The Frarful Report

KHRIS:

Perhaps more than any other time, election season is the season for taking nonsense very seriously. I was planning to post some comments on the bailout/rescue package, but instead, I came across something from a couple months ago that, while completely unrelated to any of that, or anything at all, might do better to lighten up the apocalyptic mood that’s been circulating by reminding us that there is a lot more to America than the campaign issues that characterize it. Below are excerpts from a telephone call I had with my mother in August, just after the Olympics began. Aside from my brief introduction and a few bits of background info scattered throughout, it is a word for word transcript of what was said. Though there appear to be many omissions or moments where I left out ellipsis, these are actually just verbatim leaps of disconnected thought in my mother’s brain.  That said, I offer a respite from the serious nonsense of political America with this piece of unashamed nonsense from America America that has no aspirations of seriousness whatsoever. Keep in mind as you read that I get calls like this all the time.

Mom called. Asked me to go online to look up pictures of groundhogs so I can confirm the identity of the creature she’s been seeing in our backyard. Mom’s probably legally, if not actually, blind, but she gives the following precise description, presumably compiled from behind our dining room window:

“14 inches tall, mostly gray with a black tail.”

I look.

“Does he have little black paws too?”

“Yeah, that too.”

A match. She tells me there’s one, maybe two hanging out in the backyard. Everyone has told her that she needs to call a professional, but she says she doesn’t want to pay for that. So she asks me if there’s anything online about groundhog trapping. I wish I could have found an online guide to DIY groundhog trapping and talked her through the procedure over the phone, but unfortunately I could not.

Next she wants to know if the groundhog is a mean animal, since we have two small dogs who use the yard and would be better off staying out of a turf war with real animals. Wikipedia says that the groundhog is known for its aggression, particularly on issues of territory. Mom says its been cocky about this.

“This is like a real mission for me and this sucker is just laying with his head hanging out of the garage, sleeping…you always laugh at my troubles, it’s not funny. I’m so afraid it’s going to attack one of the dogs. It’s fuckin scary. I hate this shit. Last week, the bat, this week groundhogs.”

We usually get a bat in our house every August and it did in fact come last week, although instead of flying around a bedroom at 3 in the morning, Mom found it asleep under our kitchen sink in the middle of the afternoon. She handled it accordingly, but has been on vigil ever since.

“If Peg finds out I’ve got groundhogs, that’ll just be another thing for her to complain about.” Peg is Peg of the Coconut Bread, the best homemade bread I’ve ever eaten. Her and her husband Bob have been our next door neighbors since I was about five or six. I interviewed her once as a kid for some get to know your neighbors assignment for school. She didn’t mention anything then about being a huge bitch. They’ve been trying to sell their house for the past few months, and she claims she can’t sell her house because the one next door, ours, is “a slum house.” Nevermind the public school district that school board members refuse to send their own kids to, or the exceptionally high property taxes, or the intermittent gang issues, or the overall economic slump and mortgage problem that’s pounding the entire country, no—the reason people won’t buy your house is because the one next to it could use a paint job, a less cracked sidewalk, and maybe a more regularly mowed lawn (the fence in the backyard that Mason-Dixons their chemical soaked golf course of store-boughts from our weed collection could also use some repair, but hey, there are two sides to the fence).

Mom was right though. If Peg found out it’d be just another thing to add to the list. She hated when I played the drums as a teenager, she hates our dogs, she apparently hates taking responsibility, and she would really hate if she knew that we had an array of animals burrowing, sleeping, flying around our property.  In a way, I guess they were making her case for her by moving into our place en masse instead of someone else’s. The word must have gotten out in the animal kingdom that there was an anti-civilization sprouting behind 343 Stockham. Be there. Perhaps that’s what the whistle pigs were whistling about.

“What? They’re whistleblowers now?”

“No, not whistleblowers, whistle pigs. They whistle to alert the colony of danger.”

“A colony? What do you mean a colony? I can’t have a colony in the backyard.”

Laughter.

“I haven’t heard from your father in weeks, and the grass is getting pretty high…but these guys are doing a pretty good job. They’re keeping it trim.”

More laughter.

“Listen, it might sounds humorous on your end, but if something happens to the dogs, I’m gonna freak out. It’s really nice how you laugh at other people’s misfortunes. I didn’t laugh at you when you had the freakin mouse.”

For many months, a network of mice and their known associates successfully maintained a terror cell in the floorboards of our apartment. I eventually killed three of them, and no, as far as I know, they were not blind.

“You know, there’s a law in Pennsylvania, you can shoot dogs…”

                Hysterical laughter.

“I don’t know why you get tickled at this stuff…you know, Khristopher…. I called for serious information, not for you to laugh at me. D’you just get high or something because I don’t find it funny. I’m a little concerned, uh oh, he woke up. Maybe he’s coming out…”

                She observes the groundhog coming out of his hole underneath our back steps and, in the whisper of a Discovery Channel narrator, informs me that it is five o’clock, the time when “he comes out to munch.”

“And I’m not telling your father about it either. If he does come over and mow, he can go in that garage and figure it out himself. That’s what happens when you don’t fix things. You should see how cute it looks, it really is cute. When something gets torn apart on Cory, and he’s chasing ‘em…they got claws?

Through laughter, wiping my eyes “Yes, they do have claws…”

“Great…..you watching the Olympics? You see those Chinese gymnast girls? I don’t think they’re 16. Especially since the one was missing her incisors. You lose your incisors around 9 or 10 years old, and she’s got her arms up there celebrating with no incisors. So I’m just thinking that, I don’t think they’re 16. Their earlobes aren’t even formed yet. Their ears and their lobes are not right. I notice these things, Khristopher. Apparently you don’t pay attention. Alright, well I’m watching the Olympics and seeing what that Phelps guy’s gonna do. He’s just a big fish. That’s just luck being born that way, that’s not even skill. There’s no way anyone’s going to beat him. That’s just incredible. Alright, well I’m just doing nothing, I’m gonna keep watching my groundhog. If it costs a lot of money, I’ll figure out another way. I can’t believe they don’t tell you nothing on there, like put out a block of poison or something, like for the mouse. I’d hate to kill her if she’s pregnant, but I don’t want a bunch of babies, I don’t want the colony in the backyard, now that I know it’s called that. I’m killing bats in the kitchen sink, now I’ve got groundhogs running around the backyard, it’s not a happy time here. There must be something that makes them keel over…What’d you do, just go to a generic groundhog thing?”

“Are you questioning my sources?”

 “Well I just think there’s got to be something. I thought maybe since your computer’s fast and I don’t want to go upstairs to use the one here, because there might be more bats up there… where could I live where there isn’t any animals? Pretty much nowhere…

“ I’m gonna try my method. I had some blueberries out there. I’m going to put a trail of blueberries out both gates, open em up around their feeding time, and see if I can get them to travel out of the yard. I gotta keep trackin em to see what time they come out. What do you think about a trail of blueberries?”

Laughing again as I picture two groundhogs in Hansel and Gretel costumes.

“Let’s see, what else…oh I went to the farmer’s market yesterday. This one guy was selling these kinds of tomatoes I’d never heard of before, but they were ugly. So I bought em. The guy said if you don’t like them, just cut em up and eat em. They’ll taste great. So I bought em.

“Alright, well I’m gonna keep an eye on these groundhogs, maybe call the wildlife association and see what it costs to trap em”.