Monday, January 17, 2011

A Veritable String Of Pearls

There used to be a show on TV called Kids Say The Darndest Things and it was full of kids saying just that, the darndest things. Children are people, I know this, but they are special people, insightful, humorous, loving, not timid, and sometimes, I will admit it, even mine, crass people.

A couple of weeks ago, my twin granddaughters were telling me about their newly understood ‘special-ness’ of being twins, my head swiveling like at a tennis match.
Liza: “Everywhere we go people point”
Lorna: “their finger at us”
Lisa: “and say look”
Lorna: “Are they twins?”
Lisa: “It’s like”
Lorna: “we’re famous”
In unison: “or sumpin!” then to each other in unison “It’s crazy”

I also heard them discussing privately what would happen if they wore identical outfits… who would be able to tell them apart? They were very disappointed that we all could, but they have no idea how hard it was. Even their brother Guru said “Well I sorta knew and I was sorta guessing, but I got it right.”

My grandson Mario was talking about his relatives in another state. He described his aunt as old, then turned to me and clarified the statement “Not as old as you grandma but still REALLY old”

His sister GiGi, after being up literally until five in the morning told me”Actually Grandma, I just don’t sleep all that much” Ya’ think???

These keen observers of the human dilemma come from a long line of children who love to vocalize and therefore say fascinating things quite often. When I married my husband, my daughter Polly, then in 8th grade caught us in a simple embrace in the kitchen. “Eeewww you can’t hug each other! You’re related now!” Wow.

My son Henry, who had been upside down and backwards in the womb, was delivered by emergency C-Section. He loved to tell the story, saying he had been stepping on his “Ability cord” so they had to take him out. Another favorite Henryism came in 92 when he was still just four years old. Our house was damaged and most of our personal possessions destroyed by a tornado. We went back the following day to see if anything was salvageable. Henry, being Henry cut right to the heart of the matter. Upon seeing the wreckage of our home and those surrounding it, seeing people picking through once prized possessions, now trash, he snatched up the top half of a GI Joe figure and shouted “I’m getting my stuff and getting the hell out of here!” He was known to use the whole tornado incident to his advantage though. 3 months later sidling up to a pretty woman at a 4th of July event, saying “I am just four and a tornado hit my house, I lost everything except for half a GI Joe man.” She was appropriately saddened by this and handed over a Popsicle he had had his eye on with a “you poor baby”.

My son Peter, at age 3, batting his long lashes told a lady who commented on his lovely blonde curly hair “And I have nice eyes, too”. He once earned the ire of his big sister by telling a potential beau who called that she couldn’t come to the phone because “she was poopin’” Another day was marked by shrieks of laughter from the two littler darlings following him as he came running in to tell me that a boy his sister was “in loooooovveee with” had kissed her, hot on his heels came an extremely embarrassed and furious and recently bussed Anna swinging at him and wailing over and over, “It was a peck! It was just a peck!” (Aside: When visiting the home of your new (you can only hope) girlfriend the day after a first date to a chaperoned dance DO NOT wear a shirt that says Party Naked With Me and then kiss the girl while her mom and siblings are home)

There was the day my son came charging in, breathless and shouted “Have you done the laundry yet” I leapt up and shouted back “No” not sure what the drama was, he replied with “Whew, I forgot to take the worms outta my pockets”. Needless to say, that was the day I decided they were old enough to start doing their own laundry…

I wish I could remember more of these pearls, string them together into a necklace of funny memories to wear when I am feeling blue. I should have written them down, taken a moment to memorialize them but I didn’t for one simple reason. When life is happening it is hard to stop and say whoa, funny moment, let me grab a pencil and just jot this down. Even if I had they would have all been in my illegible hand on the back of long tossed envelopes, so I treasure these that stay embedded.

4 comments:

  1. Very well done! This was a "pearl" of a piece. Took me back to when my kids were young-fun memories. Thank you!

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  2. Thank you! I am glad you enjoyed it!

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  3. Oh, so very, very nice! And how true about memories. They slip away, until some scent, some flash of light and color pop them up again. But all the ones that don't pop up again? Ah well. Gone. Starting to see the benefit of being a diarist! But would we ever go back and read those diaries? Probably not?

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  4. I hope we would, or our children would. Like old pictures, but better, because we color them with our own rememberances

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