The Jennifer Dispatches IV: Tim Sequiturs

Jennifer reports to me the following:

Tim woke up from a nap and started to wave his left arm around wildly like he was looking for an alarm clock to shut off.

When Jen asked what he was doing with his arm, Tim said "I'm trying to think of all of the simple classifications of flowers."

Jen giggled quietly and asked him if he knew what he had just said.

"Sure. Yes." he replied, as though she was the crazy one, and then: "I don't knooooooooooooow."

Then he went back to sleep.

Later, Tim had no memory of any of this.

The Jennifer Dispatches III: Tim's Face

Jennifer tells me that, once, while in bed with Tim, he sat bolt upright, clutching his face in both his hands.

He cried out: "My face is too SMALL! I feel like I have a DOLL'S FACE!"

I asked Tim what happened. He said the feeling just went away eventually.

The Jennifer Dispatches II: The Things That Make My Father Laugh (Make No Sense)

My sister sent this email to me today. I can only assume she wanted me to post it here, the curious phrase "off the record" notwithstanding.

"Hey.

Tim and I were up at Mom and Dad's last night. We watched several episodes of Dirty Jobs with Dad, which is a show that makes Tim and I laugh - when it is not about animal hides - then it just makes us feel . . .well, dirty.

So, anyway, we are watching it and Dad is laughing and saying things like "oh my god" - (you know in the way he does where his voice goes up at the end) and asking questions like "now why would he do that?" - (you know in the way that he does). He keeps saying how amazing it is that this guy would do all of these horrible things just to get on TV. He complains and complains, but I swear to god he was laughing so, so hard. Why do you think he pretends to not like things that he does like?!

Oh and off the record, while we were watching television there was a commercial for some random sitcom on TBS or ABC or something like that. I didn't see this clip, I just heard it, but basically there was some joke where the woman says two female names and I guess probably pointed to her breasts or something because then the guy says "You named them?!?!?!"

I'm not exaggerating; Dad laughed for five minutes, and in Dad fashion kept on loudly repeating "You named them?!?!" "You named them?!?!"

Tim and I just looked at each other across the room and tried to laugh a little so that we didn't draw attention to the fact that we were actually both paralyzed with awkwardness and laughing at Dad. It may not be as funny on paper, but I wish you had been there to share in the paralymazment.

Anyway I hope things are okay with you. Talk to you soon. Love you."

Cancun: Tim Orders an Odd Dessert

“Tim’s breath always - always - smells of corn.”

This from my sister during a brief pause in the conversation last night at dinner.

“Except when he eats creamed corn. Then it doesn’t smell like anything at all,” she added after a moment’s scrunch-nosed thought.

This was presumably a segue from the discussion of one of Tim’s more surprising actions of the evening: ordering the corn ice cream off the dessert menu.

When it arrived, it came inside an actual cornhusk and was the creamy color of French Vanilla. I guessed it would be less bizarre than, at first blush, it seemed it would be. After all, I reasoned, cornbread is sweet - after a fashion.

This ice cream smelled strongly of raw corn and, delighted at our trepidation, Tim dug in with gusto.

“It’s not bad,” he said. “exactly."

After another spoonful and a moment of thought: "It tastes like corn.”

We pressed him.

“Well, it doesn’t taste like cornbread as much as corn juice.”

This brought a joyful horror to all of us.

Tim ate about half of the stuff before giving a kind of full-body shiver that started from his head and moved down his arms. He set his spoon quietly down on the table and pushed the plate of ice cream away from him.

I got up to go to the restroom and stumbled on the leg of my chair to everyone’s delight.

“It’s an old tequila injury,” I explained. “Acts up sometimes - always tells me when I’m drunk.”

Tim’s breath, it was reported to me later, had not even the faintest trace of corn-smell after eating the corn ice cream.

Cancun: A Difficult Dinner

Dinner last night began in the same way it so often does - with me feigning indignation for comedic effect.

My mother had ordered a bottle of pinot grigio for herself and, after receiving it and tasting it, declared that it was pretty good. My father asked to see the bottle and when he took it from my mother I leaned over Chiara to have a look at it myself.

The first thing I noticed was that it was not, strictly speaking, a pinot grigio at all, but rather a blend of chardonnay and pinot grapes. I slammed my fist down onto the table in mock disgust and cried out “A blend!? Mother, how could you!?”

I then asked my father where the wine was from. He read the back of the bottle and informed me it was from Vera Cruz. Again I slammed my fist down on the table, rattling the flatware.

“Vera Cruz!?” I shouted in faux consternation.

“What’s wrong with you?” my father asked me.

“Nothing,” I replied quietly. “I’m feigning indignation.”

“Why?”

“For comedic effect.”

Stare. Silence.

Later, while discussing the adoption of Children, Tim impressed upon me the importance of a child having a cool name.

“Like Kobe or LeBron?” I asked. “Yeah,” said Tim.

I offered to call an adopted son LeJeff or LeKobe. Somehow or other this led to a more earnest discussion of potential baby names. Jennifer volunteered that she and Tim had already selected baby names for their theoretical children. The top boy name? Finnegan.

I said I thought it was a terrible name with a great nickname: Finn.

My dad said it was a terrible name because it was Irish.

This, as you might have expected, was the screeching turntable of the evening and rather upset my sister. It also rather perplexed the rest of us.

We pursued the topic with abandon.

Turns out my father believes that an Irish name dooms a child to a life of prejudicial treatment because, and i quote:

“Everyone knows that the Irish are a bunch of drunks and criminals” and “No one would ever think an Irish name was anything but low-class.”

It should be noted, for the record, that mine is, of course, an (ethnically) Irish family. Indeed, my father's actual surname is O'Brien.

We tried to explain to my father (over Jennifer’s mild protestations) how dashedly pretentious and upper-crusty a name like Finnegan actually was, but he wouldn’t have it. Instead he insisted over and over again that we must be incredibly ignorant if we didn’t know what people thought about "the Irish."

Tim asked him if he still called it a paddy wagon.

You can guess how this all went over.

Later, my sister offered up the middle ground (and perfectly true) position that words and names change their meaning with time and use. She mentioned the etymological history of her own name ‘Jennifer’ and how it came originally from ‘Guinevere’ who, according to my sister, was a slut.

This really caught in my father’s craw for some reason.

“How was Guinevere a slut!?” he demanded in far too loud a voice.

“Uh, because she slept with someone who wasn’t her husband!” my sister replied, pitched over the table and pointing a fork at my father.

“A knight!” he replied, red in the face, bubbling with anger. “You can’t be a slut for sleeping with a knight of the Round Table!”

“Of course you can! Especially if you are married to King Arthur!”

Here I tossed in that maybe she felt neglected because he was always off somewhere with Merlin, playing cards and whatnot. Tim smirked and, looking down, stirred the food on his plate in ever-tighter circles.

From here things got progressively more ridiculous until, almost as if the weight of the conversation caused itself to collapse, the whole thing just fizzled away leaving little more than a smell of burnt ozone and a cloud of steam.

We ate more or less silently for the remainder of the meal.

The Jennifer Dispatches: My Father versus Cheese and Bread

My sister relates a story of my father on Superbowl Sunday:

Halftime. The family sits around a coffee table laden with snackfoods and appetizers. My father voices a complaint:

“Next time, we should really make some plans for dinner and not just snack. We should have some protein for dinner. I’m tired of having Cheese and Bread all the time. We should have gotten those ribs at the supermarket.”

My sister responds: “We weren’t going to just snack for dinner. Mom ordered a pizza.”

“More Cheese and Bread! Why would I want more Cheese and Bread?!” cries my father.

“Well then why don’t you go to the supermarket and buy those ribs?” asks my sister, foolishly.

“I don’t want to go all the way out to the store to buy the ribs! I just don’t want to eat any more Cheese and Bread! All we ever eat is Cheese and Bread since you came here! This must be your doing!”

“Are you talking about the hors d’oeuvres? There isn’t even that much Cheese and Bread,” says my sister.

This is the last straw apparently. My father leaps from the sofa and hunches himself over the coffee table. Extending one of his stubby index fingers he points violently at a bowl of French onion dip and its companion plate of Ruffles brand potato chips.

“Cheese and Bread!” he exclaims

He jabs his finger at a pate.

“Cheese and Bread!”

He, predictably, stabs his thick digit into the wedge of jarlsberg.

“Cheese and Bread!!”

Even the bowl of sweet pickles is not immune from his wrath.

“Cheese and Bread!”

He punches with his finger at a bowl of Cheetos. He’s almost perspiring with the force of his hate.

“Cheese and Bread!!”

The twin bowl, filled with Fritos.

“Corn Chips! Just like Pizza!!”

My sister, always the glutton for paternal punishment, interrupts my father’s reverie of rage.

“How are corn chips just like pizza?” she asks.

“Shut up!” responds my father, “I’m speaking to your mother!”

My sister announces that she is going to go work on her art history paper. She goes to her room and does so. Later, when the pizza arrives, she leaves her room to find my father, perched stone-faced and alone at the dining room table eating the enormous porterhouse steak and gargantuan baked potato that my mother prepared for him.

My sister went into the living room and finished the game - and the pizza - with my mother.