Posted August 27th, 2007 by Mike Lawson
My friend Lindsay was raised by pretty liberal parents.
When Lindsay was about 6 her mother got her dressed up and they went to a commitment ceremony for a lesbian couple that were friends with Lindsay’s mom.
After the ceremony the inquisitive Lindsay asked her mother what a “lesbian” is.
“Well Lindsay,” said mom, “a lesbian is someone that really loves and wants to spend the rest of her life with her best friend.”
The idea sounded great to the 6-year-old Lindsay who later that afternoon told her best friend that they should be lesbians together.
Posted August 25th, 2007 by Mike Lawson
What some would call lies.
Joan Didion wrote in her short story “On Keeping A Notebook” that she has trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened. That’s a distinction that I sometimes grapple with as well.
This blog will contain, in no particular order, stories from my life that I will retell as accurately as possible. This blog serves the same purpose as Didion’s notebook.
No names have been changed…since no one is truly innocent.
From “Keeping A Notebook”
I tell what some would call lies. “That’s simply not true,” the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event. “The party was not for you, the spider was not a black widow, it wasn’t that way at all.”
Very likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.
The cracked crab that I recall having for lunch the day my father came home from Detroit in 1945 must certainly be embroidery, worked into the day’s pattern to lend verisimilitude; I was ten years old and would not now remember the cracked crab. The day’s events didn’t turn on cracked crab. And yet it is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in family love and guilt.
Or that is what it was to me. Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.
Posted August 23rd, 2007 by Mike Lawson
A female friend of mine had a crush on a male friend of mine. Of course she googled him and cyberstalked him by finding his Myspace, Facebook, etc.
Eventually the two friends started dating, and on their second date they met at her place to have some wine and look up show times and buy movie tickets online.
“You look up show times,” she said. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”
He opened up google and started typing in the movie title, which tragically started with the same letter as his first name, and the drop down showed all of the previous searches my female friend did that started with that letter, including my male friend’s name.
When she returned from the bathroom my male friend said, “Have you ever googled me?”
Female friend chortled. “No way, that’s stupid.”
They aren’t dating any longer.
Posted August 22nd, 2007 by Mike Lawson
A co-worker and her three-year-old were driving to the grocery store in their minivan and the song “Party Like a Rockstar” came on the radio.
When they were in they grocery store my co-worker heard her son singing under his breathe “Party Like a Lobster.”
Posted August 20th, 2007 by Mike Lawson
I was at a training last week where the trainer (supposedly a professional in the field) was explaining how we can integrate academics into an after school program for school-aged children.
She had us yell out common board games that children play in our programs, and she was writing them on chart paper as we did.
When one participant yelled out “Connect Four,” the trainer wrote “Collect Four.” I can forgive that, I guess. Not everyone is aware of “Connect Four.”
Then another participant yelled out “Chess” and the trainer wrote “Chest.” That one isn’t forgivable for two reasons: 1. Who doesn’t know the game Chess? 2. Why would there be a game called “Chest” that we play with children?!?
This presenter also said that “some kids like to go to Disneyland or Knotts Landing.” She definitely meant Knott’s Berry Farm (the amusement park), not Knott’s Landing (the 80s primetime television soap opera).
Needless to say, it was a wasted 4 hours of my life.
Posted August 18th, 2007 by Mike Lawson
I was about five years old when this story takes place. I grew up in a crappy apartment in Anaheim, California–a few blocks from Disneyland.
I was sitting at the kitchen table coloring, which was a rare thing in my house because mom didn’t like us coloring in the same place we ate. She said that the wax of the crayons would somehow taint the flavor of our food.
My mom was having trouble with the oven. The pilot light wouldn’t light. She had the gas running for a couple of minutes before she decided to grab a match and try to light the pilot herself.
She climbed into the oven and struck a match and a huge ball of fire engulfed her. She screamed and ran to the bathroom where she jumped into the tub (fully clothed) and turned the water on.
She was fine; she only singed her eyebrows. But to this day I have trouble opening the oven.
Posted August 17th, 2007 by Mike Lawson
The organization that I work for held their annual “Thank You” bbq for all of the employees last night (who needs a bonus, they give us BBQ ribs!), and the catering company asked a head of time for us to count the number of vegetarians that will be attending.
When guests arrived they received a red meal ticket if they were meat eaters, and a yellow meal ticket if, like me, they were vegetarians.
My food plate was identical to the meat-eater’s plates–minus the bbq’d meat–and I had one extra scoop of potato salad.
Cheap.
Posted August 15th, 2007 by Mike Lawson
What some would call lies.
Joan Didion wrote in her short story “On Keeping A Notebook” that she has trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened. That’s a distinction that I sometimes grapple with as well.
This blog will contain, in no particular order, stories from my life that I will retell as accurately as possible. This blog serves the same purpose as Didion’s notebook.
No names have been changed…since no one is truly innocent.
From “Keeping A Notebook”
I tell what some would call lies. “That’s simply not true,” the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event. “The party was not for you, the spider was not a black widow, it wasn’t that way at all.”
Very likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.
The cracked crab that I recall having for lunch the day my father came home from Detroit in 1945 must certainly be embroidery, worked into the day’s pattern to lend verisimilitude; I was ten years old and would not now remember the cracked crab. The day’s events didn’t turn on cracked crab. And yet it is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in family love and guilt.
Or that is what it was to me. Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.
