Happy 2008, remaining LIFSOSnians. If any do indeed remain.
Ah, a new year. A new chance to re-start the blog. Yeah.
In 2007 I started off the blogging year with an account of a family Christmas in Maine, capped by a you-can't-make-this-up exchange regarding the old "Frosty the Snowman" Christmas special.
Nothing quite as funny happened this holiday, but there were some choice moments, which I'll relate below.
But for context . . .
F. and I took separate holidays this year. As you may know from her blog, she spent the holidays in Florida with her beloved munchkins. I rode the Greyhound red-eye (leaves Port Authority at 12:30 a.m.) to Portland, Maine, where my sister, sister-in-law, and niece live--now joined by my elderly parents, who just moved up from North Carolina.
Since my sister has been running herself ragged helping our folks settle in to their new condo, I felt I owed a couple of days' labor to the process as a filial duty.
The settling-in process has proved somewhat problematic. In large part because my parents--in addition to their furniture, and two (count 'em, two!) mini-vans--shipped 229 boxes o' crap north.
The 229-box figure comes from the moving company's manifest, but Dad LIFSOS feels that number is inaccurate, because many of the boxes are boxes-within-boxes.
The boxes-within-boxes--as I was to learn as I attempted to help in the unpacking--are in fact boxes o' crap my parents shipped from Long Island to North Carolina a decade ago, and which were never opened.
Really, you can't imagine what kind of crap they've shipped to Maine, whether in boxes or in boxes-within-boxes. Just a minor example . . . a CB radio antenna.
Yes, if this whole "Internet" thing turns out to be a flash-in-a-pan, at least Mother and Dad LIFSOS can fall back on good ol' Citizen's Band radio for communication.
The movers packed the vast majority o' crap, as the folks moved in haste in a (failed) attempt to get to their new home before the fierce Maine winter set in.
The movers basically packed everything in boxes labeled to correspond with the particular rooms the objects were in in the North Carolina house.
This system greatly perturbed my parents. Upon arrival, both of them were fretting about their inability to locate certain prized possessions within the 229 boxes o' crap.
In Mother LIFSOS's case, these included some "artworks," including a 19th-century engraving of Dante and Beatrice, and a painting of indeterminate origin which she referred to as "The French Girl With the Big Hat."
Whatever their dubious value as "family heirlooms," Mother LIFSOS was convinced that these "artworks" were so valuable they should really be hanging in the Louvre, and she was heartsick at the thought that they'd been lost, or pilfered by the movers.
[SPOILER ALERT: Dad LIFSOS and I did eventually manage to locate these treasures of Western Civilization. Phew!]
So on the afternoon of December 23rd, I was unpacking a huge box labeled "Dining Room," which contained much of the "good china."
Besides the "good china," it also contained meticulously wrapped empty jars of Newman's Own(tm) pasta sauce and Del-Monte(tm) peaches, which should have gone out with the recycling back in North Carolina, but which had made the 800-mile journey northward to the State of Maine.
Anyway, I unwrapped piece after piece, piling them up on the dining-room table. Then Mother LIFSOS pointed to a stack of odd-looking, boomerang-shaped plates and said, "Those chop plates need to go in the green cabinet in the hallway."
"Chop plates?" I asked. "What are chop plates?"
My mother shot me her patented "How did I birth and raise such an idiot?" look and said, "They're for when you're serving lamb chops. The bones go on the chop plate. They were a gift from your grandmother."
Chop plates? CHOP PLATES? Has anyone out there even heard of such an object, let alone used one?
Anyone, that is, that dwells on this place called "Earth" and exists in this realm called "reality"?
What's more, I had no recollection of ever having seen the chop plates when I was growing up, let alone ever having used one; meaning that if they ever had been used, they'd likely been out of action since Nixon was in the White House.
Then there were the candy dishes. Many candy dishes. I guess they were a big deal back in the day. Now Mother LIFSOS brags about just having a single sugar-free candy a day. So why the need for all the candy dishes? And I pointed to a hideous orange glass example.
"It's FAMILY!" Mother LIFSOS barked.
This was to be a recurrent response over the next couple of days whenever I queried why they were still clinging to various pieces o' crap.
Not "It's a family heirloom!" or "It's been in the family for a long time!" but just, "it's FAMILY!"
In the case of this particular candy dish, Mother LIFSOS snarled, "Aunt Liza gave that to me!"
And I felt like saying, "Aunt Liza's been a heap of ashes in a vault in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx for thirty years. Do you really think she'll cry tears in heaven if you got rid of this ugly old thing?"
So it went . . . until (not having slept for like thirty hours) I hit critical mass as evening came on.
I started to channel Jesus and Buddha and ranted to Mother LIFSOS about how ridiculous it was that she and Dad LIFSOS were hanging on to all of this crap at a time of their life when they should be scaling down and concentrating on what was really important in their lives and why were they both so obsessed with material possessions when they really don't matter in the overall scheme of things and so forth and so on . . .
Well, Mother LIFSOS gave me The Look again, and said . . .
"Your father and I like to have nice things!"
OK. Moving to Dad LIFSOS . . .
Dad LIFSOS is a retired industrial engineer. And he has the classic engineer's personality. If you know any engineers of any sort (except maybe the ones that drive trains), you know what I mean when I say "classic engineer's personality".
If you aren't familiar with this personality type, engineers have many quirks, but two defining traits are:
1. A tendency to disregard the input of anyone who isn't also a trained engineer. (And in fact they also tend to disregard the input of other trained engineers--although they may give that input the benefit of the doubt, just out of professional courtesy. Maybe.)
2. Engineering is supposed to be all about logic, objectivity, using rational means to assess data and solve problems, and so on. But, paradoxically, engineers often ignore freakin' obvious reality if it doesn't gibe with their own perceptions. (Because, after all, they're trained engineers, and you aren't.) In pure science, I believe this attitude is known as "changing the facts to fit the theory."
I read or heard an anecdote somewhere that serves as a perfect example of this mentality:
There was an engineer who never washed the towel he used to dry himself with after his morning shower. When his friends called him on this, he replied, "Why should I have to launder the towel? The only thing it comes in contact with is my body right after I get out of the shower--and, by definition, my body is the cleanest thing in the house at that point in time."
On Christmas Eve, Dad LIFSOS and I got in one of the minivans (Dodge Grand Caravan SE--the Cadillac of minivans!) to drive to the supermarket.
When we returned, the garage door was wide open.
"We forgot to close the garage door," said Dad LIFSOS.
[When I heard him say "we", I immediately thought of the classic joke in which the Lone Ranger and Tonto ride into an Indian ambush. The Lone Ranger says, "Well, faithful Indian companion, it appears that we're surrounded by hostile redskins." And Tonto replies, "What do you mean we Kemosabe?"]
So I said, "Um, Dad, it's your house, your garage, your car, and I don't even drive, so I don't think much about opening and closing garage doors, so what do you mean 'we forgot'"?
Dad replied, "But the remote-control is on your side of the van."
Anyway, the real great piece of father-son dialog came later in the day, as we hacked our way into yet another box in search of Dante & Beatrice and "The French Girl With the Big Hat."
We didn't find them in this particular box, but as we pawed through the usual assortment o' crap, I pulled out a clear-plastic zippered bag. It contained a smallish nubbly blanket with wires attached to one side.
On a couple of strips of masking tape, someone had written--in legible block capitals, using Magic Marker(tm)--"Twin-Size Electric Blanket."
Here's the exchange that followed:
Dad LIFSOS [squinting through his trifocals]: I don't know what that is.
LIFSOS [pointing at tape]: Well, Dad, it says here it's a twin-size electric blanket.
Dad LIFSOS: That's not my handwriting.
LIFSOS: Yes, but someone took the trouble to label this as a twin-size electric blanket.
Dad LIFSOS: Take it in to your mother. She'll know what it is.
LIFSOS [sighs]: Dad, even disregarding the label, just look at it . . . it's pretty obvious that this is in fact a twin-size electric blanket.
Dad LIFSOS: What's written on the box?
LIFSOS: It says "Middle Bedroom." [meaning it was part of the load o' crap in the middle bedroom in my folks' old place in North Carolina.]
Dad LIFSOS: I don't recall there being a twin-size electric blanket in the middle bedroom in North Carolina.
LIFSOS [resisting the urge to bang his head on the wall of the garage]: Um, seriously, Dad, you can tell just by looking at this thing that it's a twin-size electric blanket.
Dad LIFSOS [giving me the "How could I have sired and raised such an idiot?" look]: Take it in to your mother. She'll know what it is.
Then Dad got distracted by something else and I just tossed the thing over my shoulder.
Ah, a new year. A new chance to re-start the blog. Yeah.
In 2007 I started off the blogging year with an account of a family Christmas in Maine, capped by a you-can't-make-this-up exchange regarding the old "Frosty the Snowman" Christmas special.
Nothing quite as funny happened this holiday, but there were some choice moments, which I'll relate below.
But for context . . .
F. and I took separate holidays this year. As you may know from her blog, she spent the holidays in Florida with her beloved munchkins. I rode the Greyhound red-eye (leaves Port Authority at 12:30 a.m.) to Portland, Maine, where my sister, sister-in-law, and niece live--now joined by my elderly parents, who just moved up from North Carolina.
Since my sister has been running herself ragged helping our folks settle in to their new condo, I felt I owed a couple of days' labor to the process as a filial duty.
The settling-in process has proved somewhat problematic. In large part because my parents--in addition to their furniture, and two (count 'em, two!) mini-vans--shipped 229 boxes o' crap north.
The 229-box figure comes from the moving company's manifest, but Dad LIFSOS feels that number is inaccurate, because many of the boxes are boxes-within-boxes.
The boxes-within-boxes--as I was to learn as I attempted to help in the unpacking--are in fact boxes o' crap my parents shipped from Long Island to North Carolina a decade ago, and which were never opened.
Really, you can't imagine what kind of crap they've shipped to Maine, whether in boxes or in boxes-within-boxes. Just a minor example . . . a CB radio antenna.
Yes, if this whole "Internet" thing turns out to be a flash-in-a-pan, at least Mother and Dad LIFSOS can fall back on good ol' Citizen's Band radio for communication.
The movers packed the vast majority o' crap, as the folks moved in haste in a (failed) attempt to get to their new home before the fierce Maine winter set in.
The movers basically packed everything in boxes labeled to correspond with the particular rooms the objects were in in the North Carolina house.
This system greatly perturbed my parents. Upon arrival, both of them were fretting about their inability to locate certain prized possessions within the 229 boxes o' crap.
In Mother LIFSOS's case, these included some "artworks," including a 19th-century engraving of Dante and Beatrice, and a painting of indeterminate origin which she referred to as "The French Girl With the Big Hat."
Whatever their dubious value as "family heirlooms," Mother LIFSOS was convinced that these "artworks" were so valuable they should really be hanging in the Louvre, and she was heartsick at the thought that they'd been lost, or pilfered by the movers.
[SPOILER ALERT: Dad LIFSOS and I did eventually manage to locate these treasures of Western Civilization. Phew!]
So on the afternoon of December 23rd, I was unpacking a huge box labeled "Dining Room," which contained much of the "good china."
Besides the "good china," it also contained meticulously wrapped empty jars of Newman's Own(tm) pasta sauce and Del-Monte(tm) peaches, which should have gone out with the recycling back in North Carolina, but which had made the 800-mile journey northward to the State of Maine.
Anyway, I unwrapped piece after piece, piling them up on the dining-room table. Then Mother LIFSOS pointed to a stack of odd-looking, boomerang-shaped plates and said, "Those chop plates need to go in the green cabinet in the hallway."
"Chop plates?" I asked. "What are chop plates?"
My mother shot me her patented "How did I birth and raise such an idiot?" look and said, "They're for when you're serving lamb chops. The bones go on the chop plate. They were a gift from your grandmother."
Chop plates? CHOP PLATES? Has anyone out there even heard of such an object, let alone used one?
Anyone, that is, that dwells on this place called "Earth" and exists in this realm called "reality"?
What's more, I had no recollection of ever having seen the chop plates when I was growing up, let alone ever having used one; meaning that if they ever had been used, they'd likely been out of action since Nixon was in the White House.
Then there were the candy dishes. Many candy dishes. I guess they were a big deal back in the day. Now Mother LIFSOS brags about just having a single sugar-free candy a day. So why the need for all the candy dishes? And I pointed to a hideous orange glass example.
"It's FAMILY!" Mother LIFSOS barked.
This was to be a recurrent response over the next couple of days whenever I queried why they were still clinging to various pieces o' crap.
Not "It's a family heirloom!" or "It's been in the family for a long time!" but just, "it's FAMILY!"
In the case of this particular candy dish, Mother LIFSOS snarled, "Aunt Liza gave that to me!"
And I felt like saying, "Aunt Liza's been a heap of ashes in a vault in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx for thirty years. Do you really think she'll cry tears in heaven if you got rid of this ugly old thing?"
So it went . . . until (not having slept for like thirty hours) I hit critical mass as evening came on.
I started to channel Jesus and Buddha and ranted to Mother LIFSOS about how ridiculous it was that she and Dad LIFSOS were hanging on to all of this crap at a time of their life when they should be scaling down and concentrating on what was really important in their lives and why were they both so obsessed with material possessions when they really don't matter in the overall scheme of things and so forth and so on . . .
Well, Mother LIFSOS gave me The Look again, and said . . .
"Your father and I like to have nice things!"
OK. Moving to Dad LIFSOS . . .
Dad LIFSOS is a retired industrial engineer. And he has the classic engineer's personality. If you know any engineers of any sort (except maybe the ones that drive trains), you know what I mean when I say "classic engineer's personality".
If you aren't familiar with this personality type, engineers have many quirks, but two defining traits are:
1. A tendency to disregard the input of anyone who isn't also a trained engineer. (And in fact they also tend to disregard the input of other trained engineers--although they may give that input the benefit of the doubt, just out of professional courtesy. Maybe.)
2. Engineering is supposed to be all about logic, objectivity, using rational means to assess data and solve problems, and so on. But, paradoxically, engineers often ignore freakin' obvious reality if it doesn't gibe with their own perceptions. (Because, after all, they're trained engineers, and you aren't.) In pure science, I believe this attitude is known as "changing the facts to fit the theory."
I read or heard an anecdote somewhere that serves as a perfect example of this mentality:
There was an engineer who never washed the towel he used to dry himself with after his morning shower. When his friends called him on this, he replied, "Why should I have to launder the towel? The only thing it comes in contact with is my body right after I get out of the shower--and, by definition, my body is the cleanest thing in the house at that point in time."
On Christmas Eve, Dad LIFSOS and I got in one of the minivans (Dodge Grand Caravan SE--the Cadillac of minivans!) to drive to the supermarket.
When we returned, the garage door was wide open.
"We forgot to close the garage door," said Dad LIFSOS.
[When I heard him say "we", I immediately thought of the classic joke in which the Lone Ranger and Tonto ride into an Indian ambush. The Lone Ranger says, "Well, faithful Indian companion, it appears that we're surrounded by hostile redskins." And Tonto replies, "What do you mean we Kemosabe?"]
So I said, "Um, Dad, it's your house, your garage, your car, and I don't even drive, so I don't think much about opening and closing garage doors, so what do you mean 'we forgot'"?
Dad replied, "But the remote-control is on your side of the van."
Anyway, the real great piece of father-son dialog came later in the day, as we hacked our way into yet another box in search of Dante & Beatrice and "The French Girl With the Big Hat."
We didn't find them in this particular box, but as we pawed through the usual assortment o' crap, I pulled out a clear-plastic zippered bag. It contained a smallish nubbly blanket with wires attached to one side.
On a couple of strips of masking tape, someone had written--in legible block capitals, using Magic Marker(tm)--"Twin-Size Electric Blanket."
Here's the exchange that followed:
Dad LIFSOS [squinting through his trifocals]: I don't know what that is.
LIFSOS [pointing at tape]: Well, Dad, it says here it's a twin-size electric blanket.
Dad LIFSOS: That's not my handwriting.
LIFSOS: Yes, but someone took the trouble to label this as a twin-size electric blanket.
Dad LIFSOS: Take it in to your mother. She'll know what it is.
LIFSOS [sighs]: Dad, even disregarding the label, just look at it . . . it's pretty obvious that this is in fact a twin-size electric blanket.
Dad LIFSOS: What's written on the box?
LIFSOS: It says "Middle Bedroom." [meaning it was part of the load o' crap in the middle bedroom in my folks' old place in North Carolina.]
Dad LIFSOS: I don't recall there being a twin-size electric blanket in the middle bedroom in North Carolina.
LIFSOS [resisting the urge to bang his head on the wall of the garage]: Um, seriously, Dad, you can tell just by looking at this thing that it's a twin-size electric blanket.
Dad LIFSOS [giving me the "How could I have sired and raised such an idiot?" look]: Take it in to your mother. She'll know what it is.
Then Dad got distracted by something else and I just tossed the thing over my shoulder.
Charles:
I was scrolling around My Favorites list, saw you, thought "if Chuck hasn't posted anything after 6 months I should give up." Happily your hilarious recap of yet another Wills family gathering made up for the big gap in communications.
Rachel and Ivan and Blaine and Randal and Iris came to our Christmas Eve gathering. It was great to see them all. We missed you, though. I said that you don't even respond to my emails anymore!
Happy New Year.
jm
Posted by: Jeanette | January 07, 2008 at 12:18 PM
I think I remember seeing some chop plates in the treasure of the Knights Templar in the movie National Treasure.
Posted by: Homeslice | January 23, 2008 at 05:03 PM
This is just about the funniest thing I have ever read. I would have sworn you were writing about my parents.
Posted by: Jennifer | March 26, 2008 at 11:21 AM