|
|
|
smart silly four year old
Saturday, September 4 1999
I don't recall going to bed last night, but however I got there, I never bothered to take off my clothes. In the still of the night Kim woke me up with some complaint about having stepped on glass. There she was, helpless on the bedroom floor, with a huge spot of blood growing on the brownish-cream carpet beneath her foot. Evidently she had no idea how to deal with this sort of crisis, so in panic she'd decided to do nothing. I'm a practical guy who has dealt with many veterinary emergencies on the farm, so I knew exactly what to do. I gathered her up in my arms and got her to the bathroom and put her in the tub. She was bleeding a lot, but it wasn't life threatening. So I left her there and turned my attention to cleaning up all the blood she'd tracked everywhere. In the drunken party atmosphere of the preceding night, at least two wine glasses had broken, someone had put them in the trash, and then Sophie had rooted them out again. As she'd gone to get a glass of water in the night, Kim had stepped onto a piece of glass that was so long and sharp that it had painlessly lacerated a small slit deep into the core plumbing of her foot. When she'd first seen the blood, she'd actually thought it was coming from Sophie.
By the time I made it back to Kim, huge blood clots swung like maroon vines from her foot and lay like seaweed on the white faux-porcelain of the tub floor. The bleeding had stopped, and by the time I'd cleaned up her foot I couldn't even find a wound. Out in the living room, my colleague Al was still fast asleep on the couch.
With the Russian army rollin' through our heads, Kim and I lay around the house mostly watching videotape movies. We'd borrowed Jurassic Park from Lisa's new roommate and though we'd seen it before (Kim had even read the Michæl Crichton book), we popped it in and hit play. And after watching it a second time, I've decided it's a terrible movie. Nothing about it is remarkable except the special effects, and there's nothing particularly special about those on a little television screen. I found the inclusion of so many annoying child actors particularly loathsome. There was, however, one scene in the movie that stuck me as brilliant, and this definitely depended on the quality of the special effects. It was the scene where the fat unscrupulous engineer dude is taunted and attacked by a chattering, poison-spitting dinosaur. The creature is so lifelike and seemingly intelligent (definitely more so than the bulk of human actors) that the scene is imbued with an unusual terrifying quality, as if I'm actually watching some superiour extra-terrestrial feline playing with a human as though he was some sort of mouse.
Our viewing was interrupted by the sudden arrival of our neighbor Lisa along with Scotty, the bright little four year old boy whom she nannies. Like most four year olds, Scotty loves Jurassic Park, though by now he's seen it far too often for it to be much of a distraction. He was in a silly, talkative mood, and (having drunk a lot of coffee), so was I. So I joked along with him as he, for example, came up with ideas for ingredients to put in stroodle. Lisa didn't much mind when he said things like "lightbulbs, books, trees and paintings," though she became increasingly disturbed as he said "slimy stuff, fingers, and smashed eyeballs." When he said "poopies!" he'd gone too far, but he knew it, so he immediately changed the subject to something a bit less wacky. I was struck by his conversational maturity, the result (I'm sure) of the fact that both his parents are older and well educated. For example, I was delighted when I heard Scotty using the passive voice to distance himself from responsibility for a lost card in a card game he'd brought. Evidently he'd been so disappointed when his daddy had originally given him the game that he'd flung it into the air and gone into a pout. "A card was lost!" he explained. Still, the kid tended to get lost in creative ruts from which he seemed to find it difficult to extricate himself. For example, the phrase "squash in a tree" was one of his pat responses to all sorts of ridiculous questions I was subversively posing.
I found it difficult to motivate myself today. Some days really aren't much good for anything except baths, pot smoking, sex and masturbation, and this was one of them.
Kim has (without bothering to get my consent) arranged an expensive two-week trip to the East for Christmas time. At first I was shocked and dismayed by the cost of the tickets, but I've subsequently calmed down and dealt with the pragmatic features of the situation. I've been trying to prepare her for the culture shock of meeting my parents and brother in Virginia. So I've been talking more than usual about my parents. Today I was telling her about how my folks used to be weekend socialites back in the late 70s and early 80s, hanging out a lot at a de facto gay bar (now defunct) called The Roaring Twenties lounge in Staunton, Virginia. As I was telling this story, I suddenly realized how this bar came to be the official gay bar of Staunton. The bar was, you see, set at street level in the old Stonewall Jackson Hotel, the tallest building in Staunton. "The Stonewall" had, of course, the same name as the ground zero of the gay rights movement, the Stonewall of Greenwich Village, New York. All that was needed to twist the good name of this confederate legend into a symbol of gay pride was to plant a flamboyantly-named bar on its first floor: the Roaring 20s Lounge. Sadly, the place had died out by the early 80s, well before the rise of the AIDS epidemic.
Considering its Redneckistan location, Staunton has always had an unusually high concentration of lesbians and gays. This is due in part to the presence of women-only Mary Baldwin College, but it's probably also somewhat related to the presence of a large medium security prison and other large white collar public institutions.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?990904 feedback
previous | next |
