satisfaction of eating the last, lonely piece of the final pie, Bud spoke what were very nearly his last words, “You ate my pie!”

Fish Tale

We were all going fishing! Katie, Johnnie, and Aunt Ellie had come to spend the night. Before daybreak the next morning, carrying a picnic lunch, we all headed for the deepest part of Cuthand Creek, where the biggest, laziest catfish lay in the deep water, under the tall trees, waiting for foolish little water critters to drift by. Luck was with us that day as we Continue reading →

Working Things Out With Chris

Chris and Frogs0002
original art by Kathleen Holdaway Swain

Chris was the meanest kid around.  He threw rocks, kicked his dog, stole lunch money out of desks, broke in line for lunch, and was sassy to the teacher.  He had a giant pile of sand in his yard and dared anyone come near it.  All the kids avoided him.

This was a problem for me and my brother Billy when Mother visited Miss Alice, Chris’s next door neighbor. We sure didn’t want him to spot us so we always played in the far side of her shady yard.  One day, we were making villages of stick houses with mossy fields and sandy tracks for roads when, out of nowhere, POW!!  A rock popped me on the head, knocking me goofy.  When I quit seeing stars, I heard Chris laughing, “Ha!  Made you look!”

Look nothing!!  He nearly made me dead!! We jumped up and chased him, but he left us in his dust, fuming!  We had to come up with a plan to get that creep.  We puzzled and plotted the rest of the day.  He was the biggest, fastest, meanest bully around, so we’d have to outsmart him.  We decided to spy on him the next time Mother went to visit Miss Alice. 

We got our big chance the next day.  He glared when we went in her gate, just waiting to torture us.   The ladies decided to drink their tea in the backyard.  Even Chris knew he couldn’t  us get at us with adults around, so he skulked back to his own yard and kicked at his dog to cheer himself up.   We lay on our stomachs and crawled into the bushes to spy on him as he stomped over to where his mother was working in her flower bed.

Chris was even mean to his mother.  He sassed her when she told him to help, stepped on her flowers, sprayed the cat with water, and kicked over the flower pots.  Suddenly, he went crazy jumping and screaming.  When she finally caught up with him, she said, “Chris, it’s nothing but a little bitty frog!!!  He can’t hurt you!! Just stay still and I’ll get him. I don’t know why you’re so scared of a little bitty frog.”

That big bully was bawling like a baby.  “Get him off! Get him off!  Get him off!!! I hate frogs!” We had our plan!

We headed to the pond and collected a few frogs as soon as we got home.  The next morning at school I slipped in to the class room and got to work hiding frogs.  I put a couple in Chris’s desk, a couple in his pencil box, and slipped a really nice one in the pocket of the jacket hanging on the back of his desk.  I barely finished before the first bell rang.  Chris strolled in after the last bell.  All I had to do now was wait.  I did wish Billy could be here for the fun.

The frogs stayed quiet as we all settled down.  I kept waiting for the fun to start.  After a while, I got involved in a story the teacher was reading and forgot about the frogs.  That’s when it happened.   “Ribbitt!  Ribbitt!  Ribbitt!”   We all started giggling.

“Who did that?”  Miz McZumley was not amused.

“Ribbitt!!  Ribbitt!!”  Kids guffawed!  The class was out of control.

Miz McZumley whacked her ruler down on her desk.  “That does it!  Storytime is over!  Get out your pencils and workbooks.”

You can imagine what happened next.  Two fine frogs jumped out of Chris’s desk.  He screamed and ran in place.  The whole class was hysterical as they chased frogs.  The teacher was furious at Chris for bringing frogs to class.  He blubbered a pathetic defense “I didn’t!! I didn’t! I hate frogs!”  Two more frogs jumped out of his desk, looking for their buddies.

“Then where did all these frogs come from?”  She wasn’t convinced.  Chris got paddled and was sentenced to pick up trash at recess.  I couldn’t wait for him to put on his jacket!!!  My bully problems were over.  There were going to be a lot of frogs in Chris’s future.