BIRTHDAY AFTERMATH

         Another year come and gone.  Another line.  Another gray hair.

Yeah.  My husband, Stij, only wishes that’s all there was to it.

We have quite a large garden in the back yard—it was Stij’s last ditch effort to keep me the hell out of the kitchen because he is tired of rebuilding the house.  The neighbors are sure that when our house gets dirty, rather than clean it, we just burn it down—this is how often the local fire department had been showing up each time I tried out a new recipe.

So this year, for my birthday, Stij decided to make my life in the garden (which I really do enjoy) easier.  In Arizona, we have two gardening seasons—spring/summer and fall/winter.  Once one garden is spent, I used to have to go out there with a shovel, rake and 20 bags of manure and sundry other stinky stuff, and amend the soil.  Backbreaking work, let me tell you.  And I am no longer a chicken of the spring.  I’m not even a chicken of the autumn.  I’m more like chicken that was mowed down by a Peterbilt while crossing the road.

At any rate, this past Sunday when I opened a very large box, I discovered one of those Mantis rototiller thingies!  My heart leapt! 

I now owned my very first . . . power tool!  Yes!  I couldn’t wait to try it out!  This was even better than cooking!

First, though, it had to be assembled.  They never show that in the commercials. 

So we dumped out the contents of the box, which sounded like the New York Philharmonic’s brass section falling over a cliff, and surveyed the wreckage.

“Uh, honey?  You look tired.  Why don’t you go soak in the tub for a while,” Stij suggested.

“Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“Yes.  Absolutely,” he said.

“But why?  I want to help you.”

Stij gave me THE LOOK.  I never pushed THE LOOK to the next step . . . THE REMINGTON.  I drew a bath.

When I got out later on, Stij had put the whole thing together and it looked great—just like on TV.

“Let’s go try it out!” I cried.

So Stij gassed it up and to the garden we romped.  Well, I romped.  Stij walked sedately.

I grabbed the two steering handles, and once Stij got it running, I pulled the accelerator. . . hard.

This tiny little machine and I flew across the garden, bisecting my fig tree, chopping my neighbors’ fence to toothpicks and creating a two foot deep ditch across their yard, finally coming to rest halfway through the trunk of a palm tree.

We only stopped because it ran out of gas.  If that thing had a bigger tank, I think I could have made it to Vegas in about 28 minutes.

After Stij pried the mangled metal from the palm tree and talked our neighbors out of a lawsuit, we went home.

“Can you fix it?” I asked foolishly.

“Why?  Do you want to take a spin around the block?”

“Is this why you won’t let me have a car?”

“You’re a menace to society.  You know that, right?”

“I think you may be exaggerating just a bit,” I sniffed.

“Really?  How about the time you added a hundred packets of yeast to your bread batter and then decided to cook it with a flame thrower?”

“I was only trying to stop it from engulfing the whole house.  It was eating the couch!  And it was only twenty packets.”

“And then there was the time when you made Thanksgiving dinner for the whole family and everyone wound up with such hideous diarrhea that we had to get a couple of porta johns to put out in the yard, because we only have one bathroom.”

“I hardly think it’s fair that…”

“OR the time you stopped up the drain in the sink and used sulfuric acid to clear it?

“Okay, okay, you made your point.”

“You need a new, safe hobby,” he said.

And that, dear readers, is how I came to be a writer.

Ya Wanna Coke With That?

           This seems to be my week for getting trapped.

This time, it was a pay toilet at a McDonald’s.

Now, understand, I don’t actually eat there anymore.  I just stopped, on my way to eat somewhere better than McDonald’s, because the Montezuma’s Revenge from hell had finally caught up to me from the last time I had eaten there.  I had to either stop or plan on dying my upholstery brown.

I did not want to dye my upholstery brown.

So, in I dashed.

I deposited the requisite quarter in the slot, yanked the door open and, ahhhhhh, blessed relief.

This relief was short-lived, however.

When I concluded my communing with the porcelain god, and prepared to be on my way once again, the door would not budge!  And it was one of those stalls that had an eight-foot door that was flush (no pun intended) with the floor, so crawling out underneath was not an option.

I tried calling for help.  You know . . . at first, tentatively.

“Hello?  Is anybody there?”

Yeah, right.  As if anybody would sweep to the aid of an unknown, disembodied voice emanating from a toilet stall at a McDonald’s in Brooklyn, New York.  What in hell was I thinking?

At any rate, my pleas soon became more urgent.

“Hey!  Someone get me out of here!  I’m locked in!  Help!  Help!”

The only thing this accomplished was to clear out the restroom completely.

So, I did the only thing I could do.  I sat back down to wait for a sympathetic soul or a police officer . . . whoever came first.

 I am a writer by profession, and I have never yet been oppressed by the demon “writer’s block.”  I can find something to write about in almost any given situation.

This one was no exception.

At the time of my entrapment, I was in the middle of writing a novel and was mentally chewing over some pivotal plot details that didn’t seem to be working.  As I sat, my mind set of humming and, low and behold, the solution came to me.

But I had no paper – only a pen.  And the toilet paper was far too thin to use.

This will never stop a writer.

I pulled out my felt tip and proceeded to jot my next seven chapters on the wall of the restroom.  It was brilliant, and I was ultimately thankful for my unwilling incarceration.

By the time an employee (who wanted to use the stall I was in because all the others were occupied) finally bailed me out, all four walls were covered with my scribbling, and it was the finest work I’d ever done.  I strutted out of the stall, proud as could be, until I came face-to-face with THE MANAGER.

“Hey, lady, what the hell ya think ya doin’ writin’ all over the wall like dat?  Ya know how long it’s gonna take to clean it all off?” he demanded.

“I don’t want you to clean it off!  This is the final seven chapters of my novel!”

“I don’ care if it’s the final seven chapters udda Bible!  It’s gonna be washed off and youse gonna pay for it!”

Philistine!

I told him that I would be happy to wash it off after I’d transferred it to a pad.

“I ain’t gonna wait that long!  Customers’ll complain!”

“Well, if your customers are getting stuck in here on a regular basis, they might just be glad of something to read while they’re waiting!” I retorted.

“Read?  Read what?  Why would they wanna read?”

“Look at it this way – you could start a whole new trend.  Entire books on the walls of the stalls at McDonald’s!  Why, people would come from far and wide just to eat your food, then go rushing to the toilet, as they usually do, immediately afterward.  But you’d have something for them to focus on besides the gut-wrenching pain tearing through their digestive tracts!  You’d be a legend!  A pioneer!  Just think of the repeat business,” I cried.

Though unaccustomed to the agonies of coherent thought, this seemed to give him pause.

“Awright, it stays.  We’ll have an experiment,” he said, proud of the fact that he knew a word over three syllables and could pronounce it correctly.

“Great!” I cried.  “I’ll be back tomorrow to transcribe it.”

“Oh, no, lady,” he said.  “Dis is the property’a McDonald’s.  If youse write it down and publish it anywheres else, we’ll sue youse for copyright infringement!”

He wasn’t as dumb as he looked.  Then again, he couldn't be.

So, friends, the upshot of the whole deal was that I had to pay McDonald’s a ridiculous sum of money in order to use my own work in my own book!  And if you know of anyone who would like to own an authentic souvenir pay toilet from McDonald’s, please let me know.  I have all four walls!