Month: December 2021

    The Littlespuds were thought to be an All-American family until Father Littlespud began researching the family archives for Happy American Families, an ultra-wholesome subsidiary of the National Enquirer Magazine. The popular periodical, the top selling periodical in Mississippi and Idaho, had approached him for a feature article until they got an anonymous tip that the Littlespud family was not exactly living their concept of the model American family lifestyle. According to the tip, in doing some late-night research, Father Littlespud had unmasked some unsavory family blemishes covered up for years, much as one would a cluster of facial pimples (a.k.a., zits). He had not so discretely popped them, allowing their contents to spill down the family chin. This is the story behind the story that never got published.

    The centerpiece of this sordid story is the Littlespud’s eldest daughter, One. One’s transgressions were not always serious or on the wrong side of the law, but even those that weren’t should have clued the family in to expecting those that were. Her younger sister, Two, dabbled a little in shady business, but nothing that gave the family cause for serious concern. If you are thinking that Father Littlespud, the author, is avoiding using real names because the family is in a protection program, you would be wrong. The two sisters, One and Two, have gone on to lead productive, crime-free lives; One has an entire family all living under the same roof and Two has a husband and a large dog, but under another roof. Mother and Father, while keeping a lowish profile and modest lifestyle somewhere in the Caribbean, are enjoying retirement under possibly different roofs.

    In fairness, Mother and Father, who met and married while attending university, didn’t lead such lily-white lives themselves. As a teenager, Father had collected several speeding tickets over the years and gotten a warning for playing the harmonica at a stoplight. He fell asleep at the wheel three times, which is not something to make light of, but he never killed anybody nor did it ever involved the police. The first time Father fell asleep driving was two days before Christmas 1999, and it involved One. She had come home from her university determined to not like any of her gifts, even those she had specifically begged for. Father had been having issues with insomnia and had become addicted to nonaddictive (according to his personal quack) Ambien. Disgusted with his habit, he chose Christmas week to go cold turkey and flushed his remaining stock down the toilet. Subsequently, he spent three solid nights sweating, writhing, and ricocheting off the walls.

    As bad luck would have it, they were driving Mother’s Honda. For his own protection, Father made a pact with One, at least he thought he did, that the incident would not get mentioned until the wheel bill came in and Mother would see that the car looked fine and feel expansively benevolent. They were still alive which would be considered irrelevant to Mother. One had a penchant for being a rat. The first words out of her mouth when they got home were, “Hey Mom, guess what Dad did.” 

    Mother was no saint. When she was an undergraduate, she operated an early brewpub out of her apartment. Brewing wasn’t illegal but her product was toxic, which could have gotten her into trouble with the Dean. In her defense, she grew up in Winnemucca, Nevada in the days when there was not much to do if you were a high school female, unless you were a barrel racer, so the girls were forced to drink, hang out in the front seat of Chevy pickups, and take up various domestic talents learned, in Home Econ. from the spinster, Miss Tipplemouse. Miss Tipplemouse didn’t teach brewing per se, but she did teach slot machine maintenance and operation, and Mother loved to gamble, which, of course, logically led to her interest in brewing.

    As a child, One pretty much stayed within the guidebook’s normal child range. There were certainly some spectacular temper tantrums during those years, and her parents did have to rope her bedroom door shut when she was in timeout. This raised red flags from friends and relatives, who initially thought they were lashing her to her bed. When they found out otherwise, and they all knew about One’s temper, they then expressed concern about her setting a fire and her parents would not be able to untie the door in time to save her, assuming they wanted to. She was free to roam her bedroom and didn’t have access to matches or weaponry. Father did paddle her once after an embarrassing tantrum in a restaurant in Seward, Alaska, when she was 3, which involved three whacks through a well-padded snowsuit. Thank God, Father took her to the car because her screams of false pain would have cleared the restaurant and drawn the cops.   

        Early traits displayed by One never suggested she was heading down the Manson-Dahmer road. No beating heart was ever heard lub-dubbing from the walls or floors of our home. Bones were never exhumed in their back yard unless you considered those of the pets. This included one ass wipe Australian Rozella parrot, who never talked and bit anyone who tried to give him a treat. When he finally died, the Littlespuds badly wanted to burn him at the stake.

     One had and still has, an appalling desire for sweets. This is not a crime in and of itself, but any addiction has the potential to lead to crime and just plain foul deeds, such as cheating, lying, stealing, etc. As a toddler, whenever they were at the grocery store, Mother and Father always had to watch One carefully, for fear she might steal candy. She would waddle as fast as her little bowlegs could carry her in her homemade, bulky snowsuit, looking like a miniature green Michelin Tire, to the candy aisle. Once there, she would work her way down the aisle, pulling every brand of candy off the shelf and inhaling deeply. One of us always had to position ourselves at the end of the candy aisle as a sentinel.

        One had her third birthday party while they were living in Anchorage, so they invited her friends for cake and ice cream, including a very shy, tiny 2-year-old girl who lived in the apartment below them. The innocent little thing was standing next to One at a children’s table when Mother carried the cake out, all aflame with 3 candles. One charged the cake like a starving orphan, bull-dozing her tiny friend off her feet and into the wall. One never looked back.

    When One got into Junior High School she was caught cheating on biology exam in the class of a very good friend of Father’s. She had written a few salient points about frog guts on her palm. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal, had not Two been caught cheating in the very same class several years later.

   Then came high school. As with all sophomores, One was clueless for much of that year, and she befriended a girl who had apparently had criminal tendencies. One lunchtime in the early fall, One and this new friend walked over to a nearby Albertson’s grocery store. One was unsure why they were going, but she was weak and pliable. Mother got a call from the manager while Father was hard at work taking his standard noon nap under his cubicle desk. Mother described the phone conversation as follows:

    “Ma’m, are you the mother of One Littlespud?” the manager asked.

    “Yes, why?” Mother said with rapidly tightening and increased shrillness of her voice.    

    “This is Mr. Diddley Squat, the manager of the Albertson’s store and I have you daughter here in my office. She and a friend were caught shoplifting a few items. Are you free to come down to my office?”

    “What do you mean by a few items, Mr. Squat?’” Mother squeaked, as if on helium. “A shopping cart of groceries? What the hell would two high school girls do with a cart of groceries?”

    “No, no,” Mr. Squat said. “Just some pencils and candy.”

    “The candy makes sense, but pencils? Pencils? Why the **** pencils? She has at least a hundred in her desk drawer in her bedroom.  Alright, yeah, I’m on my way. Good God, pencils.”

    Mother called Father a few minutes later. When she called, Father had already climbed out from under his desk and was gulping several cups of coffee, trying to focus on something important and wondering if he hadn’t looked at the same document several times just before his nap.

    Mother said, “I am calling from the hallway outside the manager’s office at the Albertson’s where One was caught shoplifting gummy bears and pencils. She is with some friend whom I’ve never seen before.”

    “What? Shoplifting? One? Pencils and gummy bears? Pencils and gummy bears?” Father repeated. “Why pencils.  Candy, is understandable, but pencils? Jesus Christ. Pencils. She has thousands at home.”

    “You don’t have to come down because we’re about done and the manager said he is not going to press charges but One and her friend will no longer be welcome at their store.” Mother’s voice sounded squeaky. “Did we make some mistake somewhere? Should we have given her more candy and, maybe colored pencils or even a mechanical pencil? She told the manager that her parents didn’t give her enough of either. It was embarrassing.”

    “You know she’s a good kid, just a little naive in picking her friends. Plus having an insatiable sweet tooth,” Father added. “And maybe she ran out of pencils at school and had a huge writing assignment,” he added.  

    One and Two swam throughout their school years. On the New Year’s Eve of One’s senior year, the seniors on the team had a party at one of their homes. The parents were allegedly home, which, as it turned out, gave Mother and Father enough false sense of security to go to bed long before they dropped the Big Potato at midnight in front of the Idaho Capitol. Sometime after midnight, the Littlespud phone rang. Since Father always got the phone in the middle of the night, the rationale being that he was a man of steel and could handle anything the police or a stoned wacked-out teenager could dish out. Father remembered the conversation going something like this:

    “Dad, it’s me. I’m calling from Ted’s house. Don’t worry, nothing’s wrong. Ted’s parents are here now and so everything is cool. The police are also here, and they asked some of us to call our parents. I will explain when I get home, but we aren’t going to jail or anything like that. We may have to pay a fine or repair a mailbox but that’s it.”

    “What the **** happened? Did you wreck Mother’s Honda? Did you fall asleep? Are you injured?” Father shouted.

    “Honestly, Father, no wrecked cars, nobody was hurt, but a few of us made a bomb and blew up a mailbox across the street,” she said as if she blew one up on a daily basis just to maintain her miner’s license.

    “What do you mean by a few of us?” Father screamed into the receiver.  “What do you mean by a bomb? A terrorist kind of bomb? Jesus Christ, One, your mother is going to shit flaming bricks when she hears about this.” Immediately Father realized his mistake, lowering his voice so Mother wouldn’t hear but it was too late.

    “What happened?” Mother yelled from bed, now sitting up with a look of panic on her face. “Is One in trouble again?”

    “Yes, she’s calling from the party,” Father said. “Nothing serious, it involves a bomb, but nobody was hurt. Let me hear the rest of her story and I will tell you when I hang up.”

    Turning back to the phone, “One, explain the bomb. Who made it? You? Did you learn something about bombs in chemistry class?”

    She replied, “Most of the others were passed out or went home. It was a large plastic Coke bottle bomb with dry ice in it. No big deal.”

    “Passed out? I thought you said Ted’s parents were home and there was going to be no alcohol involved.”

    “Ted’s parents went to a party, but they just got back. Someone brought some beer. I have to go. The police are asking me to hang up; they want to talk to us some more. I’ll be home soon. I only drank one beer so I’m OK to drive. Bye.”  Click.

     As the family learned later, someone got the brilliant idea to make Coke bottle bombs intent on blowing up a few mailboxes in the neighborhood. Small bombs made perfect sense to ring in the new year. The details are a bit sketchy, but One and another wise senior planted the first bomb directly across the street from the party house, close friends of the party house family. Why pick strangers to receive the holiday joy of a front yard explosion? 

    The mailbox theme doesn’t end there. Later that Spring, One was baby-sitting in the foothills at a house perched on a steep hill. She parked their Isuzu Trooper on the opposite side of the street, facing downhill, wheels straight, gear in neutral, handbrake barely on. Just off the right fender was a crafted, personalized, river stone mailbox.  One did not hear the crash while rocking out to the sounds of an SNL heavy metal band. If the Trooper had continued down the hill, their family might have changed dramatically for the Littlespuds. On a previous occasion, a vehicle parked at that same location had slipped out of gear and rolled down the hill gaining momentum before it leaped the curb and through the bay window of a house. Fortunately, the family was gone and not holding a séance in their living room.

    One’s sugar addiction has not improved with age. One has three small sons, and Father has the impression that One eats more candy than her three sons combined, which she vehemently denies. Buying huge Costco containers of peanut M&Ms, when two of her sons are allergic to peanuts doesn’t quite add up. Then guilt gets the upper hand, and she claims she bought the M&Ms for Father, the other family sugar addict. Despite this propensity, sugar in her body has no chance to settle permanently. She is a caloric forest fire. When not attending to her boys, she is the Eveready Bunny on steroids, doing jumping jacks, skipping rope, push-ups, snapping elastic tension bands, teaching boot camp classes, running, hiking, cycling, etc. Chairs and beds, to her, are for exhausted seniors and normal people.

    It seems safe to say that One’s aberrant past, has passed. Her boys are wiser and eat only health foods and love sports but refrain from continuous calisthenics. One calls her parents regularly in the Caribbean and loves her boys and her husband, who emphatically avoids calisthenics and sports, except Frisbee golf.  

Father

The Holiday Season, 2021