Misc

The Wedding Crasher


Dee officially crashed her first wedding this last Sunday evening. Her father and I are so proud.

Our dear neighbor Char generously opened her home as locale for the wedding of a niece of a woman with whom she works. The bride is Canadian but the groom is from Mexico and there may have been residency issues in play prompting the haste behind the ceremony. We found out about it the weekend before this last when Dee came home from a visit with Char overflowing with wedding preparation news. There is nothing more interesting to my Cinderella story in any guise loving daughter than a real live wedding.

The ceremony took place in the early evening on the front lawn. It brought back memories for Rob who was also married on a lawn.

“Both of your weddings have technically been on lawn,” I pointed out.

“Best kind.”

It’s also best to be “foreign” too he concluded later that evening as he overheard the a conversation among the groom’s friends about the importance of not being “from around here” when picking up women.

“I was exotic both times too,” Rob said, “so there might be something to that.”

Dee attended the ceremony and the dinner as she somehow fanagled herself an unofficial invite from the bride’s father during the dry run a few hours before the wedding. Curly hair, wide blue-gray eyes and a smattering on freckles on one’s small Who-like nose will take a little girl far.

She had it in her head to attend the dance. Cinderella at the ball is hugely significant in her current understanding of love and marriage though she’s now also added pinata’s to the “must-have” list.

At dinner Sunday night Dee had questions about marriage.

“Why can you only get married once?”

And I tried to explain the importance of “once” based on current understanding of what making a promise is but her eyes glazed over with incomprehension. Rob’s explanation later included a treaty on divorce and a reminder of the fact that we were in our second marriage, but I don’t think she was satisfied.

In Dee’s mind, a wedding is such an incredibly wonderful thing that it’s silly not to have one more than once. Perhaps she is right. It might be a better world with longer lasting and stronger relationships if we went hog wild and partied to our unions more often than just once or twice, if we are lucky enough to reach one of those vaulted milestones of 25 or 50 years. Maybe we should don finery and have a ball every year?

The wedding dance took place in the driveway which was lined with evergreens awash in white lights. The happy couple tripped their first married lights fantastic to Aerosmith’s Don’t Want to Miss a Thing. Dee huddled in a sheepskin jacket atop a folding chair watching the scene as though it were a Disney princess movie. I sent Rob to retrieve her at about 9:30.

“I’m missing the candy,” she announced as she got ready for bed.

“I’m sure Char will save you some,” I said and she was mollified.

As I tucked her in she asked,

“Why don’t girls dance with girls and boys with boys?”

“Well, they can, ” I told her.

“But not like this,” and she placed her cheek against mine.

“Well, people who dance like that are usually dating, ” I said which is mostly the truth and all the truth a girl needs at seven at any rate. “And girls can date girls and boys can date boys if they want to.”

I added the last part because it is true and because it’s never really too early to introduce your child to the idea that love doesn’t recognize gender boundaries.

Dee made a face.

“I don’t want to date girls,” she said. “Ju’stn likes boys though.”

Ju’stn is the fourteen year old down the street who Rob thinks might be “special” and who Dee had a wild crush on at the beginning of the school year.

“He only ever plays with boys,” she said.

“I’ll send your dad up to tuck you in,” my teachable moments credo will only carry me so far.

Feels Like Summer Rambling Thoughts


Woke up yesterday morning to warm, sun, and what passes for humidity here, and I thought, “Summer?” The question mark is essential because Rob believes we are in for a non-summer this year. Great. Let’s punctuate that with a heaping of Swine flu when school starts up and snow before Halloween too, shall we?

I long ago lost my taste for blistering Iowa summers which draped a person in hot moist air like a towel in a steam room. Back in the late 90’s, when I was still very much on my own, I loved that kind of weather. I ran around all summer in cut-offs, bikini tops and halters, went to the pool every afternoon and took long runs in the evenings. A decadent lifestyle. 

Humidity now feels like someone is stuffing a wet towel down my throat while kneeling on my chest, and I have neither the figure for a bikini top nor the patience for kid infested afternoons at the local pool. And long runs? Not to my knees’ liking. 

Ten years. Where have you gone? And what have you done with me?

Monday was lazy. Dee and I went into town to run errands. One of them was taking deposit containers back to the Bottle Depot, a filthy, disgusting time suck of a chore. I may have mentioned that the family that runs the place have a relative notion about hours of operation. Although the sign says 10am to 4PM, open and close have a 20 to 30 minute give or take on both. Knowing this, I just did a drive by around 10:30 and found customers backed out on to the street. Off we went to run the other errands, which included fortifying Dee with take away lunch because I was sure we’d still end up sitting and waiting a good half hour when we tried the Bottle Depot again.

While we were at the grocery, Dee spied two Army light-armoured transports and wanted to go over and take a peek as the soldiers were clearly on lunch break. One invited her to climb aboard and check things out. She did. She loves heavy machinery and uniforms. Rob says this is how they begin their seduction of the youth.

As we walked away we discussed the fact that soldiers are the ones who “stand on guard for thee”. Dee takes this duty of all Canadians very seriously.

“I watch all the time except for when I blink and am asleep.”

When do we lose that? The first time we single issue vote?

Later, as we sat at the Bottle Depot (40 minutes), I watched the car ahead of me. A young man not too many years younger than the soldiers we saw earlier. Iron Maiden shirt. Camouflage shorts. Cigarette dangling from his lower lip and hauling box after bag out of this little Nissan, each filled with beer cans. I wonder if he still stands on guard for Canada?

Eubie Blake #fridayflash


A Eubie Blake Flash Tale*

Eubie rode the subway downtown on weekday mornings even though he’d last worked for Banality of Evil Inc. four years earlier. He thought it was four years at any rate. Time was elusive since time had become other than what he remembered, a world where vampires were his friends and rather than short selling commodities he peddled necrotizing flesh like Hell’s butcher.

The last stop before the financial district was the Grand Hall. It hadn’t changed but for the murals which depicted a national history he knew he didn’t learn in school though everyone around him seemed quite comfortable with it. Eubie stopped to ponder an intricate portrait of the March on Washington that took place the year he remembered being born. The Mall was awash in reds and greens. Red blood and Army khaki. Photographic in detail Eubie found himself choking back a warm lump of bile and looking around as the few people who rode the trains as earlier as he did hurried past without a glance.

His own eyes burned as bloodshot as the bodies when faint strains of a classical tune he knew but whose dead composer slid just past his tongue tugged his attention toward the tunnels leading back down to the platforms.

Violin? No, viola, Dad, how could you not know the sounds of a viola?

That little girl’s image was tattooed on the used to be side of the dual screen deep in his cerebellum. Once he was certain he carried years worth of photos of her in his wallet. Now the only thing in his wallet, aside from a disturbing amount of cash stamped with likeness of dead presidents he didn’t always recognize, was a state mandated i.d. – chip-less because despite the equally mandatory prison farm sentence – it was just the way he rolled through this brave new existence. He could afford it.

Following the soft, insistent melody Eubie tried to remember the last time he’d been to see the Philharmonic. Zoey had season tickets but when she was in a snit she’d drag along one of her stiff vamp friends making sure he knew. Zoey was an old friend, a new lover and someone like himself who seemed to remember there was another time before the present one. She was also a vampire which had been Eubie’s first clue that life was amiss. Zoey was as beautiful and enticing as ever but not nearly as robust and ruddy with life and not nearly as obsessed with his inner thighs then as now.

“I have always loved a man with a good leg,” she’d said when he pointed out the differences.

“Did I have a good leg then?”

“When?” she asked.

Vampires had the attention span of a dog in an aviary. Zoey used hers to great advantage.

Short of the severely sloping floor that ran up to the turnstiles, he saw her. Sitting on a collapsible stool and propped up a bit by the tiled wall, her head tilted to the right and holding the viola lightly with her chin and graying cheek. Her skirted legs splayed in a manner most unladylike and had her legs not been covered with the first signs of mottling, Eubie would have been sorely tempted to bend a bit to sneak a peek.
“Duo in G Major? ” Eubie asked as he approached.

Unusual for one so involved in craft and decomposition, she nodded though it was more of an off tempo lolling of the head from side to side. It was a difficult piece for someone whose fingers weren’t near gelatinous and being sawed slowly off by the strings. Eubie admired pluck when he encountered it. He rocked back and forth from heel to toe and hummed along until instinct, and his appraiser’s eye, took over. He noted the youthful plump smoothness of skin that hadn’t yet to visibly succumb and the sureness of tone and pace in the music.

He reached into his jacket pocket for the phone to post a quick listing when a young suit walked between him and the dead musician. Eubie enjoyed catching shadowy glimpses of his former self from time to time but as the fellow continued by without a glance to right or left as all attention was honed on the blue-tooth and his own vacuous words, Eubie passed the phone and gently fingered the frequency jammer he never left his apartment without.

The infant businessman stopped in mid-word and stride and tapped quizically and than angrily on the hard black plastic protruding from his ear.

“Damn,” he said and continued on as he appeared to have caught the clatter of a coming train.

“Philistine,” Eubie said to the former girl who was finished and half-staring at him, her arms limp and the bow and viola balancing precariously on her thighs.

He walked a step closer, but no more. It looked hungry. He dropped a hundred dollar note in the open viola case that was well within her lunging range, but she watched him dully with seeming interest.

“Have a nice lunch on me,” Eubie told her.

*I write Eubie stories under the pen name of Christie Cox. This is an original flash fiction piece written especially for #fridayflash and it is the fourth Eubie Blake story I have written this summer. My inspiration will be obvious to a few who read my blog regularly and complete a mystery to others. I am currently waiting on a Eubie short story I have submitted to a spec fiction magazine. I am 50/50 hopes wise. Zombies are a hard genre because they are hard to make original because as a story there is not much by way of undiscovered country.