TouchedByMadness

When Hell Freezes Over

I am ever so fortunate to live in a part of the country where it begins to snow right around Thanksgiving time. So if you’re wise enough to stay in bed on Black Friday instead of getting trampled to death at Target while making a mad dash for the DVD players, Mother Nature will send you the friendly reminder that the holiday season has begun by dumping an assload of wet white powder on your doorstep.

Sure, there was that time when I was young and I loved the snow. Those were the days when nothing brought me more joy than nailing my sister in the face with a ball of packed ice. But those childhood memories of crashing our sled into the side of the house fizzled out far too soon. Not long after we discovered we could use the shovels to bury each other alive, they were confiscated for the greater good of clearing the driveway. And since we were so eager to brandish them in the backyard, we were the ones pushing those shovels through the Great Wall left by the snow plow.

Shoveling the driveway and stairs was a chore indeed, and often took most of the morning. So you can imagine with what glee I responded to my mother when one day she met me at the door to request, “Go shovel out the elderly woman across the street.” I attempted to protest that the woman didn’t need her driveway shoveled as I had yet to see a car ever appear in it, but my mother would hear none of it. She was always awfully generous with her child labor.

Bitter and defeated, I trudged across the road, dragging my shovel behind me. With a heavy sigh, I began to clear the neighbor’s driveway. When I was halfway done, the old woman appeared at her door.

“Who are you?” she snapped. “What are you doing here?”

I smiled my best ‘I love puppies and Jesus and old people’ smile. “I’m Stacey. From across the street. I’m shoveling you out.”

“I didn’t ask you to shovel my driveway!” she complained.

“My mother sent me,” I responded as jovially as I could manage through gritted teeth. Believe me, lady, this wasn’t my idea.

The woman went back into the house and I returned to my work, more disgruntled than ever.

I finished the driveway and slowly made a path up the walkway. When I was nearly to her porch, the elderly woman appeared at the door again.

“Who are you?” she hissed.

“Stacey,” I repeated, thoroughly irritated by this point. “I live across the street.”

“And what do you think you’re doing?”

That was it. I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t be polite. I was doing this woman a favor. I could have let her try to shovel her own sidewalk and slip and fall and break a hip. I could have left her in the snow to whine, “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!” Her decrepit frame could have been crystallized in ice from November until Groundhog Day. But there I was, torturing my fragile, frozen body so the mailman wouldn’t slip and sue her ass.

“Well, I seem to be shoveling your walk,” I replied with overt hostility.

“Why?!” she asked, as if terribly offended.

“Because there’s snow on it?”

I’m sure that any other old lady would have smiled benevolently, patted my head, and offered me hot cocoa, a cookie, or a quarter (cause let’s be honest, elderly people are always paying you in quarters). This woman, however, slammed the door in my face.

I heard that last week my dad shoveled out that same neighbor. She gave him forty bucks and a cup of coffee.

Figures.

Reconciliation

I totally bombed my first confession.

It’s something that the perfectionist over-achiever in me can’t let go of (almost twenty years later).

It started off well enough. I hesitantly crept into the holy hallowed phone booth. (I realize that “holy hallowed” is redundant, but there were confession boxes on both sides of the priest.) I was just working myself into a good claustrophobic panic when the little listening door swung back with a loud, echoing THWACK! which I mistook for the sound of the Angel of Judgment alighting on the top of my booth ready to smite me for my horrible digressions. I instinctively ducked and slowly gazed up towards the ceiling.

A deep voice acknowledged me.

For a split-second I might have honestly believed it was God, but then I experienced a moment of clarity and realized that the priest was ready to hear me. I found my voice and recited my well-rehearsed, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession.”

I delivered every practiced prayer and response flawlessly. I knew them by heart. I was such a good little Christian.

But when it came time to actually confess my sins . . . I drew a blank.

It occurred to me then that in all my efforts to perfect the rote memory portion of this blessed sacrament, I had never once given any thought to the sins I was going to confess. Maybe I expected they would just come to me at the necessary time, but in the moment of truth I found my skill for improv lacking.

I began to tremble. Surely I must have sins to cleanse from my unworthy mortal soul. How hard could it be to think of them? I closed my eyes tightly and tried to remember the last thing I’d done to get me into trouble. Still my mind was a tabula rasa. I considered making something up but that would be lying, which was a sin in itself and, at the very least, counterproductive.

By now it seemed as if the priest had been waiting an eternity. The whole world was created in less time. I began to panic. Would Father believe I had a Jesus complex and fancied myself without sin? Or would he think there were so many to choose from that I didn’t know where to begin?

I tried starting over, hesitated, stuttered and stopped. Breathing became difficult and my eyes brimmed with tears. Realizing we were getting nowhere, the priest began to feed me ideas. He started off with what I expect are standard sins.

“Do you obey your father and mother?”

“Yes,” I replied in a quivering voice.

“All the time?”

I thought about that for a moment as I clasped and unclasped my shaky hands. “Um . . . I suppose not.”

“Have you ever hurt another person?”

I had a younger brother and sister. I couldn’t remember for sure, but I was fairly certain they may have received a Smurf bite every now and then. I nodded and sniffled. “Yes.”

My nerves were shot. My heart was pounding in my ears. I was weak and vulnerable. I agreed to every suggestion the priest gave. I was like a mentally deficient criminal unwittingly confessing to murder one. I admitted to things that weren’t even true without giving a thought to if I had done them. By the time I was finished my sins included skipping church to go to birthday parties, being lazy about doing my homework, telling ethnic jokes, setting the neighbor’s cat on fire, stealing my grandmother’s prescription painkillers, loving Santa Claus more than Jesus, saying something unholy about one of the altar boys, and plotting world domination.

“Oh!” I said, finally remembering one of my own, “and I instigate my sister.”

“Five ‘Hail Marys’,” the priest said.

I said two. Five seemed a little steep to me, considering I hadn’t perpetrated half the crimes I’d confessed to. Granted, five wasn’t an exorbitant number. It was really quite manageable. But I had to stick to my principles. Did I deserve so harsh a sentence? No, of course not. So what if I pared down my penance? I mean, it’s not like anyone was counting, right?

Right?

I added an extra ‘Our Father,’ just in case.

No Exit

I am completely convinced that the reason my family doesn’t take trips anywhere anymore is because my father refuses to ask for directions.

My dad never gets lost, mind you. He simply likes to take “the scenic route.” I suppose you could argue that ten miles of I-95 South towards your destination is every bit as scenic as the ten miles of I-95 North he’s just accidentally driven, but then he would claim that he was merely taking a slightly longer route around “the city” and why don’t you take a nap or something?

One summer my parents decided to take us to the Boston Museum of Science. It would be a long ride, but my father insisted he knew how to get there. To appease my mother, we brought along a map just in case. My mother designated me the navigator, a title of which I was quite proud.

For a short time.

I kept a vigilant watch of road signs and tracked our progress on the map, shouting out directions whenever I deemed necessary.

“We need to take the next exit!”

“No, we don’t get off the highway here.”

“Yes, we do.”

“No, then we’ll have to drive through most of the city. We’ll get off further up.”

“But–”

“I know where I’m going!”

I’d holler out the next street we needed to take. He’d randomly pick one he liked. Soon I had no idea where we were.

“Come on, Stacey. Where did you put us?”

“Where did I — ? What?!”

“You have the map. Where the hell are we? Don’t you know where we’re going?”

At that point I knew that my mother’s claim that she gets carsick reading maps was a strategic fabrication. I glared at her through the seat.

“Turn up here,” I growled.

“Nah, we’ll turn further up.”

“We’re going to miss it.”

“We’re taking the scenic route.”

“You’re going over a bridge. We’re not supposed to go over a bridge. You’re taking us right out of Boston!”

“I’m going to turn around further up.”

“Where? Maine?!“

“Enough you two,” my mother interjected. She craned her neck to peer into the backseat. “Stacey, stop arguing with your father.”

So I did what any other kid (or young woman who knows she’s right) would do. I crossed my arms and pouted. My father and I didn’t say another word to each other. The car was quiet.

After an eternity of my pouting and my father continuing to drive straight ahead, my mother began to get antsy. She looked at me, but I refused to offer further assistance. She looked out the window, checked the time, and finally built up the courage to say something to my father. “Hon, where are you going to turn around?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know where the hell we are. The kid got us lost.”

“I got you –”

“Oh, I see a police car!” my mother interrupted. “Please, dear, ask the cop for directions.”

My father finally acquiesced and pulled over to talk to the officer. He rolled down the window and nonchalantly asked, “How close are we to the Boston Science Museum?”

The police officer looked at my mother’s pleading face and then at our disgruntled expressions in the backseat. My father smiled confidently. The officer cleared his throat and backed away from the car a step.

“Um, sir,” he said, “you’re in New Hampshire.”

A Cautionary Tale for Unruly Children

Women are vengeful creatures. This is a lesson I learned very early in life when I discovered that the most dangerous woman you shall ever know is your mother.

Perhaps at the beginning of time a bargain was struck with the Creator, and so, for woman’s vital role in the bringing forth of new life, she was bestowed with the Gift. Perhaps mothers, being sensitive and intuitive, have more developed psychic abilities. Or maybe motherhood simply cultivates an interest in voodoo. Whatever the source, I am quite certain that these women command a power that can only be described as the secular equivalent of godsmack. My own mother swells with this gift, as I learned one fateful day.

I was a wee peanut of a child at the time, sitting at the kitchen table. No, I’m sorry. Not sitting. Kneeling. That’s how the conflict began.

From the other end of the table, absorbed in her project, my mother said, “Sit on that chair the right way.”

I was surprised that she had acknowledged me. I briefly considered complying with her request, but she hadn’t even bothered to look up. I was quite comfortable the way I was, so I shifted back and forth a little to appease her (figuring she wouldn’t know the difference) and continued with what I was doing.

“I said sit on that chair the right way,” my mother repeated, glaring at me this time.

“But then I can’t reach good,” I complained. Who was I hurting by kneeling on the chair? What was this woman’s problem? I decided that she was being unreasonable, she was trying to start a fight, or both. I wasn’t a defiant child, but I choose in this moment to be stubborn.

“I’m only going to ask you one more time . . .”

I ignored her. Wait, did I hear something? No, no, I don’t think I did.

Now, I was a reasonably intelligent child, but I did not sense the disturbance in the atmosphere. Perhaps if I wasn’t so confident that my mother didn’t know how to pick her battles, I might have felt the prickling of energy sparking around the room. This argument was clearly heading for a climax, but I didn’t see it coming.

And then I heard it. In an otherworldly voice she bellowed All. Three. Names. Suddenly my head snapped up, my eyes filled with terror. I was young, but well aware that my mother broke out our full names only when we were in a world of trouble. I realize now that as the syllables rolled off her tongue, she was invoking the Divine Power of Retribution. It was too late for apologies. I was about to be smote.

“Anastasia Lynn Willets! You sit yourself down in that chair the right way before you fall and smash the teeth out of your . . .”

She never finished the sentence. As soon as I heard my full name echo through the house, I hastily tried to adjust my position. But, having already been conjured, the Angel of Vengeance descended upon me and caused me to slip. I plunged forward, my face colliding into the table with a sickening crack.

I prematurely lost my two front teeth that day. Soaked in tears and blood, I learned what it meant to defy my mother.

Natural consequences, she called it. Natural consequences.

I spoke with a lisp for at least a year or two. You expect me to believe gravity was to blame?