By buckeye in georgia on 11:20:39 09/27/08
dumb. But, like my wife, dumb is actually funny. Seriously, you can't make up stories like the ones I tell and you don't laugh about them when they happen, only after time has passed. It wasn't funny when the table broke and I did the ladder rodeo down the side of the house while my wife lay in the front yard screaming from the pain in her shins. But now, it's friggen hilarious to think back on. With "not funny then, but LOL now" in mind, I offer you this little gem.
When we were kids (I'm the 2nd of 7 boys) my younger brother and I were pretty good friends. We played together everyday and got into a lot of trouble together. In the early 70's, we lived in the last house of a dead-end gravel road. Every summer a tar truck would come down the road and spray the road in an effort to keep the dust down. My brother and I discovered that after that tar baked for a day or so in the sun it would start to bubble up on the road surface. If you have never busted tar bubbles, you haven't lived. We grew to love the tar truck and the joy it would bring us. Nothing like the Nintendo and X-Box kids today. No sir, we knew how to pass the time and have fun and breaking tar bubble was one of our favorite summertime activities. You could literally spend the whole day breaking tar bubbles.
So, each year we would wait in excited anticipation while my poor mother prayed that the tar truck would skip our street that summer. You see, breaking tar bubbles is hard work and it's dirty. We're talking covered head to toe in tar by the time your day was over. Somebody had to get that tar off of you, and my mom was a friggen expert at it. She was an absolute professional. The other moms in the neighborhood would look on in awe as she stripped us naked in the backyard and scrubbed us down to our pearly white Irish origin. She was pissed, but that one day each year my brother and I were as clean as a kid could be in those times. We appreciated her efforts and vowed to not do it again. At least until next summer. Anyhow, thinking back on how my mom cleaned us is what is so frightening. And now, so funny...
In order to get the tar off you had to use a petroleum based product that would cut it. My mom's weapon of choice was lighter fluid. Not charcoal lighter fluid - the kind that you put in cigarette lighters. She'd soak rags, towels in it and scrub us vigorously down to the third or fourth layer of skin. There was NO trace of tar by the time she finished (We would then have to take two or three baths in order to get the damned lighter fluid off of us.) Doesn't sound so bad, right?
Well, thinking back, it wasn't so bad. I could live with my ears burning from the cuss words flowing from my mother's mouth while she scrubbed us down in the hot sun. I could live with the spanking my dad would give me later when he got home from work. BUT, the one thing that could have killed me, I didn't realize until years later. You see, my mom was a chain smoker. She ALWAYS had a cigarette dangling from her lips, including when she was covering my body in flammable liquid. WTF? Ashes two inches long dangling off the end of a cigarette that was barely dangling from her lips as she used words no woman should use. There was a friggen puddle of lighter fluid where we stood by the time she was done scraping us off. And the whole time, just inches away, she held a torch in her mouth that would reduce us to ashes within minutes. Cussing at us and belittling us. Threatening us with our very lives for our misdeeds. Yet, she allowed us to live. That means one of two things fellas; either she didn't know the opportunity she had right in front of her, or she loved us so much that she overcame her initial thoughts of killing us and burying us in the woods. I lean toward the second.