FANBOYS

So we're like sitting around a cozy fire in our cozy living room the other Saturday, me and my husband and my sister-in-law from The City, minding a cozy cocktail and our own business, when our voices start getting like progressively louder on account of we can't hear ourselves think, on account of this enormous jet that's passing over the house, now where were we? oh yeah the new dishes, only that's one helluva huge fucking jet, that sound is like pouring down the chimney, anyone want a tad more vino? what'd you say? I can't hear you! that humongous fucking jet is like hovering over the fucking house...

The next time you want to scare the living shit out of somebody, I've got one word: chimneyfire.

Got that?

Chimney!Fire!

We've officially joined the club of that select few who've experienced this outrage. And it was. Outrageous. One minute I'm sitting cozily by the fire sipping Pinot Grigio and speaking Mikasa, and the next thing I know, I'm out in the yard raging at this shape-shifting volcanic eruption shooting out of our chimney. My heart muscle does a 911 as a ceaseless fountain of sparks cascades down the roof and black smoke spreads over the neighborhood like a shroud. It takes fifteen seconds for a crowd to form. Two minutes for the firetrucks to arrive. A week-and-a-half to come down from the adrenaline rush. Not a high I would recommend.

And all I wanted to do was bask in the new dishes. The bowls are practically big enough to fulfill that desire. And the plates, they barely fit in the dishwasher. To accommodate all those mountains of pasta, I guess. Italian Countryside. That's the style. Everything's oversized. Like an Italian peasant's appetite. Like our chimney. Like the bill to fix our chimney.

Like our daughter's backpack. The other morning we needed a wheelbarrow to get the thing out to the car so I could drive her to school. God knows how she got it from the car to her locker. Pulling up curbside at my daughter's school at 7:40 a.m. is like making a pit stop at the Indy 500...seconds is the name of the game, baby. While horns honk and buses bear down like mastodons, she ejects from the car and beelines up the walk as if her backpack were filled with feathers, as if she simply materialized from the ethers like a wishful thought rather than emerged from that rusted-out planet-wrecker at the curb piloted by Phyllis Diller's older sister.

But in the privacy of her own supermax, unseen by human eyes, she's all, "Oh pull-ease, Mommy Dearest, you're so good at Language, pull-ease can you help me with this?"

I have to think a minute. Language? Mine could use a bit of cleaning up, I guess... Then I remember. In my day they called it English. In fact, I actually got a college degree in said English. Although you wouldn't have guessed this the midnight after our house almost burnt down. I was speaking, all right, but in what tongue was anybody's guess. Let's just say I was speaking Italian white -- the other universal language -- and leave it at that.

They're learning shit in sixth grade these days I know I didn't learn until high school. Back when Prohibition was in full swing. For instance, a few nights ago, while my daughter was pounding the pavement at gymnastics, I was pounding the books online to reacquaint myself with the ever-popular compound-complex sentence, a phenomenon possible only with the aid of conjunctions, of the subordinating and coordinating variety, you may recall. And god knows one had better know the difference between the two or risk the wrath of my daughter's Eng...excuse me, Language teacher, Eva Braun. So I printed a list of the aforementioned conjunctions for my daughter's perusal and congratulated myself on being still GC* after all these years.

Perusing the list the next morning, as we careen down the hill in the planet-wrecker toward our scheduled pit stop, my daughter reads the examples of subordinating conjunctions out loud:

BECAUSE, ALTHOUGH, AFTER, BEFORE, WHICH, WHEN, WHERE, HOW

She pauses. "What's this?" she asks. "What's FANBOYS?"

"That," I say, mentally straightening my Cool Mom wig, "is an acronym. Made up of the first letters of all the coordinating conjunctions. Every single one of them!" I have to stop myself from inserting a "fucking" between "single" and "one."

I can feel her staring at the side of my face. A parent lives for these moments. I have to stop myself from smiling. Number One Rule: Don't. Ever. Smile. At. A. Middle. Schooler. (Unless. She. Just. Told. A. Fucking. Joke.)

"That's lame, Mom," she says, and stuffs the list into her backpack and pulls out her cellphone to play Monopoly.

I narrowly miss hitting an innocent bystander waiting for a bus.

"Don't you want to know what the letters stand for?" I say, trying to keep the whine out of my voice. (As opposed to the wine out of my mouth, a losing battle.)

My daughter doesn't answer. Then she yelps, "I just got Boardwalk on a bid for only a dollar! Coo-ool!"

As I turn left at the light, I can hear the cellphone tooting its little self-congratulatory horn. At the curb my daughter struggles to pull her backpack out of the planet-wrecker and then manages to swing it onto her shoulder with seeming effortlessness. Watching her, my heart bumps in my chest. For no reason other than love. Plain dumb unutterable grammatically-incorrect love. Then, at the last second, before she can stop herself, before she beelines into another day of adolescent angst, my daughter peers through her bangs and smiles. At me! Phyllis Diller's older...but momentarily reprieved...sister.

Then she's gone, and so am I, chugging back up the hill into another day of middle-aged ennui, with a smile lodged in my throat and an acronym in my brain, which I keep repeating to myself, one conjunction after another, until finally I'm over the hill, until finally it comes to me, simply materializes out of the ethers like a wishful thought, how I wish I had greeted the firefighters when they arrived to vanquish the volcano erupting out of our chimney, how I might've thrown wide the door of my imperiled citadel and exclaimed,

"GET OUT THE FAN, BOYS, AND BLOW THIS FUCKING SMOKE OUTTA HERE!"




(*grammatically-correct)