by Craig | Feb 18, 2019 | Stories from Craig
Sometime ago….. or maybe I ought to say, “Once upon a time” … My wife , Joan, had a run in with one of Ohio’s ugliest critters–an opossum. Or just “possum” for short.
Joan teaches clinical instruction for Cleveland State’s school of nursing, and it involves getting up very early in the morning and working a long day in a hospital. Well on this one particular morning, Joan was opening the door of our attached garage when she heard something shuffling along the wall behind my black beauty Camaro. She groped in the dark for the light switch and when the lights bloomed into brilliance, there was a loud and very weird screeching noise as a possum came running out from under the Camaro heading right between Joan’s legs.
As you can imagine my wife was quite startled. She did what every red blooded American woman would do, she screamed.
Joan slapped the garage door opener’s wall switch and as the door opened she bolted out of the garage. The possum who had been trapped in the garage for hours, now saw the growing gap between the floor and the door. He lurched towards his freedom; but, suddenly the woman was cutting him off! He tried to reverse himself, but too late. He slid right into her legs, bounced back, turned around and went straight back into the garage.
Joan cried out, “Jiminy crickets!! Craig, Cur-raig!”
She was trying to call me out of my deep slumber. I never heard a single thing, but the neighbors sure did. The neighborhood began to light up like Bedrock whenever Wilma’s cat locks Fred Flintstone out of his house.
Somebody called the cops. We live just around the corner from the police station, and there’s not even a donut shop between the station and our house to slow down their response. The men in blue arrived to see a wild-eyed woman staring into the garage. They were trying to figure out what was going on as they stepped out of their cruiser.
My wife said, “Got a possum”. But that’s not
what the policeman heard! “Got a
gun” is what the policeman heard.
The atmosphere became very tense. The policemen, thinking they were now facing down a crazy armed women dressed in white, called for backup. Within minutes the police SWAT team was setting up around our house leveling sniper rifles at my wife.
Our city Councilman lives just down the street. He was looking out his window at what he thought was a major crisis developing in his neighborhood. A good politician, he knew what to do next. Call the TV stations and prepare for a photo op. By now the whole neighborhood was awake, except me. People in their robes and pajamas, some wearing fuzzy slippers that looked like Homer Simpson, were streaming out of their houses to see what was going on.
Blue and red flashing lights, white strobe lights and local news TV video camera lights were turning my bedroom into a late night disco. I finally woke up. When I turned on the radio I heard there was a hostage situation developing in Parma. I leisurely dressed, went downstairs, into the garage, I saw a very frightened possum hunkered down in the corner. I said “Hey, little fella, has this ruckus got you scared?” I took a broom and sort of shushed him on his way out the side of the garage. He tore off into the darkness never to be seen again.
Just about then, they had my wife in the back of a police cruiser. A detective shook his head in denial as Joan told the story about the possum. They didn’t believe there were possums in Parma. The detective was getting pretty mad because Joan refused to tell him what she did with the gun. While the detective interrogated her, the other policemen were having a argument about whether the purple stethoscope around her neck should be considered a weapon.
Since the hostage situation didn’t seem to be developing, the news media lost interest and left. The councilman congratulated the police on a job well done. Slowly everybody went home.
Except for my wife
However, upon further questioning, and upon learning that she was on her way to teach clinical instruction, that she is the President of the Sigma Theta Tau Nursing Honor Society and President of the Northeast Ohio Medical Surgical Nurses Association, and of course married to me, they decided it was okay to let her go.
In the next issue of the Parma- Sun Newspaper the headlines read: “Councilman thwarts Hostage attempt.”
by Craig | Feb 18, 2019 | Stories from Craig
We
have been getting a lot of use from our car heater. By early December we were
visited by snow squalls and below freezing temperatures. The foul weather did
not stop me from taking a car ride with my lovely wife, Joan. After we had
driven a little while I began to feel ‘hot’. So I reached over and turned down
the car heater fan. Soon the car was at a comfortable temperature, but not for
long. Joan began to feel cold so she reached over and turned up the fan. So, I
turned it down the temperature. She countered by turning up the fan and temperature.
Get the picture?
Odd thing about this is that our conflict isn’t on how to set the controls for the car heater; it is a matter of dressing properly for a cold ride. When I go out I like to bundle up in a sensible, warm parka, with a knit hat and gloves. Even with 26 degree weather. My wife wears a long sleeve cotton shirt and a skirt that does not possible go below her knees.
Let’s take a look at our combined efforts to keep our house warm. I like to keep the thermostat at a very cozy 72 degrees. It seems my significant other isn’t aware that the perfect temperature for a human dwelling place is 72 degrees. For instance, the other night I awoke at about 3 in the morning from the sound of my very own teeth chattering. I opened my eyes to see icicles dangling from our ceiling fan. I rushed downstairs to see what was up with the furnace.
Someone had set the temperature to 50 degrees! I properly adjusted the thermostat and returned to our bedroom. As I eased into bed, I glanced over at my snoring wife, but I couldn’t see her. I followed the nasal roar to a small hole in the deep pile of blankets, quilts and bed spreads. It was like a cocoon made for arctic explorers and somewhere inside was my wife.
The lesson in feminine logic is clear: When outside in a car, dress half naked and turn up the heat all the way. When in the privacy of your own home, dress like Nan-nook and turn off the heat. Get it?
Now please excuse me while I scrape the frost from my monitor screen.
by Craig | Feb 18, 2019 | Stories from Craig
This is the tale of how a simple, green garden pea caused the lives of many people to be changed. The pea had modest beginnings. It grew on a common truck farm in mid-west America. It was picked while still in its pod, but was soon chucked; then bagged; then quick frozen with a thousand, thousand other peas. The bag was then placed into carton with a couple dozen other bags. The carton was stacked onto a pallet. The pallet was loaded into the back of a freezer trailer. A Semi-truck hauled it to the local grocery store, where our pea was placed into a display case and then began to wait and wait.
A pretty young woman with brown hair and eyes as green as the pea, came into the store and purchased the bag of frozen peas. She took the bag home and placed it into her Kenmore freezer where the pea once again had to wait and wait.
After a few months the woman took out the bag of peas. She tore the bag open and…Oh No! She poured the frozen peas into a little pan of scalding hot, boiling water. Our little pea was cooked until it became soft and very tasty.
The woman began to scoop out the peas with a big straining spoon. First she plopped some onto the plate of a pretty girl who only played with them, sealing their doom to the ignominious fate of uneaten food — the disposal. Other peas were given to an adolescent boy who devoured them while making a great noisy lip smacking. Some were placed on the plate of a middle-aged man who smothered them in margarine. Then the woman plopped our special pea down onto the dinner plate of a beautiful young girl. She was so young that she did not even know that Pea was spelled with a “P”.
The girl’s long golden hair swooshed across her dinner plate as she looked up and gave her mother a big smile. Oh how she loved to eat peas! First you get to chase them around your plate and then when you ate them they made a delightful snapping sound in your mouth!.
At first she eagerly dug into the peas, eating many of them in a single swoop of her spoon. Then she began to play, chasing them around her plate before capturing a few on her spoon. Soon she became weary of these games so she decided to see if a pea could fit somewhere else in her head besides her mouth. She picked out our special pea and held it delicately between her finger and thumb.
First her father stopped her from putting the pea into her left ear. Being only four years old, the girl mistakes her father’s intentions and tries to put it into her right ear. She is stopped again, this time by her adolescent brother.
Suddenly a loud gasp is heard followed by a whining cry. “Mommy”, the little girl whispers fearfully. “There is a pea stuck up my nose!” Undaunted by her father and brother’s attempts to keep her from placing a pea inside her head; Blondie successfully inhaled the pea up her nose!
The now sad little girl with a pea up her nose was put into a little blue car, and is driven through the city to the emergency room of a leading community hospital. Her Mommy hoped the doctors would be as good at pea extracting as they were with triple bypass surgery.
The Medical people tried to extract the lodged pea. However, the pea’s eviction had became a political struggle between the rights of little girls to put and keep things up their noses and tyrant adults who would shamelessly deny them those rights.
Now imagine
seeing all this through the eyes of a girl not quite five. You’re taken by a
mad mommy to a terrible place where you are forced to lie on a really hard bed
with a paper blanket on it. Hanging on the walls are posters showing people
without any skin, showing what their muscles look like. There’s even a poster
of a man with his head sawed in half showing the innards of his head. In the
corner is a stainless steel cabinet with glass windows. Behind the windows are
tons of shiny needles to stick you with and bundles of Popsicle sticks to shove
down your throat.
Next
thing she knows, a man all dressed in white wearing purple latex gloves enters
the room. In his right hand is a long
pair of tweezers that glimmers under the bright examination light. He is
coming right at her pretty little face with those monstrous tweezers.
“Please
pretty little girl with a pea up your nose” the wicked man says, “let me put
these tweezers up your nose, and I’ll yank that pea right out!”
NO WAY!
Victory for kids! After putting up a big fit and shedding many tears the adults give up and the now an even angrier mommy takes her back home. The pea up the nose has proven stronger then the adults. Proving that kids do have the right to stuff things up their noses. Ring the bells! Sound the trumpets! Sing along with Barney! Because today is a liberation day for kids all over the world.
The adults haven’t admitted defeat. That night they conspire to have her father take her to see a specialist. Perhaps even a PEA-di-ah-trician. Now a person might think it funny that a man could specialize in plucking small objects from children’s noses, but in a society where grown men get paid millions to hit a tiny ball with a club and then go on strike for more pay, I guess there would be some people who could make a fair living performing nose pickology.
Next morning her daddy took the girl with a pea in her cute nose back to the hospital. Once again the girl refuses to let anyone come anywhere near her nose. Still thinking she has
won, her daddy walks her through a door labeled; ”Pre-Op/Surgery”. The adults
are getting tough now.
A nurse tricks her into drinking apple juice laced with a sedative. It tastes icky so she only takes a few small sips. Then they wheel her into surgery, where even though she says; “No, I don’t want to put on that funny mask”, a man wearing a silly blue hat puts it on her anyway. Then he makes her breath horrible smelling air. Soon she is fast asleep.
The nose picking specialist, unopposed by the slumbering girl, approaches her nose with the long slender tweezers. With a quick flick of his wrist he removes the pea and sends it into a nearby stainless steel pan. From there the pea will meet its end down the operating room disposal.
Yet the story is not over. After the hospital visit, her father takes her to MacDonald’s for a plain cheeseburger happy meal. As she happily munches her fries she decides to never put a pea up her nose again. Unfortunately, she will have to suffer year after year as her family retells the story of how one little pea affected the lives of so many people.
The End.
by Craig | Feb 18, 2019 | Tales from the Kids
As a five-year-old, I never fully thought about the things that could result from my decisions. At that age, we’re invincible and everything is fixed with some Neosporin and a band aid. We especially like to do things that we hear older kids talking about. One night at dinner, my older brother Andy was talking about a “funny” thing that happened to his friend. After this night, I learned that I should still do things that I want to, but to just think about it a little more carefully.
I can’t quite remember what we had for dinner, but the one thing that I do remember very well is the side dish–peas. The sight of the peas immediately reminded Andy of the time his friend stuck a pea in almost every hole in his face. I looked down at my peas, wondering why I had never thought of this before. When my family chuckled at this story, I picked up a pea from the pile resting on my plate. I slowly tilted my head to one side, inching the pea closer and closer to my ear. My mom noticed me attempting to reenact my brother’s story and quickly pulled my hand away and told me not to do that. Disappointed, I put the pea back onto the pile and continued listening to my brother’s story. “Then he put one up his nose…” he continued. Now more determined then ever, I quickly picked up another pea and crammed it into my right nostril. Satisfied that nobody noticed me do it this time, I quietly took a few bites of food. When I decided that I wanted it out, I found out that it was stuck. I tried to grip the pea and pull it out. But that only sent it higher up into my nose.
Terrified, I just quietly sat there for a moment,
unsure of what to do. I didn’t want to tell my mom after she had already told
me not to put the pea in my ear. Having no other options, I started crying.
Between the sobs and few words I managed to get out, my family had a very hard time
trying to figure out what was wrong with me. When I finally managed to say,
“There’s a pea in my nose,” they just started laughing. My parents and siblings
did the best they could to free the green ball of doom from my nose. When
nothing worked, they had no other choice but to take me to the emergency room.
The nurse sat me down on the examination table and asked me if it was okay for her to use an “instrument” to get the pea out of my nose. To a five-year-old, an instrument is something that produces music, like a guitar of a piano. When the nurse came back, however, she did not have a trumpet or tambourine. She was holding a big, long, set of tweezers that to me looked like it would not even fit in my nose. So I began screaming. After all my fighting, I was surprised when they brought me a cup of my favorite juice a few minutes later. I took a sip of my apple juice and immediately noticed the disgusting and bitter taste. “It tastes funny,” I began to say, but the nurse, completely annoyed with me just yelled at me to drink it. The juice was bitter because they had spiked it with some sort of drug to make me fall asleep. This way they could simply remove the pea while I was passed out and not have to worry about me kicking and screaming. I don’t know how long I was asleep for, but I woke up in a chair sitting in the waiting room. My dad was sitting next to me reading a magazine. I was confused as to what had even happened. All I knew was that I had a pea stuck in my nose, I fell asleep, and when I woke up it was out.
That was good enough for me because my dad took me to McDonalds on the way home.
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