Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Memoirist BS
Thirteen fvckvps
Can I possibly think of thirteen horrendous errors? Sure — provided they’re not all my fvckvps. Take, for example, the opiate-addicted anesthesiologist who injected himself with sufentanyl rather than fentanyl, forgetting the tenfold higher potency of the former. It was the last dosage error he ever made.
If I get stumped, I could steal stuff from the Darwin Awards website. For example, I could pretend I once crawled into a huge helium-filled advertising balloon like this duo.
Their last words consisted of high-pitched, incoherent giggling as they slowly passed out and passed into the hereafter.
. . . But I’ll try to stick to fvckvps drawn from my personal experience. Follow me below the fold.
High school English
You don’t frighten us, English pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottom, sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called Arthur King, you and all your silly English k-nnnnniggets. Thpppppt! Thppt! Thppt!
Suisan’s reminiscences about her schooling in English made me think about my high school English teachers. I owe them a lot, those gals. I credit them with teaching me to write, a skill which paid off big time in college. It’s frightening how few college students know how to write a coherent paragraph (let alone a coherent essay), particularly during timed final exams. I’m sure many of my As had more to do with the quality of my grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence variety, rhythm, and clarity, than with the quality of my ideas.
I don’t remember much about my 9th grade English teacher, Mrs. Baca. At the time, I thought she looked like Liz Taylor. I think she made us do one of those idiotic assignments where you write up your dreams for the future at the beginning of the year, do it again at the end of the year, then compare the two to see how far you’ve come. I doubt I came very far*.
We read The Old Man and the Sea that year. I hated it. I still hate it. I’m going to make Jake read it this year so that he can hate it, too. (See, Suisan? I didn’t learn anything from your post.) Seriously, though, what am I supposed to do about exposing Jake to Hemingway? I’m tempted to have him read The Best of Bad Hemingway and call that his Hemingway experience**.
But I digress.
Healer
Seems like Corn Dog and I are trading wacky childhood stories. Here’s another . . . kinda, sorta.
As a child, my first love was a woman who imagined herself perpetually on the verge of death. I am not a well woman! she would holler, and what did I know? I believed it.
The irony is, she wasn’t a well woman. Axis II diagnoses aside, my mother was a breast cancer survivor in the pre-chemo, pre-radiation, pre-tamoxifen era. She beat the odds.
Somehow, I was responsible — for the loss of her breast, her health, her youth. You took the best years of my life. Did she say that to me or to my father? Doesn’t matter; four- or five-year-old Doug took the blame.
I woke up early one Saturday morning (kids: in those days, we only had cartoons on Saturdays. I had no intention of missing a single one) to find a hole in our den’s screen door. My older brother woke up soon afterward and convinced me I had done it. It didn’t take much convincing; I felt certain I was responsible for everything. And so I made up a lie to deflect my mother’s inevitable anger.
“It was a bird!” I told her when she woke up and came into the den. “It, it flew in, and then it flew out, and it made that hole –”
“That bird was your father’s fist,” my mother said.
You mean it’s not my fault?
(Smart guy, my dad. A dumber man would have punched the wall and broken a few fingers.)
Yeah, it was all my fault. And I was always trying to make it better.
***
Karen gets outwitted
Another Jake story, courtesy of the boy’s mom. I’ll tell it as she told it to me:
Why I’ll Never Again Tell Jake I’m Smarter Than He Is
Before Jake turned two, we began struggling over food. I wanted to steer him towards a healthier diet but he objected. He objected by putting his finger down his throat, thus throwing up the objectionable food item.
After a while, he learned he could get his way by faking it. He would put his finger to the side of his mouth, which (at least at first) still got the desired reaction out of me but didn’t have that nasty barf side-effect.
But I figured out his little trick.
“HAH!” I said. “I’m smarter than you. I see what you’re doing — you’re putting your finger to the side of your mouth! Well, it’s not going to work.”
Whereupon he stuck his finger down his throat and threw up all over me.
Behold the face of cold cunning:
D.
Thirteen memories of Jake
I would have posted a lot more pictures, except the HP Scanner Gremlins are disgruntled this evening. Oh, well.
1. Karen was given a “3% lifetime chance” to conceive. In preparation for IVF, she had to get a baseline ultrasound to look for fibroids, etc.
The infertility doc’s partner did the ultrasound. “Well,” he said, “there he is.”
“There who is?” Karen asked in what I imagine was her Must Be Aggressive With Doctors voice.
There was Jake, of course. And there was egg on the infertility doc’s face. Um, so to speak.
2. Jake was a real kicker. Get me the hell out of here! he would scream.
Here’s a picture of Karen and her good friend Kira. Karen’s the pregnant one:
3. Karen had a relatively easy delivery. By the time she asked for the epidural, her doc told her, “Give me another five minutes and he’ll be out.”
Sorry, no crotch shots of the delivery. I remember thinking, No, for the love of God no, get him the hell out of there already. I suspect that was the last time Jake and I ever agreed about anything.
How big? 5 pounds, 2 ounces. For a comparison, this is a normal-sized pacifier:
4. Karen and I are hyper-rational types. We thought of ourselves as scientists back then, even though neither one of us made much dent on the world of science. Imagine our surprise when the post-partum parenting instincts kicked in.
Wow.
We argued over who would get the job of changing diapers — we both wanted to do it. (Yeah, that didn’t last.) We were like toddlers fighting over a new toy.
5. Jake had the best nanny. Julietta had raised three daughters of her own, and she treated Jake as if he were her fourth child. We wouldn’t have survived those first seven months without her.
6. Jake’s first word. Soon after arriving in San Antonio, the three of us were having lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant. Or, rather, Karen and I were having lunch, and Jake was having a bottle.
I pointed at a young couple at a neighboring table: 20-something gal in short-shorts, guy with handlebar moustache and baseball cap. “Bubba,” I said to Jake. “Buh . . . buh.”
“Bubba!” said Jake, who had never before uttered a syllable.
“Great, Jake!” we said. “Do it again! Buh . . . buh.”
Nothing.
Nothing at all for another two years. Now we can’t shut him up.
7. When he was about eighteen months, we took him to the San Antonio mall to buy new shoes. The saleswoman was a Hispanic gal with a low-cut top and ample cleavage. Karen and I watched open-mouthed as Jake grabbed two handfuls.
I imagine he was curious, never having seen anything quite like that before. The saleswoman laughed it off and seemed a whole lot less embarrassed than Karen or I. Afterwards, I told Jake, “You know, once you turn two, you won’t be able to get away with that anymore.”
8. Before he turned three, he figured out how to do things with the TV remote that we couldn’t do. Not content with Total Control Over Television, he tried to use the remote to shut off the room lights and the swamp fan. Then he pointed it at us, hit the off button, and laughed maniacally.
9. The kid has always had an amazing mind. You know that game, Tower of Babel? That’s the one with a stack of seven disks, one smaller than the next. You’re supposed to transfer the stack from one post to another, one disk at a time, never putting a larger disk on top of a smaller one.
Unbelievable would have been if he’d figured the puzzle out at age 2. Sorry, he’s not unbelievable. Amazing, however, was watching Jake play with it for two hours nonstop. Most adults don’t have an attention span like that.
10. And then there’s that puzzle with pegs and holes. You’re supposed to put the square pegs in the square holes, round pegs in the round holes, and so forth. Before he was one year old, he figured out how to do it the right way, but he did it that way only once. Forever after, he kept trying to figure out how to get the pegs to go into the wrong holes.
If we hadn’t seen him do it right that one time, I suppose we would have been pretty worried.
11. Remember Comet Hale-Bopp? I do. For two or three nights, I took Jake outside, put him on my shoulders, and pointed out the comet to him. I doubt he remembers this, but at the time, it seemed like an important thing to do.
12. Early religious instruction. One of the San Antonio synagogues had a fair — a Purim fair, if I remember correctly — so I took Jake to the fair to soak up some Yiddishkeit.
To this day, I regret not having a camera. They had set up a Jonah and the Whale ride: little kids climbed into the whale’s mouth, bounced around inside his stomach, and then slid out . . . well, you can guess how they slid out.
13. Twelve memories, and we haven’t even scratched Jake’s fourth year. I wanted to close on a recent photo, however. Here’s Jake, today, practicing Tae Kwon Do at the dojo (do they call ’em dojos?)
You know what to do. Leave a comment below and I’ll give you some linky lurve.
Next week: Thirteen Things I Learned from Cosmo, Part Quatre.
Lyvvie? Gene Tierney. Definitely Gene Tierney. (Not Lyvvie’s most recent post, but how could I resist?)
Pat goes a-voting (don’t you Canadians know the election is in November?)
See Dean choke the bald giraffe
Darla introduces us to author Jim Butcher
Placate May’s screaming dreamer
Trish’s Thirteen Ghosts of Toronto
D.
Cobwebs in the attic
My mom wouldn’t take my dad’s word for it.
“Lift Dougie up,” she said. “Let him take a look around.”
Okay, fine. I was game for it. I’d had dreams of a sunlit attic, plush carpet wall-to-wall, toy firetrucks and stuffed bears and a ten-inch-tall girl who had led me up there by playing on her tiny piano. Also, my grandfather claimed he kept a monkey in his attic; maybe we had one, too.
My dad lifted me up on his shoulders so I could look around. No toys, no monkeys, nothing but rafters and cobwebs.
“Look for wires,” said my mother.
No wires.
I told my first grade teacher all about it. My mom thinks there’s wires in the attic. She thinks people are listening to us and watching us.
She asked my parents about it at open house and they denied everything. Just Dougie making up stories. God knows I made up a lot of stories back then, so my teacher never doubted my parent’s version.
Back home, my dad said, “You don’t tell anyone what happens in this house. No one. Do you understand?”
You’re probably wondering why my mom thought people were listening to us and watching us. Sorry. I’m not supposed to tell.
D.
The fruit: looking vs. squeezing
Well, Karen liked my post yesterday (Alchemy) but I think I worried her.
“I’m afraid you’re bipolar,” she said last night. I’m waiting for me to fuck up, and she’s waiting for me to plummet from my high. Neither of us have experience with this optimism thing.
One of the best things about our new relationship: I am no longer a sexual predator. (Yet another sentence which will ruin forever my chances to be elected to political office . . . which, hey! gives me an idea for a Thursday Thirteen.) Lemme ‘splain. I have Male Roving Eyes, and in the gym or in grocery stores my brain and my legs tend to wander, too. I don’t exactly stalk these women, but I have to go down that canned vegetables aisle one more time to —
Well, for no good reason, that’s why.
But, now? Beautiful women still show up on my radar but I no longer feel like a missile tracking system locking onto a target. I see them, I appreciate them, and my mind lets them go. It’s nice. I no longer feel like I deserve the adjective creepy.
I look at the fruit but I don’t squeeze it. Well. I haven’t squeezed it for a long, long time, anyway. Back in 10th grade Algebra/Trig, the cheerleader who sat in front of me must have realized those were my knees digging into her ass, but she never said anything about it and never rearranged her furniture so that I couldn’t do that to her. (It took me about twenty years to realize just how easily she could have avoided my knees, which meant, omigod, she liked it. Am I wrong? But at that stage in my life, I was so used to girls ignoring me that I figured she didn’t even realize my knees were there.)
Karen knows about my roving eyes (the spittle hanging off my chin is a good clue) and tolerates it. She’s an ultra-realist, so unless something has a negative effect on her or Jake, she doesn’t mind it. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if either one of us were seriously tested . . . you know, if for example I were out of town and an aroused Russell Crowe walked into her bedroom, or if Jacqueline Kim walked into mine. What would we do? How much can we boast about our 24 years of faithfulness (counting courtship) if we haven’t been tested?
Eh. It’s not likely to happen any time soon. Neither one of us is a knockout and we’re both shy, especially around strangers. We’re not the kind of folks who attract seducers.
But I was talking about looking vs. squeezing. A long time ago, we were on a road trip and had stopped at a gas station to fuel up. Karen went to use the bathroom while I scrubbed the windows and filled up the tank. While working at this, I noticed a small woman with long, dark hair and immediately thought, Nice. My type. I saw her from behind, which is one of my preferred views of a woman, and I watched her for as long as I could, always in that low-key predator mode, a looker but not a squeezer.
Karen turned around.
I had to explain to her why I was laughing so much. Surprise, that’s all it was, but also a measure of delight, since for once I knew I’d be squeezing me some fruit.
I often wonder how she feels about her body — a body which has betrayed her and robbed her of so much. She can’t possibly view it with as much joy as I do.
And now I had better shut up before she accuses me again of being manic.
Now, if only I could get her to pose nude for a few photos. I wonder if nagging would work. Imagine me whining, “But SxKitten poses for Dean!”
D.
9/11/01: It didn’t have to change anything
On the morning of 9/11/01, a patient told me what had happened in New York City. I didn’t immediately believe him. Patients, especially the older ones, tell me lots of strange things. Not all of them are true, and this one in particular sounded unbelievable.
Between patients, I called Karen, and she confirmed the story. I didn’t see the footage until that evening. It still seemed unbelievable even after I watched the news. I felt like one of those cranks who refuses to believe in the Apollo moon landings. Surely this hadn’t happened.
At some level I began accepting the idea but I still kept it at a distance. I thought of it as I would a speculative fiction plot bunny. “Suppose it’s real. Suppose terrorists really did crash those planes,” and so forth. And I swear to you this is true: I wasn’t worried about what the terrorists would do next — I worried what George Bush would do next.
When it comes to politics, I’m not always right, but this time I was dead-on accurate.
The following thought is neither original nor particularly well-stated: the greatest damage to our country on 9/11/01 was that which was perpetrated upon us by our leaders. I saw it coming. I dreaded it. I knew the world had changed, knew it would take a strong and wise leader to weather the change, rise above it, and prevail; knew George Bush wasn’t that man.
I was wrong about some things. Frankly, I thought we would lose our civil liberties in a matter of weeks rather than months, and I didn’t expect the tide of public opinion to turn within the decade. Call me a pessimist.
9/11 didn’t have to change anything — not like this, at any rate. We could have learned from it. We could have led the world. We didn’t have to fuck everything up.
D.