Roughy, Rats & a Sage

I am once again back at the home of my father, in rain-soaked Ohio, where the corn gets as high as an elephant's eye & I'll be even higher than that if I can track down earthmother/dealer & friend, NastyBarb.

It is always a trip, coming home to check on my father. There are disturbing little mysteries everywhere. The Caller ID (which my father claims he doesn't have) has spit up a few surprising names. The cat has a bald spot & is behaving rather antisocially, so I assume something ugly happened. Neither he nor my father are willing to discuss it yet. There is an entire freezer shelf of nothing but orange roughy fillets, yet my father has no idea how to cook them & seemed somewhat surprised they were there. The cat looked guilty & suspicious when I showed him a roughy, so maybe he's the one who procured the fish & scraped some hair off hoisting them into the freezer.

It would be so easy, during his golden years, to explain away my father's eccentric behavior with words like "senile dementia" & "senior moments", but the truth is that he has always been half a bubble off plumb. When I was little, I thought he was the funniest person in the world. As a teenager, I lived in fear that he would speak to any of my friends or do something nutty. (he confesses to having the same fears about me) I had a sleepover where we went out to the garage freezer to get a pizza & found, on top of that pizza, a partially dissected rat in a baggie. Needless to say, after that, no one ever clamored for a dinner invitation to my house. It was for his Anatomy class. When we had all stopped screaming, he pushed aside some beef roasts to show a fetal pig that was also doomed to be slashed up by his students. My father is an Educator (now retired), a teachers' rights Activist (semi-retired), a Unitarian-Universalist minister, & a Sage. Yes, a sage. Years ago a friend of his bought him a tee shirt that said, "A copy of what I have just said will be made available for distribution." When I was 8-12 yrs old, we constantly travelled to his speaking engagements or guest appearances at Unitarian churches. He editorialized, ranted & sermonized & it all bored me to death. I wouldn't appreciate his intellect & eloquence until much later in life. I liked him better when he was teaching me Harpo Marx's leg-in-the-hand routine. I may test him on that later, to see if he's still got his comedy chops.

I came home to find lots & lots of jewelry! Thank you, Pund, for the earrings & zipper pull in amethyst.....my favorite. And muchas gracias to Bahb for my Queen of Mardi Gras necklace & bracelet in the traditional Fat Tuesday colors of purple & gold. I have the bracelet around the top-notch on my head, it's very tiara-like. Whooooo's queen?