The Real Thing!



Happy Day all! I just thought you might like to see what is inspiring Bunky's Playhouse. 

There is a rabbit hutch underneath it. I found this to be horribly cruel to the poor rabbits who must have inhabited it at one time. Here they sit in the cedar bed, looking through wire as their species frolics freely about the ground. Did the wild rabbits taunt  the poor pet, probably named something disgustly cute like 'Bunnie', laugh at his pampered state? Did the poor incarcerated pet get the last laugh as he saw owls, ghostly and silent in the dark swoop down and snatch up his tormentors in their talons while giggling maniacally into the night? One can only wonder...

 

Bunky's Playhouse --CHAPTER 2—

Bunky is staring at me from the corner of the porch. I feel his eyes on me before I spot him eyeing me from behind the glider. He is tiny, a serious little man in a serious little world of his own. He wears a coonskin cap we found at a yard sale and swimmer’s goggles cover his eyes. His blue striped shirt, once fresh and clean looking, is faded, permanently wrinkled and shrunken, having been washed nightly for two months now. I think, as I always do, that I need to find a shirt he likes as well or he will go through life with his buttons popped and his seams split. His shorts ride low, waist band sliding under his rounded belly into a natural resting place on his scrawny hips. Just below his clay stained knees his rubber boots, bright red and shiny look huge and out of place and ridiculously new. He is dressed for adventure.

My heart jumps. I want to run up through the yard and onto the porch and grab him up. I want to swing him around and smother him with kisses and inhale his milk-and-dirt little boy smell. I want to sit in the glider with him on my lap and sing silly songs and tickle his sides until he begs for mercy through his giggles.  I want, I want, I want…

I stroll through the yard slowly, stopping to smell a flower, to pull a weed, to toss an acorn. I approach him coolly. Bunky is the epitome of cool. Four years old and outbursts annoy him. I nod at him as I settle on the porch steps, acknowledging his presence as he sidles up next to me and lays his hand on my shoulder. I pat the tiny fingers, softly, and we stay like that a while, looking out into the yard at the teeming wildlife and the luscious greenery, companionable.

Bunky tells me he wants to go adventuring, please, walk in the woods and find some interesting bugs for his collection. I shudder at the thought of more creepy crawlies at the same time I am bursting with pride at his inquisitive mind. I see that he has his mason jar ready. Holes punched in the lid and grass in the bottom. A magnifying glass, net and bug book sit next to it. They are in a neat row, laid out in a manner that tells me he was expecting an argument and wanted to have everything ready to point at if and when I said no. The book is there simply to make me happy. In an effort to curtail his passion for insects that actually moved and bred I bought him the book. As good as having them I explained, but better!  More variety, more color. You can learn about them without actually having them in your room! He had looked at me somberly and called me out. You only bought it so you wouldn’t have to hunt bugs with me. It is a simple, and true statement but the way he says it sounds so bad I cringe like I have been caught doing something mean and petty.

No worms, Bunky, I mean it, no worms and no grubs and no crickets. Deal? And nothing that bites or stings! And no stink bugs!

I am talking to myself; he has run off the porch and is trotting around in circles with his arms flapping erratically calling out Butterflies? How about butterflies? Are you afraid of butterflies? Are they scary granma? He giggles. My heart soars.

Never Ever Not In A Million Years

Two of my granddaughters, both turning two this month, are celebrating their birthdays together tomorrow. The excitement runs high, furious cleaning, moving, painting, arranging and decorating is going on at my daughter’s who is hosting the fete. Elmo invitations are sent, a jump house is rented, multiple highchairs and booster seats are gathered and cloroxed to within and inch of their (if they had them) lives. Balloons, bunting and banners proclaim and adorn the day in bright primary colors, colors of joy.

My daughters are wonderful mothers, perfectionists with unbelievably high standards in all areas they feel are important to the health, happiness and well being of their children. I am sure that this will be a total joy to attend, that the toddlers will end the day happy and exhausted and everyone will go home saying what a wonderful job they did.

Watching them gear up for this important day I can only remember the various parties planned and hosted by me for my children….

Most of their parties were small simple family affairs. My first child’s first birthday went totally unmarked except by my saying Happy birthday Sugarbear to her and promptly bursting into tears. Her father was somewhere on the island of Crete shooting missiles from tanks, her Grandparents were literally in other countries. I was six weeks away from giving birth to my second child and that was about all I could muster. I was sad and lonely and clung to her much more than she clung to me that day. Her second was more exciting, having her uncles there to teach her how to say “Wassup?” and giving her change from their pockets. She had presents from her father and I, from her grandparents, her great-grandmother. We all moved outside after cake and ice cream to watch the uncles, one 12 and one 14, blow up model cars with firecrackers and whoop like wild things as they played with my baby girl in the Indian Summer twilight.

For my children born in the heat of summer parties were more elaborate even if still almost criminally simplistic. The heat in June and August in Georgia made it possible for us to celebrate out of doors. We played water balloon volley ball, and smear the queer (don’t be angry, please, that was the name of the game 30 years ago) with the water balloon, and went swimming. We had potato races and danced in sprinklers and went to the park and cooked out, eating second and third slices of cake while we watched adult relatives row lazily around the lake as their offspring threw hamburger buns to the ducks, skipped rocks and told secrets on the benches under the pines. On a rare occasion a friend was invited but there were just so MANY of us, of the family, that 30 was a normal number so who needed anyone else?

As my kids got bigger the parties began to take on more importance to them. They realized that they should be events of a caliber worthy enough to mark their birth. Luckily for my oldest, unluckily for the rest, she had 6 years on the next in line so she got to try everything first. The end results were so often irritating (on the up side) or down right disastrous (on the down side) that the others rarely got but a watered down version of the event if they got any version at all.

When Anna was turning 12 she wanted a slumber party. This is a normal request for a 12 year old girl. I had had many myself. Long nights filled with too many sweets, giggles and tearful arguments. Many a best friendship had gone up in flames and many a new, tentative friendship rose up in it’s place. What could be the harm? I knew the girls, knew their parents. We lived in a complex which had townhouses (called condominiums) and no one had more than a five minute walk there or home if need be. My husband had gone home to Belgium for a visit so it was just me and the kids. I thought it would be a blast.

Getting ready for the party was a hoot. We went and rented movies fit for tweens, “Princess Bride” being the group favorite, and bought potato chips, brownie mix and soda pop. Lugging these treasures home from the store my daughter started worrying that the three movies we had chosen would not be the RIGHT movies, and if they were, would not be ENOUGH movies for the party.

When we reached home she promptly went next door to her friend’s (twins!) house and after much secret deliberation the girls decided to raid their (at work) parent's stash of movies. I heard the trio come in, making big plans for a fun filled night. I heard them turn on the TV and the VCR opening. I asked them what they were going to watch, wanting to save the movies (a truly rare treat for me and my kids) for the actual party. They had borrowed a movie they said, called “Brown Eye” from the neighbors. “Uhm, girls, don’t turn that on!”

“Why not?” they asked in unison as the door slid shut.

I tried racing to the player but felt my feet go exponentially slower as the tape went fast forward through the opening credits. I felt like a cartoon, heard my voice in low slow mo crying “Noooooooo” as I tried in vain to reach the off button before they could see what I had only guessed at. As a woman’s quite large, curvaceous and gelatinously jiggling bare butt filled the screen (thankfully obscuring the split second but definitely THERE shot of a large male member) all three girls shrieked in horrified glee and my hand slammed into the TV control panel, sending the unit sliding across the table, my heart into my mouth and brain into shock. OH. MY. GOD. Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod. Shit!

In my head I cursed the neighbors, cursed the kids, cursed the VCR, cursed the damn slumber party. Out loud I heard myself say “Well, I don’t think that looks like a good movie” as I slapped at the buttons, wrenched the tape out, put it in an envelope, wrapped around the entire package 50 times with duct tape and marched outside to leave it like a foul smelling dead thing on the neighbors front stoop.

At this point the party was a success as far as the girls were concerned. For me, it was a portent of the evil that was to follow. Sitting in my room about midnight I heard the house go ominously still below me. The sound of the Princess Bride floated up quite clearly in the silence. Not even my other kids, banished to the upstairs in various states of mutinous anger (This sucks! Why does she get everything she wants? I HATE YOU) were silent. As every mother knows, silence is not golden, silence is freaking scary. I crept downstairs to find them all out on the patio, standing on folding chairs and tables and motorcycle seats (their dad would KILL them) peering over the fence at the OTHER neighbor’s house. Sounds of great revelry permeated the night air, loud music, glassware tinkling, ice cubes jingling against each other muffled by the slightly viscous  sound and smell of cheap bourbon. I slid in amongst them, they were too engrossed to notice me, and got an eyeful of the spectacle they were so enjoying. A woman who could very well have been the star of “Brown Eye” was dancing, sort of, on the kitchen table. Clothes half off, eyes half closed, glass half full, the 3 men who shared the unit looked on in slightly sickly silent greedy lust. “OH FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!!” My outburst startled every single one of us in the tableau, the kids stumbled back trying to keep their footing on their various shaky perches, the men turned their heads with snaps slowed by inebriation, the woman fell off the table backwards into the wall with a whoop, a hiccup and a giggle.

The babes were marched back upstairs and I could hear them trying to define what they had witnessed… “I don’t think that was dancing, you don’t dance on a table!” “You do if you are a grown up” “Mom and dad never do!” “That’s cuz our tables too shaky” “I don’t know…”… the big girls returned to the tale of princesses and honor and love, definitely pale in comparison to what they had just witnessed and tried to NOT talk about it. I spent the rest of the night on the couch smack in the middle of the gaggle eating potato chips out of the bag and thinking of how I would never, ever not in a million years host a slumber party again.

I did, of course, but that's another story.