On long airplane flights (long being anything over an hour and a half), I often (meaning, always) have to get up to use the bathroom.
It’s not just my copious water drinking habits or my pea-sized bladder which make me get up so frequently, but also my deep and abiding paranoia of developing deep vein thrombosis. (Look it up, and you too will not be able to stop yourself from getting up and strolling up and down the aisles of the aircraft, although I certainly hope you will refrain from performing calisthenics in said aisle as my father is prone to doing.)
However, my greater-than-average trips through the airplane mean that I also have a greater-than-average chance of running into more assholes than the average person.
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“Where are we going?”
“We’re going home.”
“And what we do then?”
“Well, we can play cars, if you like.”
“I love you!”
“What?”
“I love you!”
“Wow…that’s great….well, I love you too, what do you think about that?”
“Well, I love Spider-man, too.”
(His mother later explained, “He must really like you, because he really, really loves Spider-Man.” She paused to consider this. “Also the Transformers.”)
I mentioned I was dating again to my sisters, separately. Their reactions:
Sister 1 (in hopeful tone): Does this one read?
Sister 2 (in a resigned voice): Is he non-Asian?
Me: Yes, he’s half-Jewish.
Sister 2: What!?
Me: And half French.
Sister 2: Oh, he speaks French?
Me: Yes.
Sister 2: Oh, that’s OK then.
“Hey, have you seen my Tupperware container of dog chicken? I wanted to give the dogs a treat,” I said, peering into my parents’ fridge.
“No,” said my father, his standard response to all questions.
“Tupperware? No,” said my mother, who actually listens to questions.
“Well, it wasn’t exactly a Tupperware container…but one of those glass containers with a blue plastic lid on it?”
“Glass?” my mother said. “You mean the chicken bone?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t see it,” I said, moving things around in the fridge. “Chris cooked it for the dogs and gave it to me, and I put underneath the canned dog food, but it’s not here anymore.”
My mother turned on my father. “You said that was left over from yesterday!”
My father turned on my mother. “How was I supposed to know!”
My mother: “You should have told me that was dog chicken!”
My father: “But I didn’t know!”
My mother: “I knew we didn’t have leftovers! I asked you why there was a bone!”
My father: “I thought you left it!”
“Hey!” I yelled. “It’s no one’s fault; I didn’t tell anyone it was dog chicken. But where is it now?”
My mother turned glumly to the pot she was stirring. She opened the lid. The three of us stared inside the pot.
“I put it in the soup,” she said.
“You tell Chris he’ll never find anyone so good again,” my mother said.
“Why would I tell him that?” I asked. “Anyway, he can; it’s easy to get married to anyone these days.”
“No, I’m not talking about you, I mean me. He’ll never find another mother-in-law as good as me!”
Until this past year, I hadn’t had much time to get to know my nephew because he lives a 6-hour plane ride away. And let’s face it, very young babies aren’t usually too interesting — by the time one of them gets used to you, your visit’s just about over.
But now that P.T.’s almost 3 and has firmly developed a personality, I’ve begun discovering the joys of being “Auntie Jane.” So when my sister said she and her husband had a business trip in New York, and would I be able to come down and babysit him for a day, I agreed.
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