Fruitcake

Good morning, my neighbor, and Merry Christmas to you! I’m here with a gift for you and your family! Yes, it’s fruitcake again, just like every other year, only before it was left on your porch by a woman whose name you never bothered to know.

Who, you ask? But you must have seen her a hundred times walking the street in front of your house—tiny thing, ruddy cheeks and shaggy white hair. She always wore a gauzy tie-dyed skirt and a Cardinals jersey—Pujols, number 5. Sometimes she danced for no reason and sang old Beatles songs at the top of her lungs. 'She loves you yeah, yeah'...yeah, that’s her. Don’t you remember? Every time you saw her you called for your kids to come in. Crazy’s the word you used—off in the head.

For ten years straight that crazy little lady baked a fruitcake for you and your family and left it on your front porch on Christmas morning. And every year, when you walked out your door you kicked it aside “Damn thing’s like a brick,” you said.

I never told my Lizzie this because it would’ve crushed her soul, but last year I saw you feed it to your dog. “Look,” I heard you say, laughing. “He won’t even eat it.”

This Christmas I thought I’d hand the cake to you, personally, because with your gift I have some news I think you’ll be glad to hear. There will be no more fruitcake. No fruitcake ever again to clutter your porch and block your door; no fruitcake to feed your dog. And you can rest assured that you won’t be seeing the crazy slip of a lady anymore, dancing in the street, singing her songs. No one will ever see my Lizzie again.

Why do you look so sad my neighbor, my friend? There’s no need to ruin your Christmas by feeling bad. After all, you’re not the first to turn fruitcake away; not the only one afraid to take a chance on its colorful fruits and nutty texture, choosing the smooth chocolate sheet cake instead.

Running With Scissors

On a warm Saturday morning, this past October, my husband decided it would be a good time to go out into the backyard and clear away some dying tomato plants from our vegetable garden. After breakfast, he selected a pair of garden shears from the garage and immediately began the task.

I’m not a morning person and wasn’t feeling nearly as energetic as he was, but I poured myself a second cup of hot tea and went outside to sit in a nearby hammock  and watch him work. It was a quick job, and in a matter of minutes he was done and ready to leave the garden. As he began to walk away, somehow his feet got tangled up in the mesh fence he had put up to keep wild animals out,  causing him to trip.

I should probably point out that we have a raised garden bed, and that my husband was still holding the shears, which were the kind with long, pointy blades. To be perfectly clear, he was falling headfirst with a sharp object aimed directly at the main artery in his neck—a trip to the emergency room trifecta.

Now on my feet, across the yard, I was watching the whole thing, helplessly. As he hit the ground, he instinctively jerked his head back just as the shears made contact with his neck. I ran to his side, expecting the worst, and discovered that he had, in fact, jabbed the shears into himself.

The good news is there was no squirting blood. By the grace of God the shears missed his jugular vein. When he jerked his head back he prevented the blade from penetrating deep into his neck. He was cut, though, and there was some blood, but the wound was superficial. Nothing that a tetanus shot and a butterfly band-aid wouldn’t fix. The worst of his injuries was a bad sprain in his neck, for which the doctor prescribed steroids, and physical therapy.

Later on that night, he found himself in quite a bit of pain, and as with most men who’ve been injured, he needed babying. As for me, I was pleased with the minor wounds he sustained and happy to have him alive and in one piece. If you ask me, all in all, it was a pretty good trade-off—a little whiplash for a life-threatening stab wound. I told him he should’ve bought a lottery ticket on the way home.

His accident got me to thinking about when I was a kid and my grandmother told me not to run with scissors. Or a pencil. She used to say, “Stop running with that pencil or you’ll fall and put your eye out!”  Why couldn’t she have simply said, “Stop running with that pencil” ? Why? Because that alone wouldn’t have been enough to get my attention, but by adding the part about poking my eye out, she conjured a gory mental image that I could not ignore.

Grandma also used to tell me if I crossed my eyes they would stick that way, and if I played with fire I would wet the bed. I’m pretty sure neither of these things have actually ever happened, at least not in the said sequence, and even then, I doubted the validity behind her statements, but at the time I wasn’t willing to take the chance.  

She used the word “death” a lot when she wanted to get me to stop doing something of which she didn’t approve. Some of her favorites were “Don’t eat so fast or you’ll choke to death!” and “Get in out of the cold or you’ll freeze to death!” But the one that scared me most of all was “Zip your coat and pull up your hood, or you’ll cough your head off tonight!”  That really made for a grizzly nightmare for a kid with an overactive imagination. I pictured myself in bed hacking away, face red, eyes bulging, unable to catch my breath to scream for help, hacking, hacking, hacking, until my head is thrust from my neck with a spurt of blood and rolls across my bed, onto the floor, disappearing into the darkness.   

When I grew up and had kids of my own, I used the very same tried and true phrases on them that my grandmother used on me—for their own good, of course.  Do you know of any more such phrases used to manipulate a kid’s behavior? If so, I’d love to hear them!