People

Gulley’s mama has been in Bryan visiting Nena, so y’all know that I love to be able to share a good Nena story.

Nena and Grandaddy are about to celebrate their 62nd wedding anniversary. Sixty-two years is a mighty long time to spend with a person. In fact, Nena sent me a note a few years back and mentioned in the note that Grandaddy was driving her crazy. It made Gulley and I a little sad to realize that even after 62 years, there will still be times the husbands will drive you a little nuts.

Anyway, Nena wanted Gulley’s mama to drive her down to THE newspaper so that she could give them a picture of she and Grandaddy to commemorate their 62nd anniversary in print. As they were waiting in line, Nena started to chit chat with a young girl standing in line in front of them.

It turns out this girl was there to turn in a picture for her engagement announcement (I guess no one has ever heard of putting anything in the mail or even better, sending it ON THE COMPUTER). Nena shared that she has been married for 62 years.

The girl said “Oh my! You’ve been married 62 years? How old are you?”

Nena replied, “I’m 82”.

The girl said, “Well you look great! I would’ve thought you were just 62 years old!”

Nena smiled at the girl, handed her picture to the head picture guy at THE paper and they left. As they were walking to the car, Nena looked at Gulley’s mama and said, “WELL, I would feel a whole lot better if she had said she thought I was 52!”

Gulley’s mama said “Well Mama, she gave you 20 years!”

Nena said “Well, of course she did, do you see how good I look?”

P and I have a neighbor who is…how do I put this nicely? Maybe slightly completely obsessive compulsive in all things related to his yard and home. For example, now that the leaves are finally starting to actually fall, he will be out in his yard with his power blower a minimum of three times a day to blow the leaves out of his pristine yard in our direction because it’s apparent by the surplus of leaves piled up that we aren’t necessarily compulsive about extra foliage in our yard.

His yard honestly looks like a putting green on a golf course ALL the time. Ours looks more like a place where outdoor toys go to die or at least bake in the sun until they are unrecognizeable.

In all fairness, I believe he used to be in the military and continues to run his home in military fashion, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by what we saw Christmas afternoon.

We pulled into our driveway, looked over at his house where there were many cars parked along the side street and honest to goodness, he had placed big orange cones around the perimeter of the cars to caution oncoming drivers.

It made me laugh out loud.

Where do you even purchase orange cones for private use? And, once purchased, is it truly necessary to use them on a slow, residential street on Christmas afternoon? Maybe they were there just in case the five year old down the block got to cruising too fast on the new bike that Santa brought, you know…in case she didn’t see the huge car parked there.

Whew! Good thing for that orange cone…I didn’t even see that cherry red Ford Expedition parked on the side of the road.

And if any of y’all happen to use orange cones outside your home on a regular basis, I’m sure that is very wise and prudent of you. Safety is key.

I’m just saying that if you come to visit the house of Big Mama, y’all better bring your own cones to protect your parked vehicle because it’s not something we have on hand. We just prefer to live dangerously around here.

Many years ago (almost five to be exact), before Gulley left the official work force to become a stay at home mom, she worked in what we affectionately referred to as “the cube” in a large office building. She supervised a group of employees, who for the most part, proved that anyone can get a job if they are in the right place at the right time. As happy as I was for Gulley when she left that job to raise her baby, I was sad for myself because there is no better comedy to be found.

One of her employees was Sister (no relation to Boomama’s Sister) and no, her name wasn’t actually Sister, but it’s how she referred to herself at all times. Sister was the subject of so many hysterical stories that I’ve lost count of all of them. Let’s just say that I called Gulley in the cube on a daily basis to hear the latest Sister story, and there always was one, because Sister wasn’t afraid to say things like “Girl, Sister needs to get some work done on her hemorrhoids”. She also held the distinction of making 364 personal calls in one month. Apparently, Sister had some personal business that needed taking care of.

Anyway, I tell y’all this to tell you the story of Sister and some words of wisdom that we still quote to this day because it really applies this time of year. At the company where Gulley worked, people were always bringing food from home to share with others in the break room. This was especially common during the holidays.

The Christmas that Gulley was pregnant, she walked into the breakroom and there sat Sister who was busy taking a break from all those personal calls. Gulley went to fix a plate of food and Sister said “Girl, you’re pregnant. Don’t go eating off in somebody else deep freeze. You don’t know what people do in their deep freeze. Cheryl brought sausage balls and girlfriend don’t even wash her hands after she goes to the bathroom.”

This time of year, I can’t help but think of Sister’s wise words as I attend holiday functions and look at all the food sitting out. Then, today P called his mama and it seems that she thinks someone dropped something off in her deep freeze out in the garage because there is something in there and she doesn’t know what it is, so obviously someone else put it there and she’s going to throw it away.

P told her to thaw it out and find out what it is before she throws it away, but since she’s convinced some hooligans are wreaking havoc on her deep freeze by placing random objects in it, she’s going to go ahead and get rid of it.

It’s probably for the best since you never know what people do in their own deep freeze, much less someone else’s.

She called back later to report that the unknown item has mysteriously disappeared. So, it seems that someone just borrowed her deep freeze for a while and has now probably taken the mystery item to a party in their office break room.

Last week, I mentioned that I had gone to dinner with my friend Hite and he had told me a story that left me with tears running down my cheeks and gasping for breath. I said I’d tell y’all about it as soon as he sent me some pictures to illustrate.

I am going to preface this story by telling y’all that there is absolutely no way that the written word can do this justice, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

My friend Jen lives just a few blocks away from Hite. We have all been friends since college and Jen and Hite hang out on an almost daily basis. Jen wasn’t available for dinner the other night because she is attending seminary, works almost full time, teaches 184 classes at her church, runs marathons and in her spare time goes on mission trips to Africa. She is what y’all might call a Type A personality. In fact, while we were roommates in college she would purposely wake me up at 8:00 a.m. because she felt I’d had enough sleep and needed to help her conquer the world. Amazingly enough, we are still friends.

Anyway, Jen has a lot of personality and never does anything halfway. You never have to wonder how she’s feeling about something because she will let you know, usually in a voice that isn’t necessarily an inside voice. In fact, she and Gulley have both been known to talk so loud that it has been suggested that they might have hearing problems.

Okay, so the week of Thanksgiving, Hite’s phone rings about 10:45 at night. It’s Jen and she is talking so fast and is so upset that he can’t even understand what she is saying. She tells him to get to her house right now. So, he jumps in the car and speeds over to her house fearing that something really bad has happened because she is so wound up.

He walks in the door and she is hysterical. He finally gets her to calm down long enough to find out that she walked out in the backyard about an hour before and saw some men in a truck stopped behind her house and when they saw her, they sped away. Then, about thirty minutes later she starts hearing some horrendous, loud noise coming from her backyard. She runs out to see what is going on and immediately notices the terrible smell.

In the meantime, her dog Willie has also run out to the backyard and is barking and going wild. She can’t get him to come into the house. Willie is no average dog. He already functions at a higher level of excitement than your normal canine. In fact, he has been known to get so excited that he has jumped through her plate glass window not once, but twice. Of course in the midst of all this chaos, he is beyond wound up.

Hite listens and hears all the commotion coming from the backyard. They go outside and he says the smell is just beyond awful and the noise is worse. He manages to get Willie back in the house and then goes to inspect the source of the noise. This is what he finds.

They are under Jen’s deck with slop and all. Hence, the smell…and the noise.

Just as they are trying to figure out the best course of action for renegade domestic pigs, six cop cars, a firetruck and an ambulance show up with sirens blazing in front of Jen’s house. It seems that before she called Hite, she called 911.

The police get out of the car with their electric tasers drawn and ready for action because as it turns out, Jen was so hysterical during her call to 911 that the operator taking the call coded her as crazy. Seriously.

I guess they figured anyone who lives in the heart of a major city who calls and hysterically suggests that some unknown perpertrators have placed something that appears to be livestock in their backyard has a high probability of being a little off.

Hite said the cops kept walking around saying “Bob, I’ve been on the force 18 years and never seen anything like this”. And then, “Carl, you ever seen pigs in someone’s backyard in this part of town?” They were stunned and weren’t sure about the next course of action.

They did volunteer that it was obviously either just a practical joke or someone had decided they no longer wanted those pigs, which they all agreed didn’t seem likely because why would someone drive to the middle of a city to drop off pigs in an upper middle class neighborhood.

How about those powers of deductive reasoning?

Jen said, “No one I know would do something like this”, but it seems that she was wrong. Apparently for some reason that I have forgotten, two of her friends from church had these pigs in their possession and had spent the week dropping them off in various church members’ backyards as a practical joke.

The next morning when they called to laugh and claim their pigs, the joke was on them because those pigs had been hauled off by animal control.

I’m not sure of their fate, but that night as Hite was telling me the story he had ordered the pulled pork and as he went to take a bite he said, “I hope this isn’t them”.

The end.

Over the last 24 hours we have been busy around here making the yuletide gay. And by gay, I don’t mean that we’ve been listening to Cher. Although we have listened to a little Judy Garland. I mean that we have been festive and full of Christmas cheer.

Not that there is anything wrong with listening to Cher.

Yesterday afternoon, I decided that we needed to decorate some sugar cookies and since this was a spur of the moment decision based mainly on the fact that it was freezing cold and sleeting outside and we desperately needed an activity NOW, I didn’t have time to wait for homemade dough to chill so I reached for my good friend the dough boy and his slice and bake offerings.

I have never seen Caroline as excited as when faced with such a variety of items to make a huge mess with. Oh! the flour! the sparkles! the red hots! the dough! It was an embarrassment of riches.

She focused all of her decorating efforts on one lone, candy cane shaped cookie and having emptied the entire container of colored sugars decided she was done. I’d like to say it was totally worth the huge amount of cleanup involved, but I think that might be a lie.

Then, this morning we had Breakfast with Santa Claus and I made a huge error in judgement by creating a buzz about it last night, so this morning she was up at 5:30 yelling “Mama, let’s go see Santa. Let’s go eat with Santa!”. By the time Gulley and her gang finally arrived to pick us up at 8:30, we were more than ready to go.

During the course of the morning I can guarantee that I made her aware of the fact that Santa was watching at least 154 times which would buy me maybe 30 seconds of quiet obedience. Maybe 30 seconds.

Gulley and I have a term we use to describe docile, gentle children. We call them “cup-pourers”. The name is derived from the little kids who sit on the edge of the baby pool in the summer time and are perfectly content to just fill their little nesting cups with water and then dump them out and then fill their cups and dump them out, while their mamas get to visit and drink a beer and have enjoyable adult conversation.

Gulley and I have not given birth to “cup-pourers”. This fact is confirmed every summer at the pool as we chase our kids as they run from one end of the pool to the other and it was confirmed again this morning as we chased them all over the country club while waiting for Santa and breakfast. At one point I even looked and thought why is that rope line holder about to fall over and realized it was because all three of our kids were trying to swing on it. And so here we go again with “Santa is right there watching you”.

We’d like to complain, but seeing as how neither of us could be classified as a “cup-pourer”, it would stand to reason that neither would our precious offspring.

So after a morning of sitting on Santa’s lap, eating some French Toast sticks drowned in maple syrup, and my futile attempts to get a decent picture of the three of them in front of the Christmas tree we headed home.

Gulley had fit all three carseats in her backseat, so on the way there we had talked about how great it would be to take all the kids to Bryan together. Then, on the way home listening to Caroline and Jackson argue throughout the entire 20 minute drive about who was strong enough to pull a helicopter out of the sky, we decided that maybe that trip could wait another year or five.

All in all it’s been a very merry 24 hours and the best part is that right now Caroline is in her room sleeping in heavenly peace. I’m about to do the same. And although all this merry making has worn me out, there is nothing better than spending time with best friends.

Gulley was in Bryan last week visiting Nena, so y’all know I was hoping that there would be some kind of story.

When they got to Nena’s house, Nena was wearing some light green velour pants paired with a sweater and a wide leather belt. Gulley said, “Well, Nena…look at you!”

And Nena said, “Well, I know. I’m a vision of loveliness.”

Later on, Uncle Glen came over and was complaining about how much he hates Walmart but “Mama wears me down and makes me take her to the Walmart”. He said the other day they were there for almost two hours, so to pass the time he started trying on sunglasses. Nena walked up and said “Quit trying on those sunglasses. People are going to think you’re not right in the head.”

And in all fairness to Uncle Glen, isn’t two hours in Walmart is enough to drive anyone a little bit out of their mind?