Putting My Toys Away

My butt implants have slipped, but now I have killer calves. That’s the last time I will go to Costco for cosmetic surgery.

That’s a post I recently placed on a social media site.

What the hell is wrong with me?

Is it nature? Is it nurture?  Did my pony kick me in the head?

Now I am an old man, and I still don’t know how I got this way.  But I have some suppositions.

First, here’s a small digression.  Many times, in my accounting career I dealt with guys who cheated others out of their dough.  I concluded that they stole because of what they heard after holiday dinners.  I pictured them as a ten-year-old listening to their father and uncles talk about how they financially screwed people. That ten-year-old grew up to be a money-grabbing A-hole.

Now I think about what I heard my own relatives say in the past.

First, there’s my aunt Dorothy.  She was married to my father’s brother Roger.  Dorothy and Roger were my godparents.  She was less than 5 feet tall – one of those elementary school teachers who were shorter than her students.

Dorothy once observed that one woman looked about as happy as a chicken with a severe case of hemorrhoids. I also heard dear Dorothy say stuff like:

• He sounds like a sick calf in a mud puddle.
• If it has tires or testicles, you’ve got trouble.
• An ugly building is just a pimple on the butt of the world.
• A man was led by his gonads instead of his brain.

Next, let’s hear from my mother, a proud and refined woman.  She was the eldest of four daughters born to straight-laced Irish parents who raised their girls on the South Side of Chicago and in Blue Island, Illinois.  Mom accomplished so much – she graduated high school at 16, became a teacher at 18, attended the University of Chicago, raised nine children, obtained a master’s degree, and more.

But Mom could also spit a bit of acid in her comments.  When she saw a disheveled young lady, my saintly mother said, “This young woman got off the bus, and from the looks of her she was about five minutes pregnant.”

I often heard this stuff after dinner, as the adults eased into the evening with a “few” drinks.  This was the time for stories. 

My brother Pete could twist a mundane event into a gut-wrenchingly funny tale.  His memory was so good that he recalled things that never happened.  Pete loved describing when uncle Roger needed hemorrhoid surgery.  He had a negative reaction to the anesthetic.  The doctor skipped the inflammation issue in the patient’s backside and did an emergency tracheotomy. Pete told the story from Roger’s point of view and focused on what it was like to awaken with a tracheotomy tube, not able to speak, and wondering why he still had hemorrhoids.

Pete spoke about when he was a bartender in a small-town tavern in Minnesota.  One frigid and lonely evening in January, the only customer asked Pete if he would hold the patron’s dog so he could shoot it.  The alky apparently had money for booze but not enough to feed his dog. That’s how Pete got his first pet.

Before Pete died, he wrote his own obituary.  It included this line: “Don’t tell my mother I am in advertising.  She thinks I am in prison.”

Finally, here’s a quick memory of my father. In his dying days, he was housed for a spell in a VA hospital where he shared a room with another vet.  One evening, my sister, Betsy, visited the old man.  She was about forty and his favorite daughter.  When she got there, she noticed the roommate was fast asleep – like, mouth hanging open and drooling and snoring sleep.  That would have been fine, except his junk was hanging out for the world to see. Betsy looked at Pop who said, “That guy doesn’t put his toys away after he’s through playing.”

Please don’t blame me for being me.  I never had a pony, I’ve never cheated anyone out of their dough, and I put my toys away when I’m through playing.