Kathleen Fisher

Raid

When I was a little girl, I would spend a good part of my summer day killing flies. They liked the side of the house where the sun would beat down and I’d go out with the flyswatter and kill them. 48, 49, 50…………

I’d run in the house and give Mom the casualty count and she’d say, “Good for you. Now get back out there and don’t stop until you’ve killed them all.” Looking back, I think she might have been trying to get rid of me.

I’d run back outside and there would be more flies on the sunny side of the house and I’d swat and count for hours. Apparently, I lacked friends.

Even as a kid I hated those things and since getting married The Big Daddy has given me a detailed scientific account of what flies do after they’ve sat on a poo-poo platter. It’s disturbing.

That early experience of killing flies was a precursor to what our first home was like after we said, “I do.” We lived in the basement apartment of a complex that catered to students. You could say that it lacked charm but it was cheap and I got used to looking out the window and seeing dirt.

It wasn’t long into the honeymoon period that I found out we weren’t alone. We had The Cucaraches and they were everywhere. Like my fly-killing days, I’d go on the hunt for them with a can of Raid and spray them to kingdom come or with a swatter and beat them to a smeary mess. Before long, I’d see another one and jump to action with my killing tools.

They never stopped coming in and Mark said he could smell the Raid in the parking lot when he got out of the car.

I would rather lay all night in bed awake than have to go into the bathroom and turn the light on and see those disgusting things scurrying everywhere. We ended up having to put baggies over our toothbrushes because they’d sit on the top of the brush and eat the dried toothpaste.

I was teetering on a nervous breakdown. Eyes darting looking for signs of movement, cans of Raid in every room, calls to the landlord constantly. If this was the married life I wanted out.

The Big Daddy told me to calm my frantic ass down and put down the damn can of Raid. Hell, he said, everything we eat around here is starting to taste like Raid.

Mom, who’d only heard of roaches but had never actually seen one, said he needed to get me out of there – that was no place to live.

We were only months into a year long lease when one night I was awakened by something. I flung my arm over and that something landed in the chest hairs of The Big Daddy and he jumped out of bed, jumped up and down and started screaming.

“I CAN’T TAKE THIS ANYMORE. I CAN’T TAKE THESE SON-OF-A BITCHES ONE MORE DAY. I. CANNOT. TAKE. THIS!!!!! THIS IS BULLSHIT!

He stripped all the sheets and blankets off the bed and was beating them up and down on the floor over and over, and if there was still a roach amongst the percale it was going for a ride.

He went on like that for awhile before he calmed down and we put the sheets back on the bed. All that screaming must have worn him out and he was soon sound asleep. Those summer days of swatting flies had prepared me for that moment and I stared at the walls and counted the roaches…………..seven, eight, nine………….until the sun came up.

Within the month we’d sublet the apartment to two unsuspecting students, left all the cans of Raid under the sink and lived happily ever after.

How My Brothers Tried To Kill The Babysitter

Of my parents half-dozen kids, five were born over a six year period. You would think that having that many kids would put a dent in Mom and Dad’s social life but they frequently went out, and so Mom was always beating the neighborhood bushes to find a babysitter.

After some trial and error, Mom found a reliable one in Sheila who lived a few blocks away. I wasn’t so sure about this Sheila. She always seemed nervous and her hands would shake when she tried to pincurl me and my sister’s hair after our Saturday night bath. She kept coming back to babysit, though, and our complaints to Mom about her lousy hairdressing skills fell on deaf ears.

On a cool, October day Dad started getting prepped for winter by taking down the screens from all the windows. He had been working his way around the house installing the storm windows but wasn’t quite finished with the job before he and Mom had to get ready for a night on the town. All handsome and beautiful, Dad put a final splash of Old Spice on and Mom’s lipstick square of toilet paper smiled from the bowl. A little peace and quiet without their kids was imminent and sure enough Sheila and Her Nerves ding-donged at the door.

All day the boys had been pestering Mom to go to a football game at the nearby high school with some of their friends that night but Mom refused. “Sheila’s coming and she doesn’t need to worry about where you boys are so you’re all staying home.” There was some groaning and protesting but she didn’t budge. “And you boys better behave,” she said to them as her and Dad walked out the door to a few hours of freedom.

Jean and I took our baths and then Sheila started the painful, drawn out process of pincurling our hair with her shaky hands. By the time she finished we both looked like a head full of television antennas with the bobby pins going this way and that.

The boys went to bed soon after us and in record time the house was quiet as a church with Sheila at the helm.

But while Jean and I drifted off to sleep, some friends of the boys came to their bedroom window at the back of the house to get them to go to the football game. The boys stuffed their beds with clothes to make it appear as though someone was in them, opened up the window (free of the screens or storms windows) and shimmied their way down the side of the house. All according to plan, they were back in bed and fast asleep before Mom and Dad even got home.

The next day when we got up the boys were already sitting at the table bright and early with a notepad in front of them. Dad was so mad at them that I thought he was going to drop them off at the orphanage like he kept talking about. Instead, he told them to write down everything, and he meant EVERYTHING, that had happened the night before. Jim’s version (I think I left the toilet seat up.) and Terry’s (I had a bottle of pop and might have left the cap on the counter.) differed greatly from Tom’s who was filling up pages of notes regarding the alleged crime, including detailed drawings of the two neighborhood kids that crawled through the bedroom window after the game and hid under the bed until, Fritz, the blind dachshund sniffed them out and started barking.

Jean and I didn’t know what was going on until Mom told us that when Sheila went in to check on the boys they were gone and she thought they’d been kidnapped. By the time they got home she was beside herself, a nervous wreck shaking and crying over three boys in her care who had disappeared and then reappeared.

I couldn’t imagine who would want those delinquents and I wasn’t defending them, but I did tell Mom that Sheila was nervous long before they went missing as evidenced by my bad pincurl job. “Oh for God’s sake, Kathy, not now,” is all Mom had to say about that.

Dad put the boys on a work release program that lasted for years and after that Mom said we were old enough to be on our own. Well, that and because no teenage girl within a 30 mile radius of Chicago would agree to watch her godawful kids.

It wasn’t long before there was a dinner dance at church and off they went – Mom all dressed up and wearing her lipstick and Dad smelling good and carrying the suitcase of scotch. “I’m expecting you kids to be responsible now,” Mom said. “And you’d better behave yourselves,” she added as her and Dad walked out the door.

And that was the night that the Indoor Dodgeball Tournament started.

Tom, our cousin Mike, Terry & Jim before they were delinquents.

Old Dog

We had to put our previous dog to sleep when the kids were young. He was a bassett/beagle mix (quite a conversation starter in the park) who had lost his hearing, most of his eyesight and had arthritis in his back legs. The kids cried and begged us not to let him go, but he was more than ready to move on beyond his misery.

A few months went by and we began to look for another dog. I would go to the shelters and be overwhelmed. All those big dogs barking at me felt like indigent beggars rattling their metal cups against the railings for a little porridge.

We heard about a dog adoption at Petsmart and loaded the kids in the car and went. The kid part turned out to be not so well thought out. They fell in love with all the dogs, especially the puppies, which is how we ended up with Henry. A retriever/sheltie mix we were told that would end up to be about 40#.

Three kids and a puppy is a recipe for insanity. The dog loved the kids and would cry and cry by the door as he watched them play down the street. If the door wasn’t closed all the way he’d bolt down after them and the whole neighborhood would give chase until they got tired and it was just me running and cussing at that damn dog.

He ate every pair of flip flops that were by the front door. It was to my benefit that those are so cheap because I ended up buying every kid who came in to play in the basement a new pair. He ate unattended chicken off the table or counter and whether it was cooked or not made no difference to him.

And all along he grew. And grew. And grew.

The 40# dog I was told I was getting was actually a retriever/chow mix that finally stopped growing at 85#. I’d been duped and I looked at him with disdain.

You are making my life miserable you hairy beast.

He kept watch over the front door like he was a Brink’s security guard and would lunge at it when the mailman or UPS guy came up the steps. It would take years to break that habit. One of the kids in the neighborhood walked in the door unannounced to get some water and Henry bit him in the stomach. The kid freaked, I freaked, the dog chalked it up to a community service project. I was sure we would be getting sued, but the parents were dog owners and instead of yelling at me yelled at their kid for going into somebody’s house without knocking.

Henry’s approval ratings had slipped into the negative.

With Maggie and Nathan close by now we walk him to their house when we’re having people over, for he has never earned our trust around strangers. It is a long, slow walk. He is old now and like his predecessor is getting close to moving on. He falls all the time, it hurts for him to get up, the steps to the backyard are getting too hard to go up and down, it is nearly impossible to get him in the car to go to the vet.

After the lab party we had here, Mark and I walked the few blocks to the kids’ house to pick up our dog. It was a beautiful spring night and Henry was in their backyard. When we walked up the driveway every dog in the neighborhood started barking like crazy.

We let ourselves in the back gate and there was Henry. His ears were perked up listening but he didn’t get up and he didn’t make a sound. For the first time in thirteen years I finally had a crush on my big, hairy dog.

He and I are growing old together and are finally on the same page…………………having figured out that most things in life are rarely worthy of barking.

Coming Out & The Pursuit of Happiness

This is the story that’s been begging to be written since I started this blog three years ago. I wrote this months ago with thoughts that, depending on my courage, it may never see the light of day. There are people in my family that I have never had this conversation with and all I can say is that I’m sorry. I am sorry I haven’t sat down with you and said all of this, but often it is easier to tell a stranger than someone who loves this child.

I can’t explain why this is so.

Our son was born three weeks after my dad died. I would have loved to have pulled the covers over my head and stayed in bed, and maybe I could have attempted that plan with his three year old sister. A newborn, however, requires immediate attention and so I’d start my fatherless day caring for a hungry baby and a busy toddler, both of whom were counting on me to keep it together.

This boy baby required lots of keeping it together as he grew. He was born with a surplus of energy and grieving for my Dad who was not around to know his namesake was a sorrow that often got put on hold. For when morning broke, every single morning, that child would stand in his crib and bang it back and forth against the wall to let me know he was ready to start his day.

I slipped my dad’s spirit into my pocket every day when I woke, and raised these kids and the sister that came later. .

I seemed to be living a rather charmed life (and yes I even had a white picket fence) until on a perfect fall day this son and his father were having an intense conversation that I walked in on in the garage. He got up and scurried past me into the house and the charmed rug got ripped out from under me.

He had just told his dad that he was gay.

I let that revelation seep through me and then went in the house to find him. Alone in the basement, he sobbed. Heartbreaking, uncontrollable sobbing and when I hugged him he said, “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry.”

I held him tight and sobbed for both of us.

What followed next was my husband and I trying to make sense of our new reality when our first thought of each morning was that our kid was gay. I always pictured myself as being the supportive, endearing friend of the mother of a gay kid……….much like a favorite sitcom. He’s great, you’ll be o.k., there’s worst things in life. At least you’ll never have to deal with a bitchy daughter-in-law. Laugh track. Instead, I felt like a mother whose kid had a target on his back and I was terrified for him.

I made an appointment with my priest friend. As I looked out the window of his office at the fall trees while he talked, I wondered when the miracle of peace was going to descend upon me. Or at the very least the handy, laminated prayer card I was going to need to reference when the court of public opinion had their say. He had other plans for me. He offered to call a mom who had walked down this path and who might be willing to talk to me, and within an hour of getting home I was pouring out my guts to somebody I’d never met.

She arranged for Mark and I to meet with a group of other parents like us. All parents of boys. All in various stages of acceptance. At one gathering, one of the moms said to me, “You do know, you’re the luckiest one here, don’t you?” That was news to me, but she said she found out her son was gay in the emergency room after he tried to kill himself. “Your son talks to you guys. He trusts you. Don’t forget that.”

I clenched that observation of hers and never let it go, even to this day.

Learning to divorce myself from the Norman Rockwellish dreams I constantly replayed in my head was another story. Every morning I drove him to school, often in silence. “Are you and dad mad at me,” he asked one day. “No,” I said wearily. “We’re not.. We’re just trying to figure this out.” I drove home, walked in the door and said to Mark, “We cannot do this. We cannot let him think for one minute that we’re mad at him or that we are disappointed.” And so beginning that day we behaved differently. In his presence we talked about school and cross-country and getting a drivers license. When I dropped him off at school I’d cheerfully tell him to have a good day and beg God as I drove away to watch over him……….to not let some macho jerk give him a hard time. Or worse.

After that I’d go home and walk the dog. Walking, crying and talking to my long-departed Dad was my daily routine. Over and over I would mentally check off the names of every person I knew who was gay. Are they happy? What is their life like? Why in the hell did I never ask them? Or pay attention?

I thought of their mothers.

If I were to say that this journey was swift and easy, it would hardly resemble a real life. Eventually, though, having a gay kid was not my first thought of the morning. It was that I have three kids, and a new Norman Rockwell portrait began to take shape..

In the years since this has become part of our family story, I have changed in more ways than I could begin to count. Profound ways. I am fortunate to live in a time when even writing about this is possible. My mother’s generation or her mother’s weren’t able to be so open, and I know that I will owe these women for the rest of my life. These women who dared not speak out loud of whom their son or daughter loved. Women whose emotional health paid a heavy price because they were burdened by secrets.

I try to keep out the noise, but that is often difficult. I have been more outspoken about politics that affect his life because he’s my kid. I know him. He was born wild and kind with a third eye that immediately senses who is struggling and who needs the world to be more compassionate. To be his friend is to know the most loyal person in the world. On the rare occasion he gets a weekend free from school and work, he walks in the door and says the same thing every single time, “I’m so happy to be home.”

These days I have the perspective of time to look back to when we struggled with all of it, and every day we would roam a labyrinth that led us to back to what we had always known.

He is everything we ever wanted in a son.

He is a shareholder in this kingdom.

He is our Will.

Step Right Up

I was at the grocery store this weekend, negotiating a chicken purchase with the butcher. I have an unhealthy attitude towards chicken. I hoard it. I can’t pass up a chicken sale even when the freezer is so stuffed with it that breasts, boneless, skinless and otherwise, repeatedly fall on the foot of the poor sap who happens to need to dig for something else.

That would most often be The Big Daddy who cusses out all the $%&**!% chicken breasts and the woman who keeps buying them.

There I was trying to determine how many more The BD would tolerate in the big chill, and from the corner of my eye I noticed a guy at the end of the counter buying ribs. I envied those slabs sitting on the scale because that’s another thing that won’t fit in the freezer with all the chicken hooters in there

He looked my way and yelled, “Well, I’d recognize that hair anywhere.”

It was the father of one of Mallie Bee’s friends. A friend (maybe from middle school?) a short-termer when they parted circles in high school. I have never known him all that well. I liked him but it’s not like I see him or his family on a regular basis.

Evidently my hair has been on friendlier terms with him.

“Yep, I saw that head of hair and said to myself, well I know who that is. There’s no mistaking those curls.”

This was when it was a few days post-wash and thus smaller than usual. It’s not even the humid months yet when its volume will intensify significantly. By then it should have its own zip code, a name (Large Marge), and a wide load sign with flags coming out the side for clearance.

If only I could think of a way to turn the burdensome second person in this relationship into a moneymaker………..

Two Parties

Last spring I told The Big Daddy that our social life was in serious need of some energy. Too many weekends doing nothing and then falling asleep on the couch was making us boring.

Not a week later he came home and joyfully announced, “Honey, the social calendar just got an engagement. We are invited to a birthday party.”

A birthday party? Oh good, a birthday party. Who’s having the party?

“My post-doc. His daughter is turning 5.”

What? No. No, not that. Not a kids party. That’s not what I meant at all. I’d rather stay home than go to a little kids birthday party.

“Too late. I told him we’re coming.”

And so I dressed that Sunday afternoon for a party I didn’t want to go to. Luckily, I wore a dress and God only knows why I pulled that out of the closet.

Many of his students, and this one in particular, are Indian. The party was in the rec center of the apartment complex Hari lives at with his wife and daughter. Nearly all of the guests were Indian with the exception of a few of us.

We walked into a color explosion of silk saris that took my breath away. The woman were beautiful……absolutely beautiful, and I was thankful I was wearing a dress. It was awkward at first. Nobody seemed to know what to do with us and so they stared.

They sang and had cake first. They insisted Mark take one of the few chairs. He declined. They offered him a beer. He declined. When the food was ready to be served and they asked him to be first in line he declined. He felt like this was their party and he would help himself to beer and food after Hari’s friends and neighbors had gotten theirs, but it did not seem to be working out that way as everyone kept staring.

“I think you need to go first,” I said. “I think everyone is waiting for you.”

He obliged and we have since learned that the boss in their culture is held in high respect and always offered food and drink before the other guests. Once that happened it was as if the room let out a heavy sigh and the business of celebrating a birthday could begin.

As Mark said recently at our Easter dinner, “We all come from different backgrounds and faiths, but it is in our celebrations that we find common ground.”

Ah yes, so it is and I will say it is one of the most memorable parties I’ve ever been to.

*****************************

Last weekend we had a party at the house for Mark’s lab. Everybody came………..Hari minus his wife and daughter who are in India, Subash who just got his PhD., Scott who graduated a few years ago and is a professor at a nearby college, Wendy who just joined the lab and moved from the D.C. area, and Syranta. He came with his wife, young son, his mother visiting from India and his cousin.

Earlier in the week the lab had gotten some great results and everybody was flying high on science adrenaline. It was an exciting turn of events and so Syranta invited Mark to his apartment for lunch. His mom made them an omelette so when I met her I said, “I hear you make a very good omelette. Thank you for feeding my husband.”

Mark works with some wonderful people and it is clear they admire their boss. When everyone was leaving, Syranta’s mom thanked me and hugged me goodbye. “Come to India,” she whispered in my ear. “I will cook for you.”

And just like that my dreams exploded in vibrant layers of silk.

Running On Redemption

In my lifetime, it started with the very handsome President Kennedy who was known in his inner circle for his wandering eye. There was the “blue dress” saga, and when the detailed Starr report was published in the newspaper our elderly ex-nurse neighbor came over in shock. “I worked for years in a hospital and I have seen things in places they shouldn’t be, but I have never heard of something like this.”

What are you talking about, Marie?

“Phone sex. That girl putting a phone there. How in the world……….”

No, no we told her. That’s not what phone sex is. Then we explained it to this very prim woman who was in her 80’s and she was so rattled she ended up taking to her bed.

Now, a politician who is involved in some affair or unseemly behavior pops up every few weeks and it doesn’t even make the front page.

They weep. They apologize to their wife. They hang their head and resign in disgrace……………..

Then some time goes by and they pop right back up in front of the camera and tell their district they’re a reformed man. Done their penance, met a counselor a few times so they know why they did what they did, things with the wife and fam are cool again and they’re ready to represent the people in Washington.

Jesus works very, very fast when it comes to saving public servants.

It may be a sign of our times that we barely pay attention, and perhaps Newt Gingrich paved Redemption Road years ago when he turned Catholic after dumping Wife #1 and Wife #2. He does go to church regularly now with this one and she’s even in the choir so he knows something about family values.

The Road of Shame to Reelection is littered with these men, but there is one who raised the bar on disgrace to a new level……………..the ex-governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford. When he got busted for lying to his staff about hiking the Appalachian Trail to clear his head, (when in fact he’d skipped town to see his girlfriend in Argentina) he took the gold medal in sleazy.

His tearful admission to doing his wife and four sons wrong came with repeated weepy references to his girlfriend as his “soulmate”, and he just couldn’t stop himself from waxing poetic about the love they shared while the rest of the country watched a slow motion train wreck in real time. And wondered, God forbid, if his four sons were watching him talk about his girlfriend when he was still married to their mom.

There was no kissing and making up this time as the Mrs. dumped him faster than he could spell Appalachia.

Now he is attempting a comeback by running for Congress, and even asked his ex-wife to help advise on the campaign. She declined. Hmmmmmm……….

Their divorce agreement stipulated that each of them must respect the privacy of the other, and so letting yourself into the ex’s home without permission is a rule breaker. He has repeatedly failed to abide by that stipulation and was recently busted again inside Jenny’s house, using his cell phone as a flashlight while he creeped around.

She has filed criminal charges against him for trespassing and his party has dropped financial support of his campaign.

Redemption is the work of the Lord. Revenge is the work of the ex.

Turf Wars

I was nagged into gardening by my friend, and my first garden was a little plot next to the garage that The Big Daddy dug for me as a mother’s day present.

By most gardener’s standards it was miniscule, but it was where I practiced until we dug a bigger garden right outside the front door. When I moved my garden into its new home, I started playing around with different flowers. If something was a non-performer, too big or invasive, I yanked it.

The Big Daddy would stand over my shoulder and chastise me every time I pulled something up until one day I said, “You have to get your own garden. You are driving me crazy. You are no longer allowed to tell me what to do in my happy place.”

He took that advice to heart.

Over the last few years he has taken over the back yard with raised beds. He could care less about the aesthetics and so it looks rather Bangladeshish to me. I have showed him pictures of English gardens where fruits and vegetables are mixed with flowers or bordered by boxwoods.

“Ack”, he says waving me off.

Two years ago right before they were about to bloom, he dug up and transplanted the daffodils that were in the back and they have yet to bloom again.

Trauma, I tell him. You’ve traumatized them.

Now he has an idea for a little patch of lawn near the street where no grass grows. The day lillys, he says, let’s put those there. Get them out of the back yard. They’ll do better out there anyways.”

Oh, why yes of course, I’ve heard that flowers thrive on car exhaust.

“Where you can see them and enjoy them”

Suddenly the smell of bullshit wafted through the fresh spring air.

Under the cover of darkness or when I’m at the mall, he will dig them up and finally be rid of anything flowering in the backyard, despite the fact that some of these plants have called that space home years before we bought this house in 1992.

With the absence of a single flower, his man card will be reinstated and not a moment too soon.

Real men grow vegetables to feed their families. Lots and lots of vegetables in boxes lined up like North Korean soldiers, and if you were ever curious about how well Mr. McGregor is endowed you need to take a look at the size of his tomatoes.

Shaking At Shady Acres

Two years ago when we were home for Christmas, Mom put the squeeze on Mark and I to visit my Uncle Paul in the nursing home. The wound he had from a recent surgery was not healing like it should, and since he lives alone it was suggested that he take advantage of his Medicare benefit of short-term nursing home care until his post-surgery problems got better.

It’s a little hard to get psyched for a visit like that, but The Queen Mum doesn’t let up on the nagging when it comes to things like visiting the sick.

He was in pretty good shape and we chatted for awhile in his room and then it was time for lunch. Mom, Mark and I followed him to the cafeteria and met the group of friends that he regularly ate with. None of them seemed especially infirmed or old and there was lively chatter around the table.

The lunch for the day was salisbury steak.

At the end of the table sat a man with all the signs of Parkinson’s. His salisbury steak lunch had clearly been put through a blender. He called an aide over and told her that his therapist said he could start eating solid food that day so could she please take this back and bring him a regular lunch. She left and when she returned said that no order was put in for solid food so he’d have to eat what was in front of him. They went back and forth discussing this oversight, each time him pushing the plate a little closet towards her. She wouldn’t relent and he looked near tears.

I was seething and ready to jump into the fray for somebody I’d known for all of five minutes..

How about you find his therapist and get the okay so he can have a frigging normal lunch like everyone else at this table? Better yet, page her that way you don’t even have to leave the room. Look at this. Who in their right mind would willingly eat this shit?

Instead I sat there being pissed. After lunch we said our goodbyes to my uncle and when we were walking out the door I said to Mom, “You are never going to be in a place like this.”

Part of Mark’s research work is on Parkinson’s, and although I don’t know anyone personally affected by that disease, I’ll always remember that man. Wearily resigned to eat what he was given, he pushed the plate closer and slowly brought his trembling hand to his mouth with more dignity than I would ever be capable of mustering.

May I Take Your Order Please

The Big Daddy is a smart guy. A real smart guy. Sometimes when he talks to me about protein folding, I wonder how his brain can hold so much information while my claim to fame is solving puzzles on Wheel of Fortune and figuring out percent off in my head.

He often gives lectures to students and to colleagues at professional meetings. Based on the amazing toast he gave at Maggie and Nate’s wedding, and the lovely toast he makes every year for our Easter dinner, I am also in awe of his naturalness when speaking in front of a lot of people.

I do not have that gift.

So it seems to me that he should be able to easily order food at a drive-up, but that is not the case. He either can’t hear or can’t understand what they’re saying, is phklempt when he tries to place the order, is confused by ordering multiple menu items, has no idea what some of these things even are, can’t understand why we can’t get a burger with everything on it and pick off what we don’t like, and most importantly, why we can’t haul our lazy asses out of the car and go get our own food.

Yesterday we drove through a local place to get Mal a burger. She wanted The Single with mustard, ketchup and pickle and a cherry limeade.

You want what?

Say that again.

Mustard, ketchup, onion and pickle?

Well, that’s what it comes with.

You don’t want the onion?

Just pick it off.

A cherry limeade?

What size?

Just when it seemed that he might be able to place this basic, small order by talking into a menu board, I had to foul things up by saying, “Make that two cherry limeades.”

He ordered the burger, a cherry limeade and a lime limeade.

That’s when Mal and I lost it.

A limeade is lime. Nobody orders a lime limeade because there’s no such thing.

And we started laughing so hard that by the time we made it to the pick-up window we were crying because this poor guy is so out of his element in a drive-thru lane.

What happened to you that makes you so bad at this?

The Big Daddy’s earliest experience with a drive-thru goes way back. Back to high school and this guy in the wee hours…………….

………….which could explain the flashbacks he has every time he has to drive up and place an order.