A Fat Cat

We have a 16-year old cat, named Benjamin, which means he’s over 100 years old in human years. You can see that he is getting older. He’s got a cat belly that hangs down, he has trouble going up and down stairs, and sometimes when he meows nothing comes out. Despite all that, I want to age like my cat.

If I was like Benjamin as I got older, this is what a typical day would look like for me:

I would sleep until someone gets up to give me some food, and if no one is downstairs before a specified time each day, say 9:00, I would sit at the bottom of the stairs and yell, “Hey! Hey you! I’m HUNGRY so come and feed me. I know you’re up there, so come give me some food. A little water would be nice, too, preferably without hair in it. Hello? Are you listening? Hello?” At that point, having expended the energy I have before breakfast, I would go lie down again and wait for someone to get up. Maybe I’d even go back to sleep again.

When someone finally got up to feed me, I would run to the table and sit down with great expectations for the morning meal. However, once the food was brought and I realized it was the same thing I had for the last 4,357 days, I would start complaining. “This is it?” I’d say. “This is what I’ve been patiently waiting for?” I’d look from the plate to the person who brought the food a couple of times, give it a little stir with a fork, maybe give it a little sniff, and then just sit there for a bit. “You know, you’ve given me the same thing every day for the last…” (Being old I wouldn’t remember how many days it had been) “…month and I’m tired of this” I’d say.

When it became apparent that I wasn’t going to get anything else, I’d start eating. After a few bites I would go sit on the couch and talk loudly, to no one in particular, about what was going on in my world. “You know, I really didn’t sleep that well last night. You left me down here all by myself all night, and my bed isn’t the most comfortable thing I’ve ever been on. Then I have to wait FOREVER for my breakfast and you give me the same old, BORING food. Well, I’m not going to eat that slop!” After looking around and seeing nobody listening to me, I’d go back to the table, eat some more food, and drink my orange juice. After going to the bathroom, I’d probably go back to sleep, being tired from all that eating and complaining.

Around noon, I’d get up and eat a little lunch, drink some water, go to the bathroom again, and then I’d walk around the house talking to myself. “Why does it always seem like no one is around? Where is everybody? Hello? IS ANYBODY HERE? Hello?” I’d suddenly stop, overcome by a horrible thought. “Oh my gosh. Maybe it’s me! Maybe nobody likes me! I’ve become a crotchety old man. What am I gonna do?” After realizing that was crazy talk, I’d walk around the house once or twice more, mumbling something unintelligible, and then I’d go back to sleep. What else am I going to do all afternoon?

After sleeping for most of the afternoon, I’d somehow force myself to get up. As soon as I saw another human, I would run to the table, waiting for my next meal to come. If they walked past me, I’d yell after them, “Hey. Hey you! I’m hungry here. Can’t you see I’m waiting for some food? Don’t you just ignore me and walk away! Hey…HEY!” Thinking quickly, I would go after them and endear myself to them. I’d go sit close to them and in a soothing voice I’d ask them how their day was, how things were going. I’d stare intently into their eyes, waiting for their answer. If one wasn’t coming, I’d put my hand on their leg until they gave me their attention or pushed me away…whichever came first. Then I’d go back to the table and wait for dinner, elbows on the table, sour face in my hands.

After eating, I’d get myself cleaned up and then I’d go to bed, having dreams of being a young, frisky guy again. I’d be scoring an amazing goal or getting the game winning hit as the crowd went wild – until I realized the noise was just my thunderous snoring that woke me up. I’d turn over and then sleep until someone came to give me breakfast and we’d start all over again.

If I live to be as old as Benjamin I’ll probably have a belly that hangs down, I’ll have trouble going up and down stairs, and there may be times where nothing comes out when I speak. As long as someone brings me some food, I should be okay.

Pranks

The other day at work we were discussing some pranks that have occurred there. In one of them, a stuffed moose from the Holiday Party Yankee Swap was kidnapped and held for ransom. In another, the Manager of Development came in to work to find his office filled with white and pink balloons, wall-to-wall and almost floor-to-ceiling. He could barely even get in the door to his office. In the most recent prank, everything at one guy’s desk was covered with plastic wrap. His chair, his laptop, his monitor, his pens and even his sticky notes were all individually wrapped in plastic cling wrap. Though there were suspects for all these pranks, no one took credit for them.

I’m not against pranks as long as no one gets hurt and nothing is broken. Growing up in a family with nine kids, including seven boys, you either have fun with pranks or you cry and whine all the time. My older brothers played a great prank on my younger brother and I. Three of them would be in their room and they would have us wait in the hall outside of it, then they’d let us back in and one of them would be gone! We’d look under the beds, under the blankets of the top bunk bed, in the closet, and out the windows in case he was hiding outside. He was nowhere to be found. Then they’d have us go back to the hallway for a minute and when we returned to their room, there he was! They did this multiple times and every time one of them was gone. It took us a few years before we realized that there was a trap door to storage space in their closet and that’s where the “missing” brother was going.

Being taught well by my older brothers and being a bit of a wise guy myself, I participated in far too many pranks over the years to detail here, but here are a couple that I remember like they happened last week. 

I used to have an obsession with throwing things up on the ceiling that I think came from The Three Stooges episode where Moe throws a pie up on the ceiling, which then falls onto the face of a rich woman when she looks up. In the fourth grade, Ms. Silverstein, my teacher, stepped out of the room for a moment and I promptly took a Fudgie (a piece of chocolate candy for those who don’t know what I’m talking about), rolled it in a ball and threw it up at the ceiling, where it stuck – just above the door. Most of the kids thought it was funny, so I did the same thing with another, which was followed by more laughter. Ms. Silverstein, sensing something was wrong, came back in and looked around the room trying to figure out what was going on. Meanwhile, the first piece of chocolate was loosening up and barely hanging on to the ceiling right above her head. Just after she turned to go back to her desk, it fell to the ground, missing her by about an inch and landing on the floor. Luckily for me she never did figure out what happened.

You think I would have learned from that near miss, but no, I did something similar in eighth grade. We were doing an “International Week” in Social Studies where each student gave a report on a different country. Someone’s choice was Italy and the person brought in some cheese to share with everybody. While most of my classmates tasted their cheese, I rolled mine into a ball and threw it at the ceiling where it stuck just above my desk. Too many of my classmates were looking up at it so I thought I better get it down before the teacher, Mr. Lown, saw it and gave me detention. I hit it with my pen, but it didn’t move. I waited a minute, so as to not draw attention to myself, and threw my notebook at it, but it held on tight. I figured I needed something bigger, so after another minute I threw my text book up at it and knocked it down – along with the whole ceiling panel that was then all over me, my desk and the floor around me in about a hundred pieces! Needless to say, I got caught.

Looking back all these years later, the pranks I did in school were stupid, as was shutting the classroom closet door on my friend Smitty. Many pranks are kind of stupid. They’re fun at the time, but not so much later. Thankfully no one got hurt in any of the pranks I was involved in, although I did have to sit below a gaping hole in the ceiling of my Social Studies class for about a month. That was painful.

Pictures in Time

Last week we had to submit pictures for my son’s high school yearbook, which included his senior picture and a picture from when he was a baby. As usual, we waited until the last day, so we spent the night before going through albums and boxes with an assortment of pictures. As much as it was kind of annoying to have to do that when I could have been getting my beauty rest, it also made me really happy. 

As I was going through the pictures of my kids when they were little, there were a few things that really stood out to me. Foremost, was that both kids were smiling and happy in almost every picture. I’m not just talking about posed, “say cheese” pictures, but also unplanned, unscripted pictures. That is how I remember them; smiling, laughing, playing, just doing the funny, goofy things kids do. Another thing that was quite noticeable was that my kids did a lot together. It was really hard finding a picture of just my son, all by himself. In almost all the pictures of him, my daughter was right there with him, both of them smiling and laughing. Somehow there were also quite a few pictures that included me with the kids, which amazed me since I don’t remember my wife taking all those pictures. However, I’m glad she did, and I was glad to find there were also a number of pictures of my wife with the kids. At least they can’t say we never spent time with them, because we’ve got the proof!

The sad part is that they probably don’t remember many of those times. I know I don’t remember much before first grade. Sure, I remember a few things here and there, but not a whole lot. Even when we’ve broken out old pictures with my family and talked about what was going on when the picture was taken, I either vaguely remember or I don’t remember at all. I’m in the pictures, so I know I was there, but the memories are gone. In one way it’s sad that I can’t remember those times, but in another way it’s nice to hear my older brothers and sisters talk about something that they remember so vividly.  

One of my uncles once took a bunch of pictures at a family party in our backyard when I was just a little guy, maybe about six years old. There were aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, parents and grandparents at that party. He had them made into slides and years later he brought them and a projector to our house to show us. As we worked our way through the slides, I realized that one way or another I managed to get into a large percentage of the pictures. Here’s a picture of all the adults standing together as couples – with me lying on the ground, peeking out between someone’s legs. Here’s a picture of all the older kids – with me sticking my goofy face in from the side. Here’s a picture of random people standing around talking, unaware their being photographed at that moment – with me facing the camera with a cheese ball smile a mile wide. Strange, but I have absolutely no recollection of that event.

I’m sure that someday we’ll sit down with the kids, maybe even the grandkids, and look through those pictures and reminisce about that birthday party, or the time that my daughter made a whole snowperson family, or how my son always wore a hat or a visor, or the summer vacations on the Vineyard, or the first day of pre-school or kindergarten or first grade. Or hundreds of other things that my kids barely remember but I happily remember like they were just yesterday.   

Nicknames

I’ve always wanted to have a cool nickname, one that everybody would know, so that when the name was said everybody would know exactly who they were talking about. I know, it sounds extremely self-centered and selfish. However, when your name is Joe and the best anyone can come up with is Joey, you feel a little underwhelmed. Also, I don’t count knucklehead, nitwit and moron as nicknames, even if my older brothers called me those a lot.

When we used to watch Happy Days, Fonzie had a nephew named Spike. I thought Spike was a cool name, but it just didn’t fit me. I wasn’t a tough guy going around in a leather jacket. I was more of an easy going guy with a fake leather jacket…that cracked and split in the cold weather. Then there was Butch, which may have come from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. However, again the name just didn’t fit me. It was just too tough for a small, scrawny guy like me. For a long time I just went by the pathetic Joey.

Then around sixth grade, I came up with a decent nickname: Fry. That was a name that fit me, because I was small and I was French. My closest neighborhood friends started calling me that, but that was about it. It never caught fire. Even though I even painted a white navy hat with bright, neon colors with the name Fry on the front, and wore it just about everywhere for close to a year, only those few friends called me Fry. I did have one or two friends who called me Jose, what they thought was an ironic twist on my name since my ancestry is French. For both years of junior high, I was simply known as Joe, or Joey by those who’d known me since early-elementary school.

When I got to high school, I ended up with a bunch of different names. A group of guys that were a year older than me and knew my sister started calling me Slits, which was short for Slits for Eyes, because they thought I had small eyes. Then a couple of the guys on the baseball team started calling me Rooster because the nickname of the Red Sox shortstop at the time was Rooster, and I played shortstop. One time I had a good enough game in baseball that my name was in the local paper – as Chuck instead of Joe – so a few people started calling me that. A few guys on the baseball team called me Fifi (pronounced fee fee) because I had a hat that had the letters FE on it, and again because my ancestry was French. I have to tell you, when you get up to bat with the bases loaded and a couple of guys are yelling for Fifi to get a hit, the guys on the other team are not too intimidated.

So here I am fifty something years in to my life and I still don’t have a cool nickname. Now I’m not sure if I even want one. I’ve kind of gotten used to just plain old Joe. No hidden meaning, no people asking me all the time why I’m called Pee Wee or Dimples or Zou Zou. No embarrassing stories going back thirty or forty years that even my kids would get tired of hearing. Nope, you can just call me Joe. Or, as my Dad used to say, “Call me what you want, just don’t call me late for supper!”

It Says So in the Childcraft!

Another post in a series on Famous Family Sayings

In my family, when you made a definitive statement about something you had to be able to prove it. Mom and Dad taught us to question things, so if I said something like “The moon is made out of cheese” someone would ask where I had heard that and then tell me to prove it. Most families had some version of encyclopedias back then, including mine, even if they were a little out of date by the time I started using them. So I’d break out the encyclopedia that included an entry about the moon and then… realize my older brothers had just made a fool of me.

We also had another option that had entries on a whole bunch of topics, a book called Childcraft. It was basically an encyclopedia for kids, with simple language, pictures and illustrations. There were multiple books, but I think we only had one – How Things Work. I used to look up things in there all the time (OK, so I was a little nerdy as a kid), as did other members of my family. That book contained a lot of good information and I found it quite interesting.

One time, my sister had one of those definitive statement moments and when asked how she knew, her simple response was, “It says so in the Childcraft!” While what she said may have been true, my older brothers pounced all over that statement and made a joke out of it. In fact, they thought it was so funny, they started using that line all the time (which us younger ones picked up on and copied so we could be cool like them). That line got used so much it became a Famous Family Saying.

Here are some fictional examples of how this line may have been used:

One of us younger ones: “It’s getting cloudy outside, I think it’s going to rain.”

One of the older ones: “It says so in the Childcraft!”

Me: “Anyone know what’s for dinner?”

Older brother: “Roast beef.”

Me: “Again? Are you sure?”

Older brother: “Yup. It says so in the Childcraft!”

Older brother: “Joey has a new girlfriend.”

Me: “I DO NOT! Who told you that?”

Older brother: “It says so in the Childcraft!”

Older brothers: “Don’t tell Mom what we’re doing. You wanna know why?”

One of us younger ones: “Why?”

Older brothers: “Because if you do…” (fist punching other hand) “You wanna know why?”

One of us younger ones: “Why?”

Older brothers: “It says so in the Childcraft!”

One of us younger ones: “You’re in TROUBLE!”

One of the older ones: “What?!?! I didn’t do anything. How do you know?”

One of us younger ones: “It says so in the Childcraft!”

This last example would have been followed by a mad dash to get away before we got a noogie…or worse.

If you made any kind of statement that sounded smart, there was a good chance it would be followed by “It says so in the Childcraft!” It was funny at times, not so funny at other times. When you were just being a know-it-all, it was funny for everyone. When you were trying to be serious about something and got mocked with that line, it could be very frustrating. Now that I think about it, it was always funny for everyone except the person at whom “It says so in the Childcraft!” was aimed.

We used that phrase so often that the publishers should have been paying us royalties. For years, there wasn’t a week that went by that “It says so in the Childcraft!” didn’t get uttered by at least one of us. The strange thing is, I don’t remember Mom or Dad ever getting involved with this and having to stop it like they did with so many other things. I can’t say no one ever got hurt (at least emotionally), but I guess it never got out of hand. Eventually, as we got older, it died out.

Kids today wouldn’t know an encyclopedia from a cyclorama. Instead of researching something using an encyclopedia, they do their research using the internet. You could make a strong case that their “It says so on the internet” is our “It says so in the Childcraft!” With one exception that is; everything in Childcraft was true. I don’t know if the Childcraft books are still published, but if they were, you could probably look up “internet” and it would say that you can’t believe everything you read on the internet. That would be awesome, because when someone asked me how I knew, I could say “It says so in the Childcraft!”