Oxymoronic Dicks

Rhetorical devices such as metaphor, simile, alliteration, oxymoron, and allusion are the little frills that make writing interesting. “See Dick play” becomes “See Dick play with himself” using personification (some may think this is a stretch, but personification is defined as “ascribing human qualities to inanimate objects.”) “Play hard, Dick” is an example of a pun (or an oxymoron, depending on Dick). “Dick did Deb,” -- alliteration. And to complete our little story, “Run like hell, Deb” employs the use of simile.

Of all the rhetorical pretties, my personal favorite is irony. There’s nothing like a little contradiction to perk up a story; in Dick and Deb’s case, we could add Donny to the mix. Deb could run like hell into the arms of Donny, who is creepier than Dick ever thought about being. That’s irony. And if Donny’s as horny as a hippo in heat, that’s alliteration, simile, and irony all at once!

One of the best examples of irony I’ve ever come across involves a friend of mine. She’s a beautiful woman, my friend, who also happens to be a hotshot in a huge government agency. The woman makes a lot of money, and on top of that, she's very thin. As often happens, her dumbass husband -- let's just call him "Dick" -- left her for a dimwit freelance aerobics instructor with bad skin and a nasty personality several years ago. That marriage lasted sixteen months.

Not long after that marriage failed, Dick reconnected with a woman he knew in college. It was a whirlwind romance, and it wasn't long before my friend’s daughter called her mother during a weekend visit with her father.

“Mom,” she whispered, “Miss Diana has clothes at Daddy’s house now.”

“Well, sugar, they're together a lot,” my friend said, adding, "They're probably going to get married.

“Mom, I went through her stuff,” her daughter continued, “and guess what?”

Before my friend could scold her child for going through the woman’s things, her daughter came out with this gem: “She wears Granny Panties!”

The lesson, of course, is the age-old "Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it." And I love the irony of Dick trading his beautiful wife for a couple of big asses. In fact, I wonder if he ever asks himself this question: "Does this ass make my dick look smaller?"

I Am What I Eat -- In What Year?

The Whole Foods on Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta has a sign admonishing its customers to “only eat it if you can read it!”

That’s good advice, actually. Those yummy Pepperidge Farm Orange Milano cookies, for example, cookies I have no business eating, contain “interesterified and/or hydrogenated soybean oil.” Now, I’m not quite sure what interesterified oil is, but the very fact that the name includes a form of the word “terrified” kind of terrifies me.

The subject of scary foods reminds me of green Fruit Rollups. Years ago, back when I didn’t know about only eating what I can read, I thought Fruit Rollups were actually made of fruit. I now understand that they’re like having a little fruit with your psychadellically-colored chemically-based food additives. We owned a condo on the beach in Destin, Florida. Friends were staying in the condo, and their toddler, Anna, ate a green Fruit Rollup or two. Now, I don’t think the Fruit Rollup made her violently ill, but Anna barfing up that Fruit Rollup in six different spots on my white carpet made me violently ill. After that, my kids no longer enjoyed those little pancake-thin fake fruit thingies ever again.

But I wonder, is the reverse of the “if you can’t read it, don’t eat it” axiom true? Just because you can read it, should you eat it? I remember back to a time when I was a little girl and clearly read a food label for something that I would not have put in my mouth for all the Ding Dongs in Dallas.

My grandfather, my mother’s dad, was a World War Two fighter pilot who flew jets for a worldwide shipping company after the war. He retired in 1982 to a 300-acre farm in Milner, Georgia, where he raised what we now know as organic local grass-fed beef.

I was raised on that beef and on the pork from his pigs. And on my grandmother’s chickens, which were just as organic as Pa’s cows. And on those chicken’s eggs. And on vegetables from their garden and from my father’s garden, which might have been the most organic garden in three counties. I vividly remember how our yard smelled when Dad spread a load of stuff he got from the Clayton County Water Authority to put on that garden. He called it “sludge,” a kind of euphemism for what really was just sanitized shit.

Eggs, steak, beans, greens, pork – words a kindergartener can read. According to the experts, that’s what is healthy. And I’m pretty sure that’s why the people in my family have consistently enjoyed terrific health.

Back when Pa had the farm, he and my grandmother had a large chest freezer in the basement of that farmhouse. When my cousin Barbie and I got tired of playing in the creek and swinging on the tire swing and naming the cows, we used to go down to their basement and investigate the contents of that freezer.

I remember one time pulling out a package wrapped in brown butcher paper that had a three-inch strip of masking tape on the outside. The words “pork shoulder – 1965” were written in my Nanny’s perfect cursive handwriting. Barb dug her hand deeper into that freezer and came out with “beef ribs – 1963.”

“Ewwww!” we shouted in unison. It was around 1976, and I was probably nine years old, Barb ten.

“Eat it if you can read it?” We read those labels loud and clear. That shit was older than we were.

Nanny and Pa sold the farm several years ago and moved to a house with no basement. Pa died nearly three years ago, and Nanny will celebrate her 86^th birthday this month. That old chest freezer, now completely rusted over but still running just fine, sits in their carport, and I’m willing to bet there’s still some stuff in the bottom of it that’s older than I am.

I joke about staying on Nanny’s good side because I don’t want her to leave me that freezer in her will. But if she does, I’ll drive down to that house in Barnesville and dig through that old freezer. And I’ll laugh through my tears when I read her handwritten labels on packages that will surely remind me of the fun times I spent at the farm when I was a kid.

But there’s no way in hell I’ll eat any of it.

All That Candy is Going to My Head

The day before Halloween, my niece, Kate, came out of school carrying two bags of candy and the hat to her witch’s costume.

She was a cute little witch. But the best part of that costume, according to my sister, was the fact that they didn’t have to fix Kate’s hair that morning. Tangled, matted curls are part of a witch's persona.

Kate climbed into my car and immediately began rummaging through her candy. She pulled out a Twizzler and said, “Oooh, I like these!” before polishing it off in two bites.

She held up a Twix and said, “Want one?”

“No, baby, but that’s really sweet of you to share. You eat it,” I answered.

As she unwrapped the Twix, she said very matter-of-factly, “I know what too much candy doos to you.”

“Does,” I said, the English teacher in me feeling the need to correct. “What does too much candy do to you?”

“It makes your hair tangled.”

Someone could have told me that when I was a kid. You see, I have enough hair for three people, and when I was a kid, all that hair was a major pain in the ass.

I remember making my brother and sister late to school because both my mom and I were trying to tame the wild kingdom on top of my head.

It was so bad that my brother nicknamed me “Werewolf.”

Raymond Adkins, the boy who sat in the assigned seat behind me every year in school because Adkins came after Adams, loved to shuffle his hands through my hair and say during Bible class, “I bet this is what Gideon’s golden fleece looked like!”

Kate’s answer made perfect sense to me because I clearly have hair issues and I dearly love Milk Duds, Raisinets, and malted milk balls. In fact, my hair kinks up just thinking about Heath bars.

The next day, I received an email from Disney with this teaser: “Unleash Your Inner Disney Villain!”

I’ve already explained how the whole Disney princess thing turns my stomach. But I can do villains; they're more realistic, in my opinion. I clicked on the email, and to my great delight, Disney had provided a quiz to help me discover who, exactly, is my evil cartoon altar ego.

The first question was, “Your closest friend is . . .” The choices were (A) My hairstylist (B) My gym buddy (C) Anyone who would lend me money (D) I prefer henchmen or (E) I have lots of close friends.

Hmmm. I’m pretty close to my hairdresser. One can’t cope with hair like mine without a dedicated and competent hair stylist. Josh has been taming my mane every four weeks for nearly fifteen years, and in that time, he’s seen me through the birth of a child, a bitter divorce, and sending a kid off to college. He’s a friend and amateur therapist with enough dignity to consistently refuse my offers to live rent-free in my home in exchange for doing my hair every morning.

As for the rest of my options, I have no gym buddies because I prefer to do walking lunges alone. I don’t borrow money from friends. I prefer to pay my henchmen in order to guarantee their silence. And the “I have lots of close friends” option is a copout – that answer will surely result in some sappy “You can’t possibly be a villain” result.

Having eliminated the other choices, the answer to that question is (A) My hairdresser.

Another question: Do you have a fatal flaw? For me, the most appropriate answer is again the first choice, A, which reads, "Well, I do collect more than my fair share of speeding tickets."

And this: What do you worry about? The choices are (A) A bad hair day (B) Looking bad in front of my loyal fans (C) Getting outwitted (D) Nothing (E) Failing in my quest. Of those choices, unfortunately, my best answer is (A).

I tallied up my score to find that I’m not Ursula the Sea Witch, even though I am of German heritage and feel much better when I’m near the ocean. I’m not Maleficent or the Evil Queen or Gaston or, thankfully, Hades.

I am Cruella De Vil, thanks to my over-processed hair and horrendous driving.

It’s quite funny, actually. Three horribly mischievous dachshunds run my life, yet I’m cast as a villainous puppy killer. I finished the quiz and walked downstairs to put my dogs outside for the day. I opened the door leading out to my garage to find that during the night, they somehow managed to jump onto the seat of my golf cart and from there reach onto the shelf of my barbeque grill and pull down the large bag of chewy treats – doggie Milk Duds, if you will. They ate all the treats and then shredded the bag. And then they got sick from eating too much candy.

At least their short hair won’t tangle.

A Twist on Happily Ever After

I have finally figured out the whole Disney formula for happily ever after, and it’s not that complicated. Sitting in Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyworld eating a $150 breakfast one fine morning, I had an epiphany. Cinderella and Prince Charming approached our table, and my friend Ann looked at me and said, “Look at Prince Charming. Isn’t he gorgeous?”

“Yeah, and gay.”

“Nooooo!”

Prince Charming was, in fact, charming. He was, like Mary Poppins, “practically perfect in every way,” with his blue eyes, blonde hair, and too-perfect smile. But there was no missing that he was gay, unless you were Ann.

“He’s not gay. Look how good he is with children.”

I swear she said that.

So here’s my revised happily-ever-after formula: Go ahead and marry a gay man if he’s a fabulously rich prince. He won’t care about the thousand bucks you drop on a pair of Manolo’s. Come to think of it, as your stylist, he will probably insist they were practically made for the new Vera Wang you need for the State Ball. He wouldn’t dream of jumping you for sex in the bathroom just before the dinner with important heads of state. Why not? Because he did your hair and makeup.

A gay prince will pick up his own dirty socks. In fact, he’s neater than you are. He can cook, too, better than you can. Happily ever after, indeed. I can’t see the downside.

And it’s a helluva lot more realistic than the Princess crap we parents happily pay Disney to disillusion our daughters with.

Look at Belle, the young beauty whose love is enough to turn an ugly, brooding beast back into a loving prince. Hell, marriage is almost the exact opposite, don’t you think? Those loving princes turn into brooding beasts about six minutes after the honeymoon ends.

And don’t even get me started on Pocahontas. She’s a Disney princess who actually represents the Mouse’s attempt to portray a strong, independent heroine. But do they tell what happened to the woman after the movie ended? No. They forget to mention that John Smith, her prince in the movie, is not the man she married. Four years after she saved John Smith’s life, her father, Chief Powhatan, and the governor of Jamestown, Thomas Dale, arranged a marriage between her and a man named John Rolfe, even though she was already married to another Indian chief named Kocoum.

Did you get that? Her dad and a dirty politician basically annulled her marriage and gave her to another man. Pocahontas was a strong, independent woman who, as it turns out, had no voice in her own life.

She traveled to England with her new husband at the invitation of British businessmen hoping to use her to attract investors for development of the new colonies. While in England, she contracted smallpox and died.

Happily ever after for, what, a couple of years?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for having dreams and pursuing them with a passion. But teaching our daughters – or allowing Disney to teach them – that a man is the means for achieving their dreams is doing them a terrible disservice.

So dress your daughter up as Pocahontas. Let her be Princess Pocahontas for Halloween and every day for the rest of the year. But let her know that Pocahontas didn’t live happily ever after with Prince Charming, and that’s sometimes the way life goes.

Or sometimes, Prince Charming has some secrets she won’t discover until it’s too late for happily ever after.

A few months after my sister married her very redneck, absolutely heterosexual husband, a friend casually mentioned that they had heard a rumor that a former boyfriend of hers was actually gay.

Her husband slowly turned his head toward her and, with half a can of Skoal poking his lower lip out, drawled, “I jess hope to Gawd he was that way ‘fore he met you and you didn’t make him like that.”

Maybe that’s what happened to Prince Charming.

Horny Toads and other Dysfunctional Reptiles

Not long ago, my nephew Joe asked for a “wizard.” My brother, Beau, understood what Joe was saying, and a few days later, Spike the Lizard was on my sister’s doorstep, accompanied by a glass cage, a warming rock, and a bag full of live crickets.

Beau knew what Joe wanted because when he was about Joe’s age, he was fascinated with reptiles. He used to hang out around the creek behind our house and catch snakes, a practice I could never quite appreciate. Probably because I hate snakes.

So when my son asked for a ball python several years ago, I put my foot down. No way, no how, not ever would a snake become a member of my household.

His dad promptly bought him a snake. They brought Freddy (named for Freddy Krueger) home, and I had a fit. That thing would NOT enter my house. So Freddy went to live in the pool house. And every week, Hunter’s dad drove him to the store where Freddy was purchased, a stinky place called Randar’s Reptiles owned by a man named Spider, to buy little white mice for that python to squeeze.

Well, his dad drove him to Randar’s for mice until the week that he didn’t. And the next time Hunter fed Fred, the poor snake was so hungry that he bit Hunter’s hand when he struck at the mouse. Hunter yelped in pain and apparently ran from the pool house, leaving an opening between the lid and the tank just big enough for a ball python to squeeze through.

I'm just glad I insisted Freddy live in the pool house.

We never saw Fred again. After a few months, Hunter was hankering for another snake, and this time I really put my foot down. No way, no how, would we ever have another snake.

And we didn’t for a month or so, just until his dad went out and bought him another snake.

Fang just wasn’t as loved as Fred was. Hunter would forget to feed him for a couple of weeks, and I would find myself at Randar’s Reptiles buying little mice for the python because I felt sorry for a snake.

One Saturday afternoon, I was standing in line at Randar’s waiting for Spider to sell me mice when a guy in his mid-forties with greasy hair and bad teeth walked up to me and said in a very creepy voice, “What kind of snake do you like?”

“Uh, I hate snakes. My son has one, and I’m here to buy food.”

“Oh.” He grinned, then, “What kind of snake do you have?”

“Ball python.” I turned and pretended to be picking out the fattest mice.

After a brief pause, he said, “I like those.”

At that moment, a light went on in my head. I turned back to the creeper and said, “Do you want another one?”

His eyes lit up, and he said, “You’ll just give me a ball python? They’re worth about $80.”

“I know. And yes, I’ll just give you a ball python.”

He hesitated, then asked, “What about its cage. Can I have the cage, too?”

I was willing to give him the cage, the warming light, and – hell – a year’s supply of free mice if he would just take that damn snake off my hands.

Now, I know it’s never smart to let a stranger, especially a creepy one, follow me home. But I also knew I lived in a gated neighborhood and it wasn’t likely he would be able to get past the guards ever again. So I said, “If you will follow me to my house, I will give you the snake and everything that goes with him.”

And he did.

Not counting the Chinese Water Dragon Hunter purchased last October and then returned to Spider after a two months, our home has been reptile-free for a few years.

My sister’s home has become the new reigning reptile house, with the occasional frogs and turtles thrown in just for fun. In fact, Joe announced to the family last week that he was heading out. He had decided to walk to Mexico so that he could find an iguana to add to his collection.

Remember the old nursery rhyme about little boys:

“Snakes and snails/and puppy dog tails/That’s what little boys are made of.”

That may be true. But in all my dealings with the masculine species and their reptilian leanings, I’ve come to believe that perhaps the entire male species is simply suffering from A Reptile Dysfunction.

Acornucopia

My littlest dachshund has been acting rather squirrelly the past few days. And if I’m honest, I have to say that her nutty behavior is partly my fault.

When I was a kid, my mom used to make Pine Cone Choirs during the holidays. Members of the Pine Cone Choir had bodies made of pine cones with acorn heads glued on top. She painted little faces on the acorns, their mouths all in an “O,” as if they were permanently singing the first note of “Joy to the World.”

I remember looking for acorns to be used for the Pine Cone Choir people’s heads. The acorns had to still have their “hats” on, and they needed to be long enough and plump enough to have room for a painted face. Finding plenty of perfect acorns was sometimes tough, especially if we began searching after the squirrels had sifted through the nuts.

To this day, if I see a “perfect” acorn, I pick it up. It’s not like I’m going to make any Pine Cone Choirs, but I guess some habits stay with us forever.

And really, there’s a second reason I collect acorns.

In her 2006 best-selling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert writes about the Zen Buddhist belief that there are two forces working at once to bring an oak tree into existence. The first, obviously, is the acorn, the seed full of the potential to become the giant oak. But the second force is the future tree with its desire to exist, a longing so great that it creates the seed from which it was born. According to Zen Buddhism, it is the seed’s potential along with the future pull of the already-existing tree that join together in helping that tree become what it was meant to be.

I love that. I love looking at pictures of myself as a small child and saying to that little girl, “It really is ALL good.” But even more, I love the thought of the woman I want to be. She's standing at the top of the mountain and yelling encouragement back at me: “Yes! You can do it! Things might be hard right now, but what you dream of becoming is absolutely possible, and I’m just waiting for you to join me.”

So I pick up acorns. My housekeeper must think I’m nutty because I have two or three acorns next to my computer so I can see them when I write. I have a few on my nightstand, a few on my bathroom counter, and a few on my back porch, next to my quiet place. I keep them to remind me that it’s not only possible to become what I was meant to be; it’s inevitable, as long as I don't give up.

My little dachshund is terrified by the sounds of weed eaters, mowers, and blowers. Yesterday, when the yard people were at my house, she followed me around begging to be held. She ended up in my lap while I was at the computer. And while I was typing, she noticed my acorns on the desk and decided she had to have one. Before I could stop her, she jumped from my lap onto the desk, grabbed a nut in her mouth, jumped off the desk, and ran.

I tried to get my acorn back, but she hid it, or more appropriately, she squirreled it away. It took me the better part of a day to find the remains of my acorn. Just like a squirrel, she’d cracked it open and eaten the meaty inside. All that remained were a piece of shell and the cute little hat.

I know. I’m nuts, and so is my dog. But that doesn't discourage me, because I keep telling myself that the mighty oak is just a little nut that held its ground.

Scoopid Knows Best

My niece, Kate, turned five today. She’s the youngest of my sister’s four children and also the youngest of my parents’ nine grandchildren. Kate often makes me think of the nursery rhyme about the “Little girl with the little curl/right in the center of her forehead/When she was good, she was very, very good/but when she was bad, she was horrid.”

Not that Kate is ever bad, much less horrid. But she does have that little curl in the center of her forehead, and on top of that, her curls are red, which I think helps a little bit to explain why Kate never has and never will take crap off of anyone.

Now, those of you who know my family also know that, for over thirty years, my dad was the pastor of a very large church.

As a young child growing up in the Christian school, I can remember looking out the windows of many different classrooms and seeing my dad holding a large Styrofoam cup of coffee and trudging across the church parking lot, crossing the street, and disappearing into the woods that were part of Reynolds Park in Clayton County. He went to the woods every day of the week to escape the barrage of telephone calls and meetings inherent in his work so that he could, as he put it, “talk to God.”

I always thought those hours in the woods must have been more about God talking to my dad, because he always seemed to know exactly how to handle everything. I realize this is the opinion of a devoted daddy’s girl, but, simply put, my daddy was perfect. As I remember things, Dad always knew best.

Several years ago, I was asked to describe my dad by completing two sentences. The first sentence was, “On a good day, my dad was always . . .” The second sentence: “On a bad day, my dad was always . . .” I used the same words to complete both sentences. On a good day, my dad was always right. And on a bad day, he was (still) always right.

During the early days of the church, someone hung a cartoon on the door to his office. It depicted a man with his behind missing and looking as if it had literally been chewed off. The caption read, “Nothing serious, just a little chat with the boss.” Everyone who passed through the office laughed about it, and that cartoon hung on his door for years. No one -- and I mean no one -- ever had the nerve to cross the man.

My brother, sister, and I certainly never had the nerve to dispute him. We three children gave them nine grandchildren, and the first eight never had the nerve to talk back to him.

But then came Kate.

When Kate was three, the whole family managed to spend Spring Break in St. Augustine. And for the first time since my sister had four children in less than three years, the whole family went to a nice restaurant together. We had a lovely meal. The children behaved, the adults shared a couple of bottles of J. Lohr Cabernet, and we ate steamed oysters while watching the sunset over the Intercoastal Waterway.

After dinner, as we made our way to the parking lot, Kate’s brother, Joe, picked up a stick and started swinging it at two of his cousins. Dad saw what was happening and moved to grab the stick from Joe, ordering in his sternest “chat-with-the-boss” voice, “Joe, don’t you do it!” And as we have done our whole lives, my sister, brother, and I stopped to watch him take care of the matter.

But Kate was having none of it. She saw him heading for her brother and apparently did not like the look on his face. She reached down and grabbed two handfuls of sand and threw them at him. Then this fiery little curly-headed, red-haired powerhouse yelled at the top of her lungs, “You shut up, you scoopid!”

Dad stopped. And then my mom, all ninety-five pounds and five feet of her, threw herself in between the two of them and yelled at my dad, “You’re bullying a little kid. You go get in the car right now!

And he did.

That is not the man I grew up with. Or at least, it’s not how I perceived the man as I was growing up in his house.

This man was stopped by two furious females with a combined weight of 117 pounds. I was stunned. And so were my brother, his wife, my sister, her husband, and most of his grandchildren.

What happened? Is the Type-A personality permanently gone, washed away with retirement like the sandcastles we build on the beach? Or has he simply mellowed, maybe as a result of trading the coffee for cabernet?

Or did he finally, after all these years, have a little chat with someone who hadn't gotten the memo that he was supposed to be the boss?