Welcome to the Funny Farm (19 page)

Creepy Crawlers

H
ARALD CALLED ME YESTERDAY WITH A STORY
that will send any arachniphobics among my readership into therapy.

Harald is my brother-in-law. He and my sister Renee live in Oak Harbor, Washington, with their three boys, six goldfish, and a tarantula.

The tarantula is a new addition. One week ago, their family roster did not include a spider the size of carry-on luggage.

It all started when my sister Renee decided to go away for the weekend. She was going to a women's retreat. As she was heading out the door, her husband announced that he would be taking the boys to the pet store because seven-year-old Hunter wanted to buy a pet. Harald added, “He wants a tarantula.”

“Absolutely no tarantulas,” Renee said. “If a spider like that ever got loose in the house, I'd have to move into a hotel. No Best Western, either. I'm talking Hilton.”

The next day Harald and the boys were driving in the van, Hunter cradling a glass terrarium on his lap, when Harald said, “Oh yeah. Don't let it get loose in the house or Mom'll have to move to a motel or something.”

They arrived home and carried their furry friend into the house. Less than an hour later, one of the boys was holding the terrarium when it fell to the floor and broke into tiny pieces. Harald spied the eight-legged wonder sitting dazed among the glass. He rushed to pick it up. The spider promptly bit Harald's finger. Harald flung the spider to the ground, where it scurried under a kitchen cabinet.

Harald looked at the clock.

Renee was due home in two hours.

Armed with a flashlight and broomstick, Harald probed the small hole into which the black spider had fled. No luck.

Returning from the garage, Harald plugged in a 6.5 horsepower ShopVac capable of suctioning the dimples off Joe Namath. But it couldn't lodge an arachnid from a cabinet.

Undaunted, Harald headed back to the garage. When he returned a few minutes later, he was brandishing an electric saw.

By now several neighborhood husbands had learned of the crisis and gathered 'round to offer hearty masculine support as piece by piece, Harald began sawing apart his cabinets. The cabinet floor beneath the sink went first. Then various toe-plates. Then bottoms of drawers.

They finally found the tarantula in the last possible section of cabinet.

The furry interloper was safely imprisoned in a borrowed terrarium when Renee walked in the front door.

She immediately said, “What happened here?”

Harald said, “Why do you ask?”

“There's a 75-pound Shop Vac sitting on the white carpet in the middle of the living room, that's why. What's going on?”

The men in my sister's life—all four of them, from the mid-lifer down to the preschooler—looked her in the eye and said, “Nothing. Nothing happened. Everything's fine.”

Around the corner in the kitchen, the cabinets lay in pieces, and sawdust was still settling around the flashlights, saws, and ShopVac attachments.

I imagine Renee was about to figure it out on her own.

She didn't have to. Hunter confessed. Then, to make up for all the commotion his pet had caused, he decided to do something extra special for his mom.

He named the spider in her honor. He named it “Mama.”

We can learn a lot from this story. We can learn to avoid women's retreats, staying home instead to protect our homestead from well-meaning husbands and venomous spiders larger than most of our body parts.

Renee says that, besides the women's retreat thing, the experience is also teaching her to face her fears. She says, “I don't want to steal Hunter's joy over this pet. So I'm working on putting aside my fears. I make a conscious effort to go look at the tarantula at least once an hour, sometimes twice, just to desensitize myself. Not to mention to make sure he's still in his cage.”

Sort of like living with Hannibal Lecter.

Life's like that, isn't it? Sometimes our worst fears come home to roost. Sometimes someone leaves, or someone dies, or the stock market crashes, or the doctor clears his throat ominously before delivering the news, and we think, like Job in the Old Testament, “Here it is. This is it. The thing I have feared has come upon me.”

And then we get on with the business of coping, which includes, but isn't limited to, activities like crying and whining, which eventually, if we're lucky, begin to morph into other things, things like accepting and trusting and growing.

I wish you and I could be protected from everything that goes bump in the night. Instead, we have a God who says, “Yes, they'll go bump, but let me hold the flashlight, and we'll face it together.”

And who knows? When it's all said and done, maybe we'll come out ahead, in possession of things we couldn't have gotten any other way, things like mettle and strength and spirit. Not to mention an eight-inch-long spider named “Mama.”

44

Clean Sweep

I
WENT THROUGH THE CAR WASH THE OTHER DAY.

Of course, that wasn't my intention.

My intention was to send MY CAR through the car wash. It's just that things don't always work out like I'd planned.

I had just picked up my daughters and a couple of their friends from school when I decided my car needed gas and a wash. I filled up the tank of my 4-Runner, paid for the gas and a car wash, and received a receipt with a code printed in red ink.

I drove up to the car wash tunnel, punched in my code on a little keypad, got a green light, and drove forward.

My front tires hit a bump. The light flashed RED. I was supposed to stop right there, right on that bump, and let the brushless magic begin. I sat. I waited, but the sprayers sat silent. I realized I had overshot the bump that triggers the sprayers.

I popped the transmission into reverse, backed up an inch or two until I was exactly on the bump. Still nothing. I backed all the way out of the tunnel, back to the keypad, unrolled my window, and punched in my code again. The green light beckoned me forward, letting me know that all was forgiven and that my car wash could commence.

Darned if I didn't overshoot the bump again.

I started to back up to the keypad again, but now there was a car waiting behind me. I was trapped.

I opened my car door and ran back to the keypad and punched in the code.

So now I'm standing at the keypad, and my car is sitting in the car wash tunnel, the driver's door wide open and the front tires planted firmly on that malicious little bump, which is apparently exactly how the car wash imps wanted everything arranged, because at that moment the sprayers kicked into action and began dousing everything—me, my car, my driver's side upholstery—with a generous layer of pink suds.

I ran through the sudsy maelstrom and jumped into the front seat, slamming the door behind me. My hair was matted to my head with pink suds. I wiped my forehead clear of pink foam dribbling toward my eyes. The four girls in the car were laughing so hard I thought they'd need CPR. The woman sitting in the BMW behind me had a pinched look on her face, as though she were wondering if I might be dangerous as well as stupid.

But at least my bumpers were spic and span. Come to think of it, my car didn't look half bad either.

There's something about a clean car. I love it. Know what else I love? A clean house. I love it when the beds are made and the countertops are clean and the clutter is contained (let's add fresh-baked bread in the oven and homegrown veggies in the sink and maybe even Ricky Martin sitting at my kitchen table. Why not? We've obviously crossed the line into La-La Land).

The problem with getting a clean house is that I hate cleaning. Well, not ALL houses, just my house. Other people's houses are another story. I mean, is it just me, or have you noticed that it's a lot more fun cleaning someone else's house rather than your own?

I like puttering around in my friends' kitchens. After a meal, I don't mind at all whipping up some soapy water and starting with dishes, gravitating to pans, and wiping down all the countertops and appliances when I'm done.

And clutter? While my own clutter stumps me daily, I'd know just what to do with that pile of sewing supplies sitting in one friend's living room or the stack of newspapers, mail, and last month's schoolwork sitting in the kitchen of another.

Sometimes I even look at other messes in my friends' lives, messes they've made or wandered into, and find myself thinking, “Why, that's not such a mess at all. That'd be easy to clean up. I know EXACTLY how she should go about tidying that unruly marriage, or that child's difficult attitude, or all those broken dreams and secrets she's been sweeping under the rug for years.”

Of course, MY messes continue to stump me, just like the clutter in my house. Sometimes, in fact, I get so used to MY messes and clutter that I wonder if I'm seeing them clearly or if my vision is being impaired by something in my eye, something sort of, well, kind of like, you know . . .

A log.

You probably know that Bible verse as well as I do, the one that says “How can you see to clear the speck out of your sister's eye when you've got a log hanging out of your own?”

The truth is, making a clean sweep of things isn't always as easy as it seems, whether the tidying up needs to occur in my life or yours. Which is why I, for one, am going to stop applying the White Glove Test to the homes and lives of my friends. Instead, I'm going to love them best I can and try in the meantime to stay open to any housecleaning the Holy Spirit wants to do in my own life.

In fact, I wouldn't complain at all if he started with my hair.

I had no idea those pink suds would be this hard to get out.

45

Crazy for Cocoa Puffs

L
AST WEEK A FRIEND OF MINE SAID,
“You should meet Susan. She's really disciplined about what she eats. She's so disciplined she even puts padlocks on her fridge and pantry so she doesn't eat anything fattening.”

I hate to burst anyone's bubble here, but Susan is NOT disciplined. A better word to describe Susan would be “creatively impaired.” This is because any woman in the throes of a binge—any woman with an ounce of imagination, that is—would not be deterred for a heartbeat by the presence of a mere padlock on the freezer door. Nosiree.

A lock means nothing. It's kind of like wearing a T-shirt onto the floor of an Amway convention that says, “No. Please. Stop. Whatever you do, DON'T tell me how I can achieve financial freedom AND be my own boss without ever leaving the comfort of my living room.”

I figure, when it comes to the mood to binge, where there's a will there's a way. For example, if MY fridge were padlocked, I'd head for my kids' stash of Halloween candy. If all the good candy happened to be gone, I'd reach for my car keys. And if for some reason I wasn't able to find the keys to my car, no problem.

Ever see a woman rumbling into a Dairy Queen on a riding mower?

Sometimes a woman's gotta do what a woman's gotta do.

Padlock on the fridge? C'mon. Give me a REAL hurdle. Something with teeth.

I have other addictions, too. Junk food isn't the only one. The other thing I'm addicted to is mail order catalogs. I get so many catalogs that two years ago my mailman canceled his gym membership, and his forearms still look like Popeye's. There's so much processed pulp around my house that my address is listed in the National Directory of Forests and Forestry.

But that's all. Just junk food and junk mail. Everything else in my life has some sort of redemptive value. Well, okay, almost everything, except for all those mindless TV shows I love. But that's it, I promise. Just junk food, junk mail, and junk TV.

Which is okay, right? I mean, it's just entertainment, right? So my figure is about as curvaceous as a Twinkie. I'm starting to believe I deserve all those catalog offerings I covet, and I've practiced for so long that I can watch TV for hours now without even the slightest twinge of conscience.

But it's all in fun.