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Monday, Jun. 21, 2004 - 11:25 A.M.

Families sure have changed. I myself have a family cobbled together by different sets of parents and children, etc. Our family tree resembles not so much a tree as a gnarled burning bush. When I was thirteen and my parents divorced it was a cross to bear, a stigma to live with. Something very interesting has happened though. Nowadays, if your parents have been together your whole life, you are the strange one, an outcast! Upon hearing the news that your parents are still together, people will stare as if you just stated you are from the planet Ruserious in the galaxy of Icantbelieveit and are the first wave of impending alien world domination.

I have a brother who is 7 years older than me. He married when he was eighteen so for 2 years I had both parents to myself, which was not a good thing. Henceforth, in life, when you hear the word �dysfunctional� to describe a familial situation, you should place the words �couldn�t get anymore� in front of it and think of my family. It was rough, yo.

My mother was straight outta Compton. No! HA! Okay, straight outta the old days. She was a stay-at-home mother back before that word came in to being; before political correctness took over the world and �housewife� was the term o� the day. She believed the father should be the disciplinarian. She had no kind of savings of her own, no source of income for herself. She had no marketable job skills. She had no clue about life in the business world. But, she could clean the shit out of a toilet. Literally and figuratively. I think this might be a special trait in my family.

After the divorce she had (and wanted) to get a job. At the time, I knew jack about job interviews, so when my mother announced she had one and went traipsing from the house in what could only be described as an upscale housecoat (� la Mrs. Roper), I thought nothing of it. Of course, looking back now, I can understand why Baker, Baker & Baker didn�t hire her. However, get a job she finally did. Even managing to work her way up to quite a prestigious position.

As she was Johnny-come-lately to the working world, her office antics in the beginning of her career were (and still are) the stuff of legend. She was the workplace version of Amelia Bedelia. (If you don�t know who that is, stop what you are doing right now and go look it up. Shame on you for having not read these books! Shame! Go beat yourself about the head and neck with a large belt buckle.) Take, for example, the time she was tasked with purging files. Be assured this is a story you do not want to hear. And, somewhere out there, there are some very unhappy clients of a certain bank.

At home there were also many comical moments. There was the time she called an electrician to repair the lawnmower. Yes, electrician, lawnmower, you read it right. The problem was electrical although did not closely relate those two as much as you might think. And, the time she paid in advance for the driveway to be sealed. Twenty years later, we�re still waiting on that truckload of men to come back. For the driveway, people. Stay with me. Don�t misunderstand�my mother was not dumb, she just wasn�t used to and didn�t know much about having to do the array of things she now had to take care of. I admire her for giving it a shot. Didn�t always work out, but still�

Then there was, as it has been known since the night it happened, The Night Of The Squirrel. The story is this: we had a one-story, one-level house, but there was a basement that had been partially finished into a den. Under the stairs that led down to the basement cum den (Stop it!) there was a dark and quite scary storage area. Even in daylight, it was pitch black in there and I personally ventured in that space only once in the 14 years I lived in that house. On The Night Of The Squirrel a mysterious scratching, chuffing noise emanated from said storage area. My mother did not believe in guns, thus we had no weaponry in the house to sufficiently incapacitate an intruder. (Unless you count her cell phone. Seriously, back then, those things were heavy duty weapons quite capable of taking out an intruder. Or six.)

So my mother, God bless her, she improvised with a large rolling pin and a colander. After much afraid-ness and fear of the unknown, mom whipped open the door to the storage area and proceeded to wail before looking. With the chopping, the creative jumping moves and the high pitched sounds I had never heard from her before, she was a virtual Bruce Lee! �They Call Me Mom!�

As you might have guessed by now, it was a squirrel who did not live to collect another nut. And, it was pretty messy given that you know, a squirrel weighs like, 1.2 lbs. or something and my mother, was a good 250 lbs., hyped on adrenaline and fueled by fear. That colander sure did come in handy though.

See? I told you she wasn�t dumb.

P.S. Go visit andclint. You can thank me later.

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� Purplecigar

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