Ask
anyone that has known me for any length of time and two things will probably be
mentioned. The first, Gregg has his own language and secondly he talks
backwards on purpose. This little ditty is about the first of those. After a
few years living in Arizona I began working in an antique and collectibles
store. About year or so later one of the
owners became very ill and a few days before he passed on he asked me to take over as
bookkeeper and to help his partner keep the store going, which I agreed to. The remaining owner had a bit of an air of a
Southern gentleman, though it was frequently more air than gentleman.
Anyone who has ever experienced the
joy that is working in retail knows you have days you can’t stop to piss and
others that are deader than Abraham Lincoln.
During one of those cemetery quiet days after I’d straightened, dusted
and vacuumed every item in the store within an inch of its life plus sharpened every
pencils I found I still needed something to do. I started a grocery list, just a few
things to pick up on the way home. I
left the list on the counter and went off to do something in the office only to
hear hysterical laughter rolling at me from the other end of the store. Ric,
the owner, had the list in his hand.
He looked
at it, looked at me, looked at the list again and asked, “What is THIS?” , while waving it in the air.
“It’s a
grocery list.”
He threw
his head back and howled. “WHAT! A grocery list? This isn’t a grocery list! There’s things on here I’ve never heard of. Boy
you are outta your rabbit assed mind! If you sent ME to a grocery store and I asked
for the stuff on this here list they’d take me away in a straitjacket.” I grumbled to myself that decision had already been made for him. He perused the list again and just continued
to screech with laughter until he ran out of breath and had to lean on the
counter.
“I sort of have
my own shorthand.”
“I’m glad
you know what this says cuz I would be absolutely pixilated trying to figure
out what some of this shit is if you sent me out of here with this.”
He put the list down on the counter
and walked away shaking his head, occasionally bursting in to a loud cackle. He
just went waltzing through the aisles of the store, straightening this and
moving that, all the while telling the chairs and lamps waiting patiently for
new homes, “The man is crazy.” From that day forward he always wanted to see
any grocery list I wrote. He would look
at it and laugh then trot off laughing to himself and muttering under his breath.
The list probably looked some thing like this:
Now let’s fast forward about 13 years
to the first few months of dating the wonderful woman that is now my wife. At that time we were both living close to the
nut and eating berries and bark as our main form of sustenance. We both like to cook so instead of going out
we would take turns making dinner at either her place or mine. One night it was
my turn to make dinner and I told her I had to change what I was going to make
because I was out of fred brums. It didn’t seem to faze her in the least and
dinner was a success despite the change in plans. Little did I know where that brief
conversation would lead.
A few
months later Dani was cooking dinner at my house again and asked me if I had
any bread crumbs. I reached in the cooking supplies cabinet, grabbed the can,
handed it to her and said, “Here ya go, fred brums.” She took the can and froze, then looked at
me.
“What did you say?”
“Um here ya go, fred brums?”
She stood there with a look of stunned
surprise on her face, slammed the knife she was using on the cutting board and said,
“OH.MY.GOD.”
I’m a bit flummoxed at this point and really
wondering what is up so I venture a cautious, “Uh, What's wrong?”
Then
I saw the look that I’ve grown to adore. Her mouth gets little and her eyes get
big for a moment, then the hands start to move in circles and go faster as the story she
is telling unfolds.
What follows next all spewed from her in
one breath.
“You are NOT going to believe this I went to
FOUR stores looking for fred brums because I thought it was a spice or
something you really liked and used a lot and you said you were out of it So I wanted to
surprise you with it one day because I had never heard of it and I thought that
would just be something special to surprise you with I even spent almost an hour in the spice
aisle in Safeway looking at everything before I asked somebody Now I know why the people in the grocery stores looked at me like I had 4
heads”
I
immediately pissed myself laughing.
Dinner was delayed a bit while we
laughed till our sides hurt though I know dinner turned out okay, they always
do. Anyone listening to the number of
times Oh God! was said during those 10 or so minutes would have suspected Billy
Sunday was back on the revival circuit and in my kitchen.
Since then we’ve both had plenty more
gooberific moments like this one to laugh at ourselves over. I know I’m definitely way ahead in
the count on those types of moments though no one is really keeping score
mainly because laughter always wins. That reminds me, I think we're out of fred
brums again.
