Horseman

My cousin’s boy has Downs Syndrome and maybe some form of autism and if you’re not accustomed to him he’s hard to understand. “What?” I kept saying. “He’s telling you about Buffy,” they told me. He’s an expert in a few areas, including some computer games and Buffy. They take him to a horse therapy place and say he’s easier to understand when he’s on a horse. He’s going grey early like the rest of us.

Musca domestica

My mother has a thing about flies. Screens on all windows, and airconditioning so she does not have to open them.

We, living across the street from a pig farm, find her a source of merriment in this respect.

She has always been like this. I have memories, as soon as I was big enough to swing a swatter, of richly harvesting praise by standing at the south wall of our house, between the scratchy juniper and the siding, swatting legions of flies.

I was reminded of all this when my wife told me this morning that our youngest daughter had killed 18 flies yesterday, together with her grandfather.

I mean, of course, that her grandfather was helping her kill the flies. And not, you know.

That will be a cherished memory of childhood someday. Like my memory of swatting flies at the back of my childhood home is. Ray Bradbury wrote a story, it might be in the Martian Chronicles, and it might not, about an intelligent house going on about its business after a nuclear catastrophe. The only characters are the house, making breakfast and so on, and a radiation-sick dog. The family members were all burned into the siding, where they remain, as silhouettes, by the blast. When I imagine that story, I imagine the back of my childhood house where I was swatting the flies.

When we were visiting the relatives a week or so ago, a fly flew by in the cool air of my mom’s house and I remarked, “Gee, you sure don’t have many flies” and my mother spent the next 15 minutes chasing that single fly. This time of year, we eat breakfast with flies crawling around our faces like those dazed people you see on CNN sometimes.

Laundry

Mother: [Doing laundry, holds up pair of child's pyjamas, with food, drink, paint and grass stains, and hole from wienerdog bite] ???
Father: Gamma had a great time at her grandparents’.

Word to the wise

If you are planning on spending the entire day laying large cement stones around the mother of all wading pools in the blazing sun without a shirt and the only person available to apply sunscreen to your back is a 6-year-old girl, have an adult double-check the application as soon as one is available, even if said girl swears to god, swears on her father’s eyeballs, that she did a perfect job.

Respite

Just when you think life is wearing you down, a panicked red cat streaks by with the string from a mylar helium balloon wrapped around his leg.

Sport ist Mord

Man: [Entering house from backyard, calmly] Sis, your boy’s in the fetal position in the yard, holding his head and crying.
Woman: [Runs outside] Honey, you okay?
Boy: [With giant bump in center of forehead] Waaah.
Woman: Oh, honey. [Hug] You have to watch out. You can’t stand so close to her when she’s swinging the bat.
Girl: [Cautiously] It was an accident.
Woman: I know. I got your uncle Mig with a golf club the same way when we were kids.

What teachers make

I saw this at Riley Dog today (I repost it on the unlikely chance that people reading this site don’t already read RD).
It was written by Taylor Mali.

Continue reading