2.23

You know you've come a long way toward adulthood when your favorite shirt is something appropriate to wear to work. You know propriety has you in its grip when your favorite shoes are conventional. You know you've made a wrong turning on the path from childhood when you delight in finding the last bagel in the conference room.

2.10

Oklahoma folk don’t care nothing for a storm. There’s respect enough for God and the Devil and good, rich soil, but these things are permanent, and it’s the permanent things that seem to register out there.
That’s where my mother was raised, out somewhere near where the collective memory of short-lived humanity fades into an even plain of old fences cutting up older land with lines that run straight east-west and north-south with nary a curve until they hit the edge of the forsaken lands of points nearer the coast where the Earth forgets its manners and has the all-fired audacity to roll up and down from time to time. Too changeable. And that’s just why storms don’t seem to register, neither. There’s just sky, out there. Folks’re too full up of it, since they get it all the time and everywhere, stretching east-west and north-south and heavy and the same.
That sky what never moves, that was my mother’s birthright, and it wormed its way under her skin until there was some measure of her that was permanent too. Most everything not nailed down to her was leached out and replaced with old, red dirt and a steady, whistling wind, I think. Or at least, she gave off that impression.
You don’t believe? You’re lookin’ at me with a curious eye, friend.
Alright, I’ll prove it to you. Time was I couldn’t stay home from school less I had blood flowin’ out my boots, but there you have it. Illness was always too transitory. Anyway, I had one day when the old boots were full up, metaphorically speaking, and she kept me home so I didn’t die on the way to school and arrive a corpse. So there I was, trying to learn how to breathe again when every breath was agony, and my mother was cleaning the house. Every now and again, she would vacuum by a window and say something like “huh.”
You’d huh too, and worse, if you saw the rain goin’ by horizontal. Now and again, a gust would roll past that threatened to invite itself inside, but she didn’t react. You might wonder why.
Having moved from Oklahoma to the rolling hills of Missouri, she had carried Oklahoma with her. ‘round her house, folks waited to head for the storm shelter “until you have to worry about the youngest flying away,” and even then they went with great reluctance. The storm would be gone again, sure enough, and the sky would go on like before.
She leant over me.
“Can you walk?”
“Hggghh.”
“We’re going to the basement.”
It wasn’t until the door closed that I realized just how loud the house had been singin’ in the wind. I sat on the bottom step, wrapped in two blankets, while my mother rearranged the cans on the shelf with a sort of cooped-up energy. But it weren’t five or six minutes before she sniffed, loud, like sayin’ somethin’, and she headed up the stairs.
Well, the house was still there, and the sky was still there. Some might even argue God was still there. But the tornado that had threatened for the last five hours had took some trees from the yard and no mistake.
Ah, well. Trees aren’t permanent anyhow. Mom is.

2.9

The Don’t Do It Gang

Radio serial theme music.

Narrator: This is the continuing adventure of the Don’t Do It Gang.
Chorus: Don’t do it! Don’t–don’t do it!
Narrator: That’s right, kids. The Don’t Do It Gang is brought to you by K-PURE and the Chaste United Network for Noble Youth. This week, we catch up with Bertha and Marjorie after school, shirking on helping their kindly parents.

Sounds of birds and crunching leaves.

Marjorie: Bertha, wait for me! Why are you going so fast?
Bertha: I don’t want any boys to follow us! All the boys in our class are so dull.
Marjorie: Yes, I’m only into older boys. Like Timmy Hornbuckle.
Bertha: Timmy Hornbuckle? Is that why you asked him and Jummy Trunkuncle to meet us at the reservoir?
Marjorie: Yes. I’m hoping Timmy will kiss me . . . again.

Music sting.

Bertha: (Gasps) He kissed you!

Both girls titter.

Bertha: Well, I’ll distract Jummy if you want. Just imagine if our parents found out!
Marjorie: Ugh. I can’t imagine what Ted would do.

Footsteps still. The birds are muffled and there builds a low droning hum.

Bertha: Oh, I forgot your step-father. (She shivers aloud) He’s so weird.
Marjorie: Mother thinks he’s so great, but she doesn’t know he’s been gone from the house for hours in the middle of the night all last week.
Bertha: But how did you find out?
Marjorie: On Monday morning at four o’clock, the hamster was screaming in the front room, and I went to find out what was wrong. I saw Ted pulling into the driveway in his ratty yellow Beetle. The clock started ringing and it just wouldn’t stop, and I . . . I . . .

Clock reverberates.

Bertha: Oh, Marjy!
Marjorie: The hamster was still screaming when Ted came in. He stopped and took his glasses off, and then (breaking) picked up poor Coffeecan and winged him out the front door like a baseball pitch.
Bertha: Oh . . .
Marjorie: Mother saw his empty cage in the morning and said it was the cat who got him. But I know the truth.
Bertha: That Ted! Poor Coffeecan.
Marjorie: He always was so Chock Full o’ Nuts!
Bertha: What will you do?

Low, insistent strings from the orchestra.

Marjorie: (regaining herself) I don’t know, Beth. He told me to come home straight after school today to help him move that nasty sailboat of his, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t be alone with him; Mother’s always at the quilting bee on Thursdays.
Bertha: Well, you can distract yourself with Timmy. Come on, then.
A few fading footsteps.
Bertha: Come on, then, Marjy! W–wait. Marjy, what’s that!?

Music sting. Fast footsteps.

Marjorie: Oh, oh no!

Strings to fever pitch.

Both: It’s Timmy Hornbuckle!

Both panic.

Bertha: Do you think he’s dead?
Marjorie: Timmy, Timmy, wake up.
Bertha: There’s so much blood—
Marjorie: What have I done?!

Background sobbing.

Narrator: That’s right, children. This is what you can expect will happen if you’re as sexually libertine as these girls. Marjorie has clearly killed Timmy with her disgusting licentiousness. She should have remained pure and helped her step-father, who is obviously a stand-up citizen and not guilty of any crime. Now, because of her kiss before marriage, she’s pregnant with Timmy’s child.
Marjorie: Bertha, I don’t feel so good.
Narrator: That’s morning sickness. It only happens to women who can’t wait for marriage to kiss.
Bertha: What’s happening!?

An enormous slorp and a baby crying.

Marjorie: (Screaming) God, why!?
Narrator: Too late to ask him for help.
Marjorie: (Screaming) I’m not ready to be a single mother!
Narrator: It’s a shame, really. Two lives ruined, and it could have all been avoided. Just . . . Don’t Do It.
Chorus: Don’t do it! Don’t–don’t do it!
Narrator: Join us next time, when we learn about the horrors of the m-word.
Male voice: (Screaming) My eyes!

The low drone returns, louder than before.

Narrator: Until then, remember: (through teeth) if the urge to get off the nut comes on you, don’t do it.

2.5

Now, you've used the past tense to refer to your wedding plans, which can only mean one of two things: you've discovered the inanity of social institutions and decided to forego them, OR you decided, for financial reasons, to enter a green card marriage with an entymologist from Bolivia, but you slowly realized that they were actually a secret agent working for the Argentinians the whole time and waiting for the moment in which they could bomb the Bolivian embassy in San Francisco, at which point they would leave you penniless and heartbroken in La Paz with their mother-in-law, waiting for them to return. They're the only two reasonable options. Enjoy picturing your South American honey pot in either strong, capable hands and husky voice OR elegant arms and ear poking through careless curls variety.