Why did the Tofurky cross the road?

To prove he wasn't chicken.

Stranger than Fiction

I told my daughter to run away. Was that a bad thing? I was just brainstorming. As usual, I was driving her to gym.

"I hate you and I hate this family," she said from the passenger side of things.

So I offered the above suggestion. I was on the High Bridge, following some asshole with a dead deer strapped to his penis.

What we have here, I said to myself, is a dead deer.

This child I'm raising -- let's call her my daughter, for the sake of argument, which is what we do -- wants to be somewhere else. Someone else. She changes her name at school, studies her face in the mirror, calls my bluff. Am I bluffing? I didn't used to think so.

Meanwhile, I look in the mirror and Shirley Booth stares back at me. Not the "Hazel" Shirley Booth, who'd fix things in a jiffy then scramble up a pie. The "Come Back, Little Sheba" Shirley Booth, who schlumps around in her housecoat all day mooning over her long lost dog.

What we have here, I said to myself, is a lost dog.

* * *

If my dog ever goes missing, I'll be right behind her.

When we first brought this dog home, my daughter was afraid of her. That was seven years ago. At the time, my daughter still looked at me with wonder. Now I know what she was wondering about.

But my daughter was afraid of the new puppy and avoided the floor for much of First Grade. I envisioned a children's book, "The Girl Who Lived on the Back of the Couch." It had possibilities, I thought, but like so much else, ended up on the slush pile.

Since then my daughter has come down from the furniture, now we're all afraid of her.

* * *

It wasn't always this...bad. It took awhile. Eighth Grade clinched the deal.

When I was in Eighth Grade, I knew my parents were utter morons, but I kept this knowledge to myself. My father's blood pressure was the reason. You don't push an ornery Finn who studied classical piano and planned to be a Forest Ranger but instead ended up in some remote suburb of Palookaville raising three daughters and selling frontend loaders to rednecks. You just don't.

My daughter would push me off the High Bridge if she could. But not before pocketing the car keys.

What we have here is a slush pile.

* * *

I have these memories of my daughter, snuggling up next to me at bedtime, surrounded by a planet of stuffed animals, sloe eyes moving across the pages of a book as I read. Of course one book was never enough, and she kept a wobbly pile of extras on the rug beside the bed.

I don't recall when it first happened. But one night during this bedtime ritual, I started making up my own stories. I'd finish a book, take another from the pile, open it and begin reading:

Once upon a time there was a girl who lived on the back of a couch...

This evolved into a sort of game: how far into a story could I get before my daughter called my bluff. At which point she'd grin with delight, grab another book, ask me to do it again. And again. Eventually I'd insert something too outlandish, even for a children's story, into the narrative (...and then the little brown bunny hopped into a phone booth and turned into Elvis...), and that was our signal for calling it a night.

My daughter's mission in this ritual was to recognize which stories were "real" and which were "made up." These were her labels. And I let her have them. At the time, she was too young to understand that all stories are made up.

Now we both know differently. Now we both know that all stories are real.

Benediction

My aunt has a boyfriend. When my husband heard about my aunt's boyfriend, he breathed a sigh of relief. My aunt's eighty-eight.

"There's hope for me yet," said my husband. Actually he was only thinking this, but I can read his thoughts.

My cousin called last Friday.

"My mom has a boyfriend," she said.

"Yeah, but does she know she has a boyfriend?" I said.

"Well, the boyfriend knows," she said, "that works for me."

We had celebratory phone cocktails in honor of this development.

My aunt has alzheimer's. Now, apparently, she also has a boyfriend. I'm not surprised. My aunt's the hottest number in the Home. The new guy took one look and made his move. My aunt can't remember what day it is, or the names of her children, but she recognized a move when she saw one.

My grandmother also had alzheimer's. Back then they just called her senile. She spent her last days in a Home on the Range, where a guy in the next room laid under his bed all day thinking he was fixing his car. The last time I saw my grandmother, I pushed her through the hallways in her wheelchair as she waved the queen wave at passersby like a benediction. My grandmother recognized a parade when she saw one.

You might say I'm descended from a long line of hot numbers, the operative word being "descended." In my case, the apple not only fell far from the tree, it rolled into another orchard. An alternative orchard, not a fruit tree in sight. Whereas my mother and her sisters and their mother and her sisters had lain in their various cradles instinctively giving tiny queen waves, I lay in mine instinctively giving the tiny finger. Gene mutation designed to serve the particular world in which a host finds herself.

Isn't evolution a mindfuck?

Speaking of which, I also inherited the ability to read my husband's thoughts. I inherited this ability from my mother. Not that my mother could read my husband's thoughts, though god knows she tried. She kept overlooking one critical detail: my husband has the ability to, on demand, completely clear his brain of any coherent activity whatsoever. He inherited this ability from his father. His father inherited it from his father, and his father from his father, and so on. It's called Drawing a Blank. It's only found on the Y chromosome.

My mother was a master at reading my thoughts, however. Until I woke up one day, looked around at the orchard in which I found myself, and set a nearby leaf pile ablaze. Thus did I discover the ancient art of concealing cerebral activity beneath a cloud of smoke. Alternative smoke.

My mother's idea of "alternative" was to switch to the other hand when one's wrist hurt from waving. Likewise, her idea of "drawing a blank" was probably what she thought of my father's spermatic input the first time she saw me lying in my cradle flipping the bird. Albeit a teeny tiny baby sparrow, but a bird nonetheless.

We were sitting by the fire, having a glass of wine, when I told my husband about my aunt's new boyfriend. I watched him closely out of the corner of my eye, looking for any errant thoughtwaves that might slip through before he Drew a Blank. Sure enough, there it was, a splitsecond of heartfelt relief at realizing there was still hope for him. Then down came that curtain.

Sometimes I think my husband watches me. Not in any attempt to read my mind, an oxymoron if ever there was one. Rather, I think he's looking for signs. Of impending senility, the old genetic crapshoot, the long road to oblivion. Don't forget, I can read his thoughts: Has she taken another step down that long road to oblivion? Or is she just drunk?

My mother was probably never drunk, not once, in her life. I try not to hold that against her. And she was on her own road when she died, her brain intact, working just the way it always had. I try not to hold that against her, either. The last time I saw my mother she was standing outside her house, under a streetlight, under a full moon. I looked in the rearview mirror as I drove away, and she was waving.