For me, it started back in the fall, October maybe, when my son told me that he didn’t want to go out of town with me, that instead, he preferred to go “hiking” with his friends. I didn’t ask any questions because, well, I was glad he didn’t want to go with me, and I was acutely aware that if I prolonged the conversation, I’d risk him changing his mind. So I shut up.

It was only after “the hike” that I asked the one, simple question that changed my life: “Who all went?”

He’d obviously prepared for this.

“Well, there was Bliss, and there was William and his girlfriend, and there was Uli and his girlfriend, and there was Julian and his girlfriend, and there was me.”

I appreciated his effort, I really did, but I know that 1+2+2+2+1 is the same as 2+2+2+2, no matter if you put the chick’s name at the beginning of the sentence, with as much rhetorical distance from your own as your content will allow.

“So is Bliss your girlfriend?”

“No,” he said, as he squinted his eyes at me, letting me know I’d hit the nail right on the head.

Oh I had heard enough and seen enough to already have that queasy feeling, but I wasn’t sufficiently sick, so I asked one more question: “What does she look like?”

“Who?”

“Bliss.”

“Oh her? Well, she’s got really long red hair….” I think that’s when I passed out.

“Bliss”? With long, red hair? That’s not a starter-girlfriend…that’s the rebound chick guys “date” for three weeks after they’ve had their hearts broken…that’s the chick who earns a living gliding around a pole with her taters all lubed up and exposed…that’s the chick over whom harsh words are spoken in the parking lot of a convenience store, resulting in a mixture of motor oil, blood, and Marlboro Lights on the ground. Whichever one she is, she’s most decidedly not a starter-girlfriend.

I’ve tried, I swear I have, to like her. After all, they’re still together…and given their ages (14 and 15), having been together for 4 months now is like 20 years to you and me…and I don’t know of anything I’ve kept for 20 years, outside of that one horrifically ugly LL Bean winter jacket from which I’m still determined to get my money’s worth, style and fashion be damned.

But I’ll admit that I sometimes volunteered to be the one to take them to and pick them up from that new mall. And, along the way, I’d start conversations in hopes of getting her to speak, to say something off-color or rude, something that would give me good reason to not like her. The most I’d ever gotten, however, was a “thank you” as she crawled out of the backseat. So I was at the end of my rope, at the point at which the most reasonable thing to do was to totally fabricate some reason to not like the chick when…when..

I went to the mailbox one day and found a thick, padded manila envelope, the return address indicating that it was from my cell phone provider. "Hmm…time to renew my contract,” I thought. I took it inside, threw it on the table with a thud, then went about harping at my son for one thing or the other. I’d nearly forgotten it until I sat down for dinner, and then, a steaming plate of fake meatballs in front of me, I opened it.

It was my cell phone bill.

Or rather, it was my son’s cell phone bill.

It was a veritable tome, page after page after page of itemized charges, charges that totaled $610.35. The good thing was that he hadn’t gone over on his minutes. The bad thing, however, was the text messages: 4,563 in all, just ever-so-slightly over his monthly allotment of 400.

So now, I have reason, good reason, to not like her. And I still haven’t figured out which chick she is, but I insist she ain’t no starter girlfriend.

How I spent my weekend was defined by my Friday morning. More specifically, my weekend was determined the very second I noticed that dog dancing in traffic in front of my house.

Hold on...let me back up for a second....you see, there's a woman who lives in the house behind me, a woman who I often refer to as a "little old lady" but who is actually only a few years older than me, but with a bad dye-job and a smoker's cough. Anyway, last weekend, she was outside attempting to mow her yard with her right arm in a full cast. I ran outside, told her I was on my way out to dinner with friends, but if she'd wait until Monday evening, I'd finish mowing her yard for her when I came in from work. She thanked me, and accepted my offer, explaining that she'd be sure to put up her dog so that it wouldn't bother me.

On Monday evening, I mowed the lawn with no problem, outside of my periodic amusement at her dog, her Chihuahua , her little white, yapping embarrassment to all other dogs, leaping up in the window to gnash its teeth my way as it fell back to the floor.

So fast forward to Friday morning when I saw same said Chihuahua dancing in the traffic on the road in front of my house, the road that's fairly busy at 6:52 am with all the first-shift employees trying to make their way to the various local hospitals and institutions on time, the very ones scattered throughout my neighborhood.

Now this dog is sufficiently detestable that I knew it wouldn't come to me if I tried to coax it from danger, so instead of making an utter ass of myself by speaking sweetly to the dog, faking doggy snacks in my empty hand, and weaving my way through speeding traffic wearing clothes that are likely inappropriate even in the privacy of one’s own home, I opted to go to the house where I knew the dog lived, all in an effort to alert its owner to the perils the little Mexican mongrel was facing. No sooner had I knocked on the door than that yapping little fleahound came around the corner, lunging towards me with all the menace its ten pounds could muster. I laughed, turned my back on it to speak to its owner...and the little bitch bit me.

And I mean she BIT ME. She went in for the kill...three inches above my ankle.

It didn't hurt that much, or bleed, for that matter, until I managed to make it back to my house, to my bathroom, and started cleaning it, and then it was only bleeding. Bleeding like I'd been shot in the gut, but only bleeding, just the same.

I took my son to school and, on the way back, decided to stop in the grocery store to buy some over-sized bandages and antibiotic ointment for my wound. I left a one-footed bloody trail down the health care aisle.

So for the weekend, I was left with a still-bleeding, bruised little flap-of-skin wound that looked like, well, a Chihuahua bite: two puncture wounds with a semi-circular, not-as-deep wound connecting them, just below the inside of my left calf. Oh, and now, well, it finally hurt.

The worst thing about this is that, to garner any of my deserved sympathy, I learned that full disclosure was completely inappropriate. I couldn't limp in, explaining that my hobbled gait was caused by an animal that weighs less than a decent jar of pickles. Instead, I learned to simply say, "got bit by a dog," and limp off while their minds were busied with thoughts of wild, rabid canines the size of small pachyderms.

My issues, however, are more complex than those simple but inappropriate displays of wishing I were somewhere else. You see, at each of these gatherings, lunch is provided by one vendor or another, lunch for which, per the company-wide memo, we are supposed to express our overwhelming gratitude. Repeatedly.

Now I will agree that anything free is deserving of some display of gratitude. But these lunches are, for me, nothing more than a grown-up version of those awful sweaters that my grandmother used to knit me for my birthday, those times when I forced myself to say, “Golly gee whillikers, thanks,” as I threw up ever so slightly in my mouth. “Ain’t no fucking way this shit will ever be seen in public,” I’d think to myself just as my mother looked me in my eyes, read my thoughts, and smacked me a good one.

You see, each month, at these meetings, there’s not a lot of menu options. Sometimes almost-decent deli sandwiches are brought in, sandwiches of two varieties: ham, and turkey. For those of us who don’t eat red meat, that means we’re having a turkey sandwich for lunch. But for those of us who show up right on time and not twenty minutes early, the only option still available is a ham sandwich (presumably because the folks who show up early are also the ones who want everyone to think that they’re  dieting or health-conscious, in spite of the obvious signs that neither is true…so they snatch up those turkey sandwiches, sometimes two or three at a time, but even if they only grab one, that illusion of their diet is always shattered about the time dessert is served.)

With all the turkey ones gone long before my arrival, I’m left with the option of choosing from a rather impressive display of sandwiches, none of which I’ll eat. “Just pick off the ham,” the others say, presumably because, in their minds, people who don’t eat red meat don’t mind eating sandwiches comprised of soggy white bread, wilted leaf lettuce, slices of not-so-moist and barely-ripe tomatoes, and pickles with a hint of a fairly suspicious twang to them. Yes, because I don’t eat red meat, I’m somehow supposed to have a palate much like that of an outside dog. Thanks, but I’ll pass.

Ok, but perhaps I am being unfair because, honestly, it’s not always deli sandwiches. Yes sometimes it’s giant aluminum trays of lasagna from that place on the Southside that’s known for adding extra meat free of charge. Oh goody. And on those days, nobody pretends to be dieting, no matter that the breadth of one’s ass might rival the size of an ocean liner. After all, it’s LASAGNA!

But for me (perhaps I haven’t mentioned this, but I don’t eat red meat), lasagna falls rather decidedly in the not-so-much category. I mean, I’ll pass. And even if I did consider it the least bit appetizing to gnash upon the flesh of some dead cow, I’m of the opinion that it’s more than just a bit unsavory to serve myself a meal from a communal, aluminum trough. And that’s true even if the politest of folks have periodically waved their hands over it, shooing the flies off that top layer of cheese. Yeah, seriously, I’ll pass.

But then there’s always dessert.

Because I work in a field that is dominated by women and because there’s a widely held belief that, if it walks upright and doesn’t have testicles, it eats chocolate by the metric ton, dessert at these meetings can be only one of two things: chocolate chunk cookies or chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.

And that’s great, really, really great, if, of course, you like chocolate. Or can eat chocolate. But I fall into neither category.

I hesitate to be too honest, though, to come right out and say that chocolate tastes like the smell of the armpits of that guy who used to sit by himself at the front of the school bus. If I were to confess this, I know that I’d be met with open-mouth stares and I’d surely be the subject of conversations around the copier that start off with, “I always thought she was a man…really, I did…I mean, after all, have you seen her in a skirt? Oh god, it’s clear she started her hormone therapy way too late in life…and did you hear….she doesn’t even like chocolate!”

That said, I usually try to get by with the half truth: I’m allergic to chocolate.

This, you’d expect, might garner me some sympathy, maybe a pat on the knee, some friendly recognition that, because of a health issue that is rather obviously beyond my control, some little medical oddity for which I have absolutely no responsibility, I simply can’t pound down the chocolate like the rest of them, as though I have some South American parasite that can only be destroyed by consuming so much chocolate that my bodily fluids all smell of and have the coloring of Hershey's cocoa.

That my fondness for breathing continues to outweigh any desire to eat the dark stuff does not, however, seem to provoke much empathy. Instead, as they smack their lips and lick their fingers, waiting in line for second and third helpings, they periodically look back over their shoulders at me, the nicest of them mouthing, “Tranny traitor freak,” and I look down and make notes to remind myself to bring my own lunch next time.

I called his landlord.

“I just wanted to make you aware that Billy is plowing the backyard.”

She’s so sweet, so kind. “Oh, I know, honey, thank you for calling. But we did give him permission to till a little garden in the back.”

I’m perhaps not so sweet, not so kind. “I see. Well, the only issue might be that he’s not ‘tilling’—he’s PLOWING—and it’s not ‘a little garden’—it’s a FARM.”

It took her about fifteen minutes to get here from the other side of town, but by then, all vegetation in the likely ½ acre backyard was completely gone.

Days went by and I kept watch, waiting for rows of tiny corn, squash, tomatoes, maybe some beans, a watermelon or two, something, anything, but instead, he planted nothing. Absolutely nothing.

And that beautiful, rich, Alabama soil stared back at me, tempting me, luring me, calling me, daring me. I thought for some time how I could sneak over in the middle of the night and force a few things into the soil, but when I finally decided what to plant, it occurred to me that there’s a certain cruelty in planting Bud Light and Funyuns. After all, the White-Trash/Crazy gods already smile down on Billy in so many ways that there’s really no point in confusing the matter.

I was thus forced to grow used to the naked earth outside my kitchen window, and no matter my hopes for a thriving garden, by the weekend, Billy had moved on: his new project was in the front yard, towards the end of his driveway, just a few feet from the busy road.

I was curious when he took an old chair (its wicker seat the apparent victim of either someone who’d grossly underestimated their own weight or a rather active and athletic cat who has since likely been declawed) and placed it in his driveway. He stood there, his hands on the chair, and looked up, squinting towards the sun, and then he moved the chair. Over and over and over again, he looked at the sun and moved the chair, a lengthy exercise in what I can only imagine was an attempt to align the chair with god knows what. Then he went inside. And while most households would only have one such chair, Billy soon reappeared with a matching one, and went through the same rigmarole of looking into the sky, then inching the chair this way or that, before determining that the chair was finally in position.

He went back in the house again and reappeared with a broom, which, again, with much precision, he placed between the backs of the two chairs. And then he did the same with a mop. Things remained as such for a while, long enough for me to wander off and get interested in something else, but when I heard water splattering against the ground, I raced back to the kitchen window. There he was, at the end of his driveway, wringing out his laundry, hanging it on his wicker-chair-broom-and-mop drying rack in the driveway. Genius, pure and simple.

So while I’d thought that he’d spend the weekend gardening, his focus, instead, had been his socks and underwear. But later that evening, he did concern himself with that which springs forth from the earth.

My writing partner had come over and, while we sat on my front porch chatting, Mr. Napalm kept a watchful eye over us, and when we neither invited him over to join us nor acknowledged his obvious desire for such an invitation, he walked out to the edge of the road and started another gardening project of sorts: he rather unceremoniously unplanted his mailbox by hefting it from the ground, rather dutifully cleaning the dirt off the bottom of the post, filling the hole with some fresh, red dirt, and taking the mailbox away to an undisclosed location. I immediately conjectured that his psychiatrist reminds him of his appointments via the mail system and that was one way to stop THAT pesky little communication.

And the next day, he again concerned himself with the ground, as he was very, very busy, on his hands and knees, rearranging the pebbles in his gravel driveway, one at a time. Before I watched him do this, I was completely unaware that one pebble right here actually belongs way, way over there. It looked to be a rather exacting exercise and I’m not sure that he ever finished, but he did work for hours. And not once was I tempted to offer any help.

Things, however, are coming around.

Billy did plant some tomatoes yesterday, a whole row of them, maybe three dozen plants, which has led me to suspect that he either really, really likes tomatoes or that he’s the sole supplier for the nearest Ragu factory.

And the mailbox? It’s back. It reappeared, with a fresh coat of white paint, mounted on a white cross, sometime Thursday evening. I became aware of it when I heard car horns, one after another, and I looked out the kitchen window, and there he was, Billy Napalm, standing in the middle of the street, cars speeding by and honking on both sides of him, as he stood admiring his latest project, periodically screaming at a passing car, “Look at my fucking mailbox, you assholes!”

I shook his hand and when I told him my name, he tilted his head and said, “That’s a beautiful name.”

Beautiful? If my name were something foreign, exotic sounding, like Isabella, Alejandra, or even Gonorrhea, I could understand. But my name is utilitarian and nothing else, barely more than an article of speech, forgotten far more often than it’s remembered, and thus warrants no attention whatsoever. I therefore, in less than thirty seconds, had sufficient evidence to conclude that my new neighbor’s buckass crazy. I almost said it right then and there, but then I thought he probably has thrice-weekly doctor visits to remind him of that, so I kept my mouth shut. And I've kept my distance since then, but because my kitchen window faces his house, I keep an eye on him.

This works out well enough because he's obviously seen all those ads about how mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of and has taken that message to heart. He therefore lives his entire life on full display, sometimes on the front porch, sometimes in the yard, sometimes in the driveway, once or twice on the rooftop, but he's always outside, sometimes fully clothed, sometimes only in his boxers.

He's one of those wiry guys, small, thin, the waistband of his pants pulled up a tad too high, his thick, leather belt and a sense of barely-bridled rage cinching it all in place; he moves like an upright accordion, his shoulders pressing towards his knees with each step, and he’s always in manic-inspired motion, always on the prowl for something, anything, but a fight would be best.

I’d planned on sleeping a lot this weekend but, on Saturday morning, I awoke just before 7:00 to the noises of an almost-tuned radio blaring through my open kitchen window. From the sounds, either a cat was dying or someone was suffering a significant heartache, but, given that the radio dial was just a shade off the station, I really can't say which it was. It remained in that same position all day.

The knob that controls the volume, however, was fully functional and also remained in position all day, that position being two notches above that which is enough to cause the neighbors day-long headaches.

Mid-afternoon, I stretched out on my bed, somewhat hopeful of a nap but willing to watch some of the University's spring football game until then, but when I heard voices, male voices, angry voices, I screamed to my son, "Hey--look out the window--there's an ass-whuppin' going on somewhere."

He peeked out the front door and said, "Dang, Mom, that old man from next door is getting taught a trick." By the time I could get there, though, there was no more hitting, punching, grabbing, or thrashing about of any sort; there was just some jawing going on, and plenty of it.

My new neighbor was across the street, directly in front of my house, dog-cussing three men, one of whom was young, built like a tree trunk, and carrying a machete, and thus, to me at least, not a very good candidate for a dog-cussing. But all three men were walking away while my neighbor, like a tiny, ankle-biting dog, yapped after them until one of them turned around, stomped his foot towards him, and spooked him away.

My neighbor then scampered back to a cluster of pine trees directly across the street from his house, bent to pick up his hat from the ground, and searched for his glasses for quite some time.

Once he'd found them, he crossed the street and went back to his front yard, where he paced...and paced...and paced. I knew that, at the very least, his mind was busy re-tooling the story of what had just happened, knowing that, once his friends showed up, given what my son had seen (it involved my neighbor hanging on for dear life as the tree-trunk guy gave him three quick elbows to the back of the head just before he threw him in a splatter onto the ground), there wasn’t a chance that he’d tell them what really happened. And so he paced.

Before long, I heard another round of loud male voices through the kitchen window and Dylan and I gathered next to the sink, squatting down, so that we could hear without being seen.

"He took my damn knife," we heard him tell his friends. "That motherfucker better bring it back or he'll have to deal with me again,” he said, as the image of him thrown down onto a bed of pine needles flashed in my mind. “You know, I went to grab him by the balls and you know what? He didn't have any...I got nothing but a handful of hair." We stopped listening for a bit—we had to—we were laughing too hard—but when we were able to muffle ourselves enough to hear again, we heard him say, "Y'know, he knocked off my hat and my glasses...and when he done that, I took out my teeth because, by then, I was ready to fight."

Now I’ll admit that I can be fairly adamant about some things, drawing a line in the sand over absurdities, and such was the case with this book: I insisted that we order it from an independent bookseller. And how very, very fortunate we were to be able to find one who had a slew of personal problems, a pocketful of ready-made excuses that she doled out to us almost daily, each of them serving as an explanation for yet another delay in sending out the book. (I would like to say, however, lest you think me less than generous, that, in the end, I do hope that the judge did not decide to send her husband to prison, that her baby—I think it was her baby—hell, maybe it was her sister’s—or the neighbor’s—is now out of ICU, and that her aunt is, um, well, still dead.)

But last week, my son called at 3:45, just as he does almost every day.

“I’m home.”

“Do you have any homework how was your day what did you have for lunch don’t forget to walk the dog oh and the trash please please take out the trash,” I said, having learned long ago that, to get in the entirety of After School Mom-rant, you can’t stop to breathe and/or get answers.

And he’s learned to ignore the whole thing.

“Hey, you know that book that professor guy told you to order for me? It’s in.”

“Nice. You’ll have to let me read it once you’ve finished…hey, have you gotten your mid-term grades yet? Seems like they’re due…”

There was a pause then, which, given the question, was not a good sign. “I’m pulling a C in English right now, Mom, but I’m going to pull it up before report cards come out.”

I wish I could say that I responded appropriately, or perhaps even with cynical disbelief, saying something like, “You’ve got a what in which class?” Instead, however, I responded without thinking, my mouth seemingly acting on its very own and from it came sounds in an octave heretofore considered unattainable by human vocal chords and at a decibel level not uncommon near an airport runway.

Whatever it was that I said, my son fully understood. “Ok, Mom, ok. But part of it is because I haven’t turned in enough book reports yet. We’ve got all semester to read ten books and I’ve only turned in two.”

“Well, that settles that—we’re doing nothing but reading this weekend. And you, you’re reading nothing but books for your English class…you hear me? You can forget about reading that book that just came in…” I gasped once I’d said it, of course, recognizing that, with that simple utterance, I’d begun to treat a book of philosophical essays like…like…contraband. But once I’d said it, having learned much from daytime tv, from all those seemingly alien folks who act like they still love their kids after five or ten years of parenting and who, for some reason, think that consistency and rules and nurturing and communication and all that shit is somehow important to raising a healthy kid, yeah, those folks, they taught me that once I banished the philosophy book in favor of the English books, I had to live up to it. So…I said it again. “Let me make this clear: there will be no reading of that philosophy book this weekend.”

On Saturday afternoon, he flopped face first onto my bed beside me. I closed my book around my finger to save my place and looked at him.

“I need a break for a while, Mom. I can’t read any more.”

“I don’t want a break, though,” I said, hoping he’d leave. “I’m at this really exciting part of the book, D…”

“What are you reading?”

“The same thing I’ve been reading for a week,” I said, flipping the book over to show him the cover.

“What’s it about?”

Bingo, I thought. Once I tell him, he’ll leap from the bed in horror, run screaming back to his room, and then, then I can finish. So I paused, loaded my response on my tongue…and fired. “It’s about a hermaphrodite.”

And you know what I got as a response? Do you know how my 14 year old son reacted to hearing that I was knee-deep in a 500 page book about a person with a mixed bag of parts? Nothing. He just kept looking at me, awashed in a fresh-faced curiosity. Not moving. Not leaving. So I tried again.

“And I’ve just gotten to the part where these folks realize that their little girl is much, much more than just a little girl,” I said, trying to hint that, if he stayed, I was going to provide him with more and more details. “You see, there’s this accident, and she’s lying there…nekkid…” I let my voice trail off, thinking the effect would be…

But again, nothing. Or at least I didn’t get the response I expected. Instead, he leaned closer and said, “How old is she?”

“Fourteen.”

“Fourteen?! How in the world…didn’t anyone change her diaper when she was a baby?”

“Yesss…” I hissed, forewarning him…”but things were tee-tiny then…but now…they’re…more…developed.”

Surprisingly unfazed, he took the book from my hands and started thumbing through the pages. “But what about puberty? I mean, didn’t she start changing? Didn’t she start growing facial hair?”

Damn, I felt control of the conversation slipping away. We’d gone from a conversation right at the edge of some naughty bits, the very subject known to send pubescent boys racing from conversations with their mother, to something as innocuous as…as…. facial hair. I’d lost my chance to rid myself of my son, my chance to finish the book.

“Yes, but they’re Mediterranean, D.”

“So? What does that mean?”

“Well, her family didn’t pay much attention to it because women from that region are known to be somewhat hairy.”

And then, that’s when he jumped off the bed in a full-blown panic, when his eyes grew wide with horror, when his mouth dropped open in disbelief, when the air came up from his lungs in a gasp of terror and when his shoulders shuddered and quaked, all of this in an attempt to dispel from his entire being the idea of something so very, very awful, to gain some distance from a book that would proffer such notions…as…facial hair…on…on…a woman!

“Really? Really?” I stared at my son, his face still frozen in horror. “Let me get this straight, son….a mélange of genitalia doesn’t bother you, no, not at all, but a little upper lip hair, that’s what makes you flail about like you ran out of refills three weeks ago?”

His face grew stern, serious, and when he spoke, his voice dropped. Everything about him let me know that he was about to say something of great import. “Mom, let me tell you something…a woman…she’s not supposed to have a moustache. Period. It ain’t right.”

I started laughing. Hard. And when I finally caught my breath, I looked at him, his arms folded, his pronouncement having been made, and I tried my best to break it to him gently. “Dylan, if that’s what you really think, the world has many, many cruelties in store for you.”

Strangely, he smiled, and then stroked his chin. “I just can’t help but think though, Mom, that if she’d had a goatee like this, there wouldn’t have been any question about her gender…”

I started laughing again. “Goatee? Goatee? Dylan, that’s not a goatee you’ve got there; that’s three little hairs left stranded on your chin. And if you get too close to the cat, there’s a good chance she’ll try to reclaim them.”

And that is exactly what it took to get him to leave the room: an insult directed at that which he considers his, um, beard. And when I went to check on him later? He was sleeping soundly, his face, his, um, beard, tented beneath his new philosophy book.

And just in case the message is too subtle, they’ll throw in a card, whatever Hallmark's the cheapest, tucked inside a lavender envelope with your name on the outside. It’ll be pleasant enough, maybe a picture of some flowers blowing in an open field, maybe a puppy romping ahead of its mother, and it’ll be embossed with words of loving encouragement for your happy future. And on the inside, at the bottom, just above the grease spot from someone’s dropped potato chip, scrawled in the ink from the pen that’s always on the kitchen counter, it’ll read “Happy Birthday. Now git your shit and git OUT!!”

“Luggage is expensive,” my dad said. “It really is a nice gift for a kid. But when you turn 18, if times are tough, we may not be able to swing it, you know, buying you that Samsonite we’ve promised. I’m just warning you now, ok?”

I responded with an open-faced stare.

“We’re not stingy or anything, Ann. We’ll give you a Hefty bag, maybe two. Y’know, double-ply and all.”

“Ok, Dad, I gotcha.”

And as I walked down the hall towards my bedroom, I heard him, still sitting at the dining room table, laughing, not even going through the motions of trying to muffle it behind his hand.

“I don’t care, Dad, you know I don’t. If it was up to me, I’d be gone now.”

He shouted back, “Well, I could go in the kitchen right now and pack you a lunch for the road...if it would help. We’ve got some peanut butter and jelly, I’m sure.” And then he fell back into a choking fit of laughs, then coughs.

And when I turned 18? I didn’t get luggage. After all the prep work they’d done on my oh-so-fragile teenage psyche, my parents didn’t come through with it. I got the cake, the special meal, and a really good dictionary from my mom. My dad was in Miami that week, though, so he sent roses, a dozen red ones. And the card read, “Happy 18^th—VOTE REPUBLICAN! Love, Dad”

“Where’s the luggage?” I asked him on the phone that evening.

“Oh, you’ll be graduating soon. We were afraid if we gave it to you now, you’d leave and we’d have wasted too much money on your graduation celebration.”

“Really? You think a cake and a shitload of wings would go to waste around here?"

He sighed on the other end, knowing I was right, that there was never food wasted in our home.  "Oh and you know what? Bob's parents are serving sangria from Jimmy Mac's at his party...how lucky is he to have parents that cool?  You know he won't be leaving home until he graduates...that's going to be a party worth sticking around for...that's incentive to stay...”

Another sigh came through the phone. “You’ll get luggage when you graduate from high school.”

And sure enough, they made good on that promise. Less than a month later, on a hot morning in early June, I came home from my graduation rehearsal, and there it was, in the living room, three steps inside the front door: a Samsonite, my name already written on the tag looped through the handle.

“Cool,” I screamed. “Thanks!” I shouted. To nobody. They were out and about, getting the cake, the wings. “I hope they don’t forget the sangria,” I said to myself as I hefted the suitcase in my arms, hugging it against my chest.

And now, a generation later, I have a good friend who is going through this, preparing her 17 year old son for the reality that free rent and groceries will soon be coming to an end. She’s convinced him that on the wall in her bedroom, there’s a calendar she’s using to mark down the days until his 18^th. “I use a big, black Sharpie to mark off each day,” she screams, her punctuation mark to each of their arguments.

He’s a lot like me, though, when I was that age, dealing with the same thing from my parents. So he shouts back, “I do too, Mom, I do too. And I guarantee you that my Sharpie is bigger than yours!”

He’ll still be high school when he turns 18, though, and that, of course, warrants him a reprieve from the street for a while. But she hasn’t told him that yet. “Makes ‘em stronger,” she says. And I know she’s right. So, not knowing any better, he’s already gotten a job, already saving his money.

My neighbors, however, used a different approach.

Not long after Christmas, she came over to borrow money, a twenty I think. “We don’t have much food in the house after the holidays,” she said. She walked back across the yard, my money already shoved into her front pocket, and headed straight for her car. I was at the kitchen window when she returned, McDonald’s bags in hand.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about funding a Chicken McNugget extravaganza, resentful that they’d wasted my money on expensive shitfood, but I was certainly grateful that I wasn’t over there in the midst of the festivities, that, from my kitchen window, I’d be blind to the masticated chicken bits spilling from their greasy lips, the gummed-up French fries visible behind broken and missing teeth, their feast of fast food being washed down with warm beer from knocked-over cans. I was pretty sure a fight would break out in no time, perhaps over a forgotten Big Mac or, more likely, the last beer.

A week or so later, her husband caught me outside.

“Hey, I’m going to pay you back that money next Thursday, ok?”

“But I thought you guys were moving on Wednesday,” I screamed back across our driveways.

“Oh, yeah, did Lisa tell you? Well, I tell you what…we’re having a garage sale on Monday…we’ll just consider that you’ve got a gift certificate you can use.”

I started laughing.

“No, no, we’ve got some really nice stuff. You should send your son over—I’ve got some really cool knives he’ll want.”

“Uh, I don’t think 14 year olds and knives is a good combination,” I replied.

“Oh no, these are cool, I'm telling you,” he said, going back through his front door, never, ever considering that, uh, I didn’t want my son to have knives and, well, my son likely wouldn’t want them.

But knives we got.

Stamped with “Made in Pakistan” between the spots of rust.

“They’re collector’s items,” he said. Readily available on CheapJunk.com, I’m sure, where all the, er, collectors shop.

A few days later, the knives already settled into their new home, a resting spot somewhere in the county dump, my neighbors moved. To the beach. It was always their dream. And, like most parents, an integral part of their dream was NO KIDS.

Not quite at the finishing line with parenting, though, six kids between them, all from previous marriages, the oldest one having just turned seventeen, my neighbors, they left their kids behind. That’s right, in the great tradition of white-trash heroics, that WalMart school of parenting, they left every one of their children behind. Classic.

The evening after the Camaro was packed up, revved in the driveway, then squealed off towards the interstate, I kept watch from my kitchen window. The kids, they’d periodically spill through the front door into the yard, like a litter of abandoned kittens, mewling towards the sky. Except I don’t think singing along with the Metallica that was blaring through the slung-wide-open door counts as mewling. And I am not sure I’ve ever seen a kitten throw a beer can that far.

The next morning, I went over when I saw one on the front porch, nursing a hangover with the hair of the dog, a can of beer turned up at her lips, her mascara smeared down her cheeks.

“You doing ok?” I asked.

She smiled. “Yeah. I got me a place to stay. Not sure about everyone else, but I got my own room where I’m going.”

“Ok. Well, I know this is tough on you.”

“It is,” she said, pushing the upturned can a few inches above her open mouth, the last drops of her breakfast falling to her outstretched tongue. “But Momma says it’ll make us stronger.”

“He doesn’t have ADD or anything like that. In fact, the results of these tests are actually quite positive.”

I’d hoped for something simple, something that could be fixed with a lifetime of weekly visits and a small co-pay, or perhaps a little pill that would turn out to be highly addictive and that would eventually lead to a drug habit rivaled only by those of the greatest rock stars. Instead, the results weren't anything that good; a laundry list of real troubles and woes were in my future.

I stared at the doctor as he continued. “You see, the issue with your son is that he has a very high IQ.”

My mind raced as I tried desperately to figure out how this guy could possibly frame this as good news. “So he’ll be robbing convenience stores by the time he’s 12?”

“Ms. Coyle, this isn’t bad news, you know.”

”Well, I don’t necessarily think a kid robbing convenience stores is a bad thing. In fact, I’m sure there will be months when the extra cash will come in handy.”

“But perhaps he won’t go that route. Children at his age, if they’re encouraged to develop intellectually, will typically find more positive outlets for their…” and he blathered on and on and on about what I should do, how I could turn this kid who ate dog biscuits and peed off the front porch each morning into somebody who might change the world.

And for the most part, I followed his advice…which hasn’t always been easy…because instead of developing into an extra source of income, my son has become a fairly significant cash drain. Yes, it seems that encouraging his intellectual pursuits has left me broke, his annual book budget being surely equal to or greater than the defense budget of those budding eastern European nations. And at least they have some fairly impressive tanks to show for it.

I wonder, though, if I would feel differently about this matter if these pursuits were done privately, if he’d just go to his room and read and leave me out of it. But somehow, for some reason, he thinks it appropriate to drag me into it, like I should somehow be a part of the development of his mind. For instance, just last week, as I was sitting at the computer, decompressing from a long day, he started in on me.

“What’s existentialism?”

I turned around to look at him, to look him squarely in the eye, hoping for evidence of some hallucinogenic in his system. No such luck; he stared back with crystal clear eyes. So I answered in a way that I thought most appropriate for a mother to respond to her fourteen year old son. “Did you see those new pictures of Lindsey Lohan’s titties on the internet?”

“Mom, I’m being serious. I can look it up if it’s been too long and you just don’t remember.”

“She’s really hot, y’know.”

A few days later, I came home and discovered that someone (who has, as of yet, failed to claim responsibility) had rifled through the boxes of books I’d stored in the laundry room, the ones that used to be so neatly stacked to the ceiling but are now simply humped into a pile. “Resistance, Rebellion and Death,” a collection of essays by Albert Camus, lay on the floor, right next to the kitty litter box. My son looked over my shoulder as I cussed the pile.

“Don’t you have a copy of Plato’s “Republic” somewhere?”

“Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact I do. And it’s mine. You hear me? It’s mine, mine, mine. Plato’s sacred to me so you just keep your dirty little grubbies off of it, you hear me? Now I’m not trying to shut you down, son, but for you, can’t we just go to the store and buy you some porn or something? Don’t you just want to see some really big, ginormous titties instead? I’m sure we could find something…”

“I want to learn about the Greeks, Mom.”

“How’s ‘bout some big Greek titties? I’m sure there are specialty magazines….”

He stomped off in a huff. And I was thankful.

But before you think me cynical, under-appreciating a “gift” my son has, perhaps you should know the whole story. Because ol’ I-want-to-learn-about-the-Greeks boy has a really difficult time comprehending some of the things that I consider fairly basic to life.

Like the washing machine.

Now I’ll admit that it’s a few years old. Maybe seven. And I’ll also admit that when I first saw it on the showroom floor, I acted sufficiently insulted by the scratch on the side that the salesman knocked two hundred bucks off the price, fifty more than I’d planned. But no matter its age or appearance, it’s still fairly efficient at performing the task for which I bought it: getting clean whatever it is that I throw into it.

And therein lies the problem.

Because sometimes Plato, Jr. doesn’t exactly empty his pockets when he throws his dirty pants into the laundry basket.

And while I’ll admit that I should be celebrating the fact that any of his clothes actually find their way to the laundry basket, I’d likely be much, much happier if, the next time this rare event occurs, my budding-genius son recognizes that, no matter how old and ugly the washing machine is, Kenmore trumps Motorola. Every. Single. Time.

So…for the record…I submit to you that almost every part of his cell phone is now “drying out” in the kitchen. Still. Furthermore, acting as the voice of reason, I counseled quite vigorously that simply throwing the phone in the dryer was likely not a good idea. He eventually agreed but, more importantly, though, I think my argument for the porn just got stronger, no?

It was something my son noticed first, the nightly routine Joey has: he goes into the kitchen, jumps onto the counter, then balances himself just-so on the edge of the sink and closes his eyes to nothing more than a squint, then lifts his chin slowly, sweetly, solemnly towards the heavens. He’ll also purr softly sometimes, or every once in a while, his mouth will crack open with a mew that is low and mournful, coming from deep within him somewhere. We’ve known all along that, when he does this, Joey is talking to Jesus.

This has gone on now for months but just last week, right after dark, my son went into the kitchen, turned on the light and said in a loud whisper, “Mom, come quick.”

I’d just settled in for a half hour with Alex Trebek and I couldn't imagine what could possibly serve as adequate motivation to leave the couch, the remote, and Jeopardy behind. “Damn it, Dylan, no. I just sat down—besides, you should get in here—one of the categories is ‘Ways to Annoy the Shit Out of Your Tired Mom’ and I bet you can run that category.”

“Mom, I’m not joking,” he replied, “you’ve got to get in here.”

“Why?”

And then my son uttered a sentence that any sensible mother would find horrifying, likely landing on the list of “Things You Never Want Your Son to Say to You” somewhere between “I think I’m going to vote Republican” and “I’ve noticed your panties don’t fit me nearly as well since I’ve hit puberty.” Yes, my son said to me, “I see Jesus.”

My body was paralyzed with fear while my mind was spinning with questions of the future, wondering if this were the beginning, my son’s first step into exorcising the demons from the kitchenware when I burn his dinner, laying hands on my flour and sugar when he wants a cake, using his finger to make the sign of the cross over the bag of my trans-fat laden chili-cheese Fritos. I was surely in a trance when my son tapped my knee then held out his hand to help me from the couch. “You’ve got to come see this.”

He led me to the kitchen and just as I came through the doorway, he turned on the light. I looked up and there it was, just like my son had said. “Jesus,” I said under my breath.

“Exactly,” my son replied. And then my son said, “I think that’s the biggest cockroach I’ve ever seen.”

“Me too,” I replied, my eyes still following the darkened three inches that was scrabbling about in the cover of the kitchen light. Joey mewed softly from the kitchen counter when we turned to go back to the living room, his eyes still following Jesus when we turned off the light.

I went into the kitchen the next night and when I flipped the lightswitch, there was nothing. Nothing. Dylan came in behind me and said, “I forgot to tell you but I think Jesus is dead.” Nonetheless, Joey was sitting dutifully on the kitchen sink.

My son walked over to the cat, smoothed back his whiskers with a few soft rubs of his fingertips and said, “Don’t get too down, Joey, I’ve read about this. He’ll be back in a few days, maybe by the weekend.”

“Yeah,” I added, “surely in time for the Bowl games.”

My son shot me a dirty look then turned back to the cat. “And when he does come back, Joey, he’ll take all the good cats outside and he’ll hide the Easter eggs and stuff.”

“Unless, of course, he sees his shadow. And if he does, Christmas will last until sometime in January, I think.”

“Sheesh, Mom, shut up—you’re messing up the story and you’re going to end up confusing the cat.”

And God knows, that cat is pretty damn confused already.

But the folks who live there recently decorated the house, attracting my attention more so than usual. They didn’t paint their front door or add some vinyl siding, nor did they hang some new shutters or plant some annuals in the window boxes. No, these folks, whose house already attracts far more attention than it likely deserves only because of its shitty location, location, location, decided that, to spruce up the place, instead of picking up the beer cars in the front yard, removing the pine straw from their gutters, or simply putting some fucking air in the tires of the pickup out front, what they should really do is hang some lights.

And in some ways, it’s a good idea because, well, when you live in the armpit of a curve in rural Alabama, you absolutely do need more light when you consider that, well, some folks miss those curves. But Christmas, not safety, was what they had in mind when Martha and Bubba Stewart opted for those strings of lights that dangle in strands from your roofline, those ones that, I suppose, are to give the appearance of icicles hanging from your rootop. Except this is Alabama. And icicles so rarely dangle from anything around here. And those things don’t really look like icicles anyway; they really only look like some strings of cheap-ass lights that dangle from some yokel’s rooftop because he has the aesthetics of a, um, cheapass yokel.

But on this particular house, although they have decorated with those lights, the lights do not dangle from the rooftop…no, no, that’s where you’d expect them. Instead, perhaps because of limited mobility (and if that’s indeed the reason, I apologize…but somehow I sense it isn’t), or perhaps because he’s a dumbass (judging from the rest of the, um, ambience he’s created, I suspect this is far more likely to be the case), this guy hung the lights on the railing of the wheelchair ramp. So, even if you glance at it briefly, out of the corner of your bad eye, in a blinding rain, if for some reason, somehow, there’s an illusion of icicles created, is it supposed to be a wondrous and beautiful thing to see them hanging from the handrail of Granny’s wheelchair ramp? Doesn’t your mind instantaneously drift to the image of a spill at the bottom of the ramp, a wreckage of blue-veined legs and pee-stained cushions, sagging, floppy bosoms and big, rubber wheels, all in tangle with someone’s gingham skirt hoisted high above the waistband of her Depends? No? Ok, maybe it’s just me….

We’re not finished yet though.

My real problem is that this guy, he hung those lights weeks ago, about the time you were still scrambling for a Larry Craig costume to wear to the company Halloween party. That’s right: Mr. and Mrs. HeeHaw Homemaker put up their Christmas decorations back in October. Now I know the local WalMarket put out their holiday stuff back then too, as did some of the stores in the mall and a few other places here and there. Oh and there were shoppers who took advantage of it, grabbing up all the Christmas stuff they could carry. In October.

And I scratched my head.

Because in third grade, I paid a lot of attention to my teacher. She wore Earth Shoes, no make-up, cut her hair short and had an odd last name, yet somehow she seemed just like the rest of us. And, although we knew she was married, she insisted that we all call her Ms. Chunn and not (and I mean absolutely not!) Mrs. Chunn. She was one of those hairy-legged feminist-types, we figured, but she really did seem so…normal. And nice. Oh and I think she did actually shave her legs. Which gave me license to like her, in spite of her sensible shoes and funny name.

So I paid attention to her. And when she started explaining to us why diamonds were so expensive, I listened intently. She didn’t have to repeat it for me because, even at 8 years of age, I understood basic supply-and-demand theory, that the rarer something is, the more valuable it is.

And to this day, in fact, every time I go to the mall in October or every time I drive past that house, I remember Ms. Chunn and I absolutely resent the expansion of the holiday season to before even Halloween. Here’s my thinking: if it lasts two months, a full one sixth of the year, really, seriously, how fucking special is it? Now I’ll admit that I spend more time in any given year with my head resting sweetly on my pillow, but I'll spend a lot more time this year in the "holiday spirit" than I will in the bathroom. Now, if you look at it like that, by celebrating the season for a full two months out of the year, don’t we value Christmas somewhere between sleep and taking a shit?

I’m just saying….