There is salvation from the torment mentioned above. Just ask the British, but be prepared to laugh. The Brits have a wonderfully dry, irreverent, off the wall sense of humor–or humour, as it were–especially when it comes to bathroom humor. Cottonelle Toilet Tissue’s clean bum/go commando commercials come to mind.

I was viewing a TV show on the BBC America cable channel when a commercial came on for the bathroom spray product VI Poo. An attractive young woman acting the part of a celebrity expounded on the virtues of this product. Whether you are a celebrity, a VIP, or an average citizen, just spray VI Poo into the porcelain throne’s bowl prior to use and you’ll leave the necessary room odor free so no one will ever suspect that you excreted stinky solid waste while answering the call of nature.

At Christmas time this past year, MG and I encountered a rival product. Annually, our Godchildren give us each a Christmas gift. Mine gave me a tin of Harry & David’s Moose Munch. Yum. MG’s gave him a spray container of Poo-Pourri, a product similar to VI Poo. I wonder if the little darling was trying to tell him something.

The label on the Poo-Pourri spray bottle contains advertising copy that is a hoot. Here are a few shameless examples.

“To own the throne, you must rule with an iron spritz.”

*****

“Spritz the bowl before you go,

And no one else will ever know.”

*****

“There once was a lad from Rhone

Whose odor he’d rather disown.

Now he’s taming his poo

By anointing the loo,

And now happily sits on his throne.”

The Poo-Pourri TV commercials are more shameless and more hilarious. Have a look and have a laugh, but be sure to visit the loo prior to watching lest you laugh too hard and have a lulu of a loo emergency.

Enjoy!

At the time, Macho Guy and I were still young marrieds living down South. His family drove down to spend Thanksgiving with the two of us, and they brought along a small cooler filled with pheasant breasts. The guys are all hunters and they bagged their limit. They proudly laid their bounty before us.

Early Thanksgiving morning, I got the turkey out of the refrigerator and discovered it had hardly thawed. I hadn’t taken it out of the freezer soon enough. I panicked. We would not have turkey for Thanksgiving. No drumsticks. No wishbone. No stuffing. I was a dead woman.

Luckily for me, my mother-in-law came up with a positively brilliant idea. Let’s use the pheasant breasts instead. Hey, it sure sounded brilliant to me. The pheasant breasts weren’t frozen. Done deal!

My mother-in-law said that at home she usually just dredged the pheasant breasts in flour and fried them. That didn’t sound very Thanksgivingish to either of us, so we cracked open one of my cookbooks [Betty Crocker’s New Dinner for Two Cookbook that I bought as a newlywed] to find something more festive.

On page 39, we found Pheasant en Crème. Oh, yes. So sophisticated. So chic. So ‘veddy’ upper class. The sides that went with it looked easy enough to prepare too. We looked at each other and grinned. We two adventurous chefs were about to impress the socks off our family.

We checked the list of ingredients. The recipe called for a whole pheasant. We figured we had enough pheasant breasts to make a whole bird. Check. I had salt, onion, and garlic cloves. Check, check, check. Uh-Oh. My pantry failed to yield Cream of Chicken Soup, apple cider, Worcestershire sauce, and mushrooms. The stores were closed. Hmmm. What to do? Substitution, of course. That was definitely the way to go.

Let’s see. I did have Cream of Mushroom soup, so we could substitute that for the Cream of Chicken Soup and the mushrooms—took care of two ingredients with one can. I didn’t have apple cider, but I had apple cider vinegar. Close enough. Now Worcestershire sauce, well that one was a toughie. Wait a minute. I had a huge bottle of Soy Sauce. Doesn’t that taste a lot like Worcestershire sauce? Sure it does. What the heck, it would have to do.

We both agreed we had everything covered. But, to ease the niggling doubts lurking in the backs of our minds, we got out the plain old unsophisticated ham that I planned to serve for dinner on Friday and stuck it in the oven along with our bastardized Pheasant en Crème dish.

We set an extravagant table. We used the good matching glasses. No cartoon character jelly jar glasses for us. We used the matching stainless flatware and good everyday dinnerware instead of Macho Guy’s mismatched, scratched and faded Melmac dishes from his college days. We even used cloth napkins instead of paper, and we left the centerpiece on the dining room table even though we couldn’t see each other over the humongous arrangement. Yes, we went all out.

At dinnertime, we proudly carried our culinary masterpiece to the table to smiles and applause. We said grace, and I silently added a prayer that none of us would die of food poisoning if the Pheasant en Crème turned out not to be as festive as my mother-in-law and I hoped. We began serving, passing the plates around, and then everyone prepared to begin their gourmet dining experience.

I think I was the first to take a bite. I put that first forkful in my mouth and my taste buds immediately begged for mercy. I actually believe I heard them scream at me.

Spit it out, spit it out, spit it out! Now, now, now! Don’t swallow, don’t swallow, whatever the hell you do, don’t swallow!!!

Oh. My. God. This must be what poison tastes like. I peeked around the humongous centerpiece to see my mother-in-law’s expression of horror as she began turning green. She did what my taste buds were urging me to do. She grabbed her napkin and spit the noxious concoction into it. I did likewise. At almost the exact moment, we both shouted at everyone, “Don’t eat it! Don’t eat it! It’s awful!”

We were much too kind to ourselves. Awful did not begin to cover the ground. Gosh-awful did not begin to cover the ground. Freaking Gosh-awful did not begin to cover the ground. There were no awful words in the dictionary that were awful enough to describe how awful our awful Frankensteined Pheasant en Crud dish tasted.

I snatched up the serving platter at once. My mother-in-law desperately started snatching dinner plates away from everyone and slapping their forks out of their hands, but not before Macho Guy and his dad decided to see what the shouting was about. They were fool enough to swallow chunks of the toxic bird and both gagged. They reached for their water glasses and drained them. My father-in-law then rubbed salt into the already gaping wound. He said, “What a waste of good pheasant.”

Humiliated beyond belief, my mother-in-law and I retreated to the kitchen in abject failure. We dumped the contents of the platter and the plates down the garbage disposal where that slop found kindred spirits.

Thankfully, we had the good old solid dependable ham. We brought it out to everyone’s vast relief, and Macho Guy sliced it and served it. Everyone tasted it. Everyone chewed it. Everyone swallowed it. No one spit it out. At last, my mother-in-law and I had something to be thankful for.

Macho Guy’s older sister and her husband had been delayed and arrived when the rest of us had just about finished eating. The others regaled them with a grossly exaggerated tale of the lethal culinary disaster my mother-in-law and I had prepared, claiming we tried to poison everyone so we could collect their life insurance benefits. Ha-Ha. Very funny.

Well, this particular brother-in-law of Macho’s was widely known for his cast iron stomach. He asked if we had any of the pheasant left. We did. There was quite a lot left in the baking pan that we hadn’t yet consigned to the garbage disposal. He said he’d like to try it. Everyone did his best to dissuade him, but he was insistent.

I brought out the baking pan containing the remains of the infamous Pheasant en Crap. Macho’s brother-in-law encouraged me to pile a huge portion on his plate, and then he dug in with gusto. The rest of us waited for the inevitable gagging and probable puking. Instead, he pronounced it delicious and asked for seconds. And thirds. We all watched dumbstruck as he chowed down. Not only did he have a cast iron stomach, he also had cast iron taste buds.

My mother-in-law and I never lived down that we prepared the most absolutely terrible, horrible, inedible, worst thanksgiving dinner ever. We heard about it every Thanksgiving thereafter, ad infinitum. We were not alone in our infamy, however. Macho’s brother-in-law never lived down that he ate that incredibly inedible bird without gagging or puking, that he enjoyed it so much that he asked for seconds and thirds, and then he lived to tell about it. Thus memorable family legends are born.

I wish you all a Thanksgiving that is happy and nothing like the disaster I just described.

I suppose the seeds of my addiction were planted subconsciously as I listened to New York Times puzzle master Will Shortz and his word games on NPR every Sunday morning while I got ready for church. I played along and didn’t do half-badly. I didn’t do half-goodly either, but I did enjoy it. Boredom and the preservation of sanity proved to be the fertilizer that helped to grow the addiction to full flowering.

Following surgery, I developed postoperative complications that landed me back in the hospital. There isn’t much to do when one is laying flat on one’s back in a hospital bed for two and a half weeks. I read all the books Macho Guy brought to me, and then I was at the mercy of The Tube. Boredom set in rather quickly, and loss of sanity threatened to follow on boredom’s heels. Trust me when I say that one can watch only a limited number of daytime television talk or reality shows before tearfully begging to be transferred to the psych ward.

Macho Guy began leaving the newspaper behind for me after his daily visits. Grasping at whatever straws promised the retention of sanity, I solved the paper’s crossword puzzle. It felt good to let my brain cells feast on something challenging after hours of feeding them mindless broadcast drivel. I looked forward to my daily vocabulary romp. I mentioned my newfound fascination with crossword puzzles to Macho Guy and asked for more puzzles to solve. He obliged by showing up for his next visit with an armful of puzzle books.

Macho Guy became my enabler. Crossword puzzle books showed up as stocking stuffers every Christmas from then on. Macho Guy spread the news to other family members who presented me with puzzle books for birthdays and Mother’s Day. They became my favorite gifts to receive—second only to dark chocolate.

After a while, I noticed that each crossword puzzle author has his own shtick—something or someone who appears in his puzzles on a regular basis. There is one who always manages to get part of Mao Tse Dung’s name in just about every puzzle. Another seems fascinated with Ché Guevara. A less revolutionary but more literary type always makes room for Charles Lamb’s alter ego Elia. Another favors including the names of iconic movie stars of filmdom’s golden age. [That is to say iconic stars—like Gable and Lombard, Tracy and Hepburn—who performed in films before spectacular overblown special effects overshadowed the actors and became the biggest stars of motion pictures.]

The more obscure the clues, the more difficult the puzzle. In my opinion, some of those obscure clues reach beyond the reasonable—like the ninth and uncommonly used definition of a little-known word. As an English Major, I am loath to look up possible answers to the obscure clues. It’s a matter of pride. I would be breaking the unspoken covenant with the puzzle’s creator if I were to look up the answer to a clue. It would be no different than turning to the page on which the puzzle’s solution is printed. Cheating. That’s what it would be. Cheating, like copying someone else’s answers on a test. Unthinkable.

My self-righteousness didn’t last long. Yes, I cheated. You knew I would. Well, I had to. When I couldn’t figure out a clue, it drove me nuts and not only because I couldn’t complete the puzzle. I couldn’t get the darn clue out of my mind until I learned the answer. It was no different for me than when a song stuck in my mind and I couldn’t stop humming or singing it. Gahhhhh! So, I got out my trusty iPhone and found a crossword puzzle dictionary. Whenever necessary, I feed it the obscure clues and it spits out a list of possible answers from which I may choose. Instant relief is mine.

It was inevitable that one puzzle addiction would lead to another, like a gateway drug leads to the more powerful stuff. I discovered Jumble. 7 Little Words. Up & Down Words. Word Search. And even though I’m math challenged, I’ve succumbed to Sudoku. I’m sure there is an endless supply of puzzles to which I can become addicted. I just haven’t found them yet.

Right at this moment, a section of today’s newspaper containing the puzzle page rests on a tabletop a few feet away from me, and it is calling my name. I’d like nothing better than to drop everything and start solving all the puzzles, but when I’m done here, my unfinished manuscript has dibs on my time. The puzzle page will have to wait until I’m done writing for the day. ::sigh::

So tell me—is anyone else out there caught under the spell of an unsolved puzzle? Are you addicted to a different guilty pleasure? Post a comment and tell me all about it. I’m all ears. No, wait a sec. I’ll be reading it. Forget the ears. I’m all eyes.

Unfortunately, the knowledge I retain leans heavily toward the offbeat and trivial. For example:

The computers used to send Apollo astronauts to the moon were no more powerful than a cell phone. I wonder if we could send astronauts to Mars with a smart phone?

Contrary to legend that has Albert Einstein not speaking before he was four years old, a family history records him already speaking in full sentences at age two and a half. I think the first words he spoke as a child were e=mc². Or maybe it just sounded like that.

For the movie version of her novel Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell wanted to cast Groucho Marx as Rhett Butler. Yeppers. It’s true. Seriously. I couldn’t believe it either, or that the name she originally gave to Scarlett O’Hara was Pansy. What was she thinking?

Legend says Hershey’s Kisses got their name from the smooch sound or motion of the chocolate being deposited during manufacturing. Even machines love chocolate.

Mano a mano doesn’t mean man to man. The word hombre is Spanish for man. The word mano is Spanish for hand. Mano a mano is Spanish for hand in hand. More chummy than macho, that mental picture,

Bob Keeshan, TV’s Captain Kangaroo, was the original Clarabell the Clown on the iconic Howdy Doody Show. Well, you had to be a kid back then to appreciate that tidbit.

Birds eat half their weight in food every day. So, someone who eats like a bird is not someone you may want as a dinner guest.

Elvis Presley referred to his restroom as The Library. Read into that what you will.

Iconic sex symbol Marilyn Monroe’s weight fluctuated between 118 and 140 pounds. Hmmm. I think I need to find a way to go back in time—to when men appreciated a woman with some meat on her bones.

What’s your favorite bit of trivial knowledge? 

That is how, in an unguarded moment, we were ensnared by this cult and became Gardeners.

It started way back when we bought the house on the lake. The previous owner took her backyard hot tub with her, leaving a big ugly brown area of earth where no grass grew. Our kindly new neighbor rushed over with several varieties of hostas she had just divided. She demonstrated where and how to plant them in the formerly big ugly brown area of earth where no grass grew. She didn’t stop there. She found other big ugly brown areas of earth where no grass grew, and she then persuaded us to take more of her divided hostas to populate those additional big ugly brown areas of earth where no grass grew.

Macho Guy desperately wanted a labor-free rock garden but was too polite to refuse the plants. Had he refused, those hostas would have appeared anyway in our big ugly brown areas of earth where no grass grew. We learned much later that our kindly new neighbor was the acknowledged leader of the cult’s splinter sect, the Guerrilla Gardeners. She and her Guerrilla Gardeners frequently staged anonymous freebie planting interventions on their neighbors’ properties while the owners were away or asleep.

The first hint that we were on our way to becoming cult converts manifested itself when we noticed the presence of invaders in our now landscaped areas of earth where flowers grew—an army of weeds. Hardy weeds of every variety known to humankind ambushed our precious hostas. The army of hardy weeds surrounded them.  The army of hardy weeds cut off their supply of water and solar energy. The army of hardy weeds attempted to obliterate and supplant our precious hostas.

You realize, of course, that this sneak attack meant war.

We dashed off to our local gardening center to purchase weaponry—eventually settling on something called Round Up. Here’s the thing; Macho Guy and I didn’t want to round up the invaders. We wanted to kill the invaders. We searched the shelves for weaponry that was more deadly, but we were unable to find any chemical weapons that might be called Belly Up or Die, Dandelions, Die.

We were able to spray and kill the invaders that arose in the spaces between the hostas, but couldn’t spray the invaders surrounding the hostas. They were too close. We would have to get down and dirty. We would have to kill the invaders with our bare hands.

It isn’t easy killing another living thing with one’s bare hands, especially if that living thing has a deep tap root that makes merely yanking it out of the ground an exercise in futility.

We had to resort to primitive weaponry. We armed ourselves with hoes and shovels. Several backbreaking hours later, the invaders were incarcerated in a trash barrel and transferred to a makeshift crematorium where they met their fiery demise. Even with smoke stinging my eyes, I wasn’t able to shed a tear for them. I knew then that I had become a card-carrying Gardener Cult Member.

I woke up the next morning sore all over. It was difficult to decide which muscle in my body hurt the worst. It was too close to call.

Our youngest was visiting from college for the weekend and was drawn to the kitchen at breakfast time by the aroma of bacon frying. At that time, he broke the tragic news. When he arrived home at 2:00 a.m. from a night out with his high school buddies, his car’s headlights illuminated a deer in our front yard—in one of the landscaped areas—munching on something.

Macho Guy almost dropped his coffee mug. I almost burned the bacon. Surely all that weeding hadn’t been for naught, and surely we wouldn’t find a big ugly brown area of earth where our hostas used to be. We exchanged horrified glances and ran out the door in our robes and slippers.

The scene of the horrific massacre took away my appetite. The 2:00 a.m. deer had shown our precious hostas no mercy. It ingested them as if they were deer salad, chewing them right down to the ground. Oh, the hosta inhumanity.

In the past, I scolded Macho Guy for even thinking about hunting—especially deer hunting. I said, “How can you possibly kill cute little Bambi?”

Suddenly, Bambi didn’t seem all that cute any more, and such barbarism cried out for vengeance. I suggested to Macho Guy that it might be a good idea if he kept his rifle handy from now on. We had other hostas that were counting on us for protection.

While Macho Guy cleaned his rifle, it fell to me to alert our Gardener Cult brothers and sisters to the presence of this merciless enemy of greenery in our neighborhood. I got out poster board and a black marker and went to work on a suitable sign.

Wanted!

For Merciless Hostacide

Bambi

Dead or Alive

[Preferably Dead]

[Unquestionably Dead]

[Terminate With Extreme Prejudice]

As a youngster, the first time I was old enough to fast during Lent, I was encouraged to give up candy—chocolate specifically. I had no idea what going without chocolate for forty days would be like. After less than a week, I was ready to convert to any religion that did not require fasting.

Back then, I didn’t know anything about Mardi Gras. My family is of Italian descent. We didn’t do Mardi Gras because we didn’t have to. We ate every day as if it was Mardi Gras. So, you can imagine the difficulty Lent presented to us.

The first time I heard Mardi Gras referred to as Fat Tuesday, I didn’t get it. Why have two names for the same day, especially when one is more fitting than the other?

So what if Mardi Gras translated into English means Fat Tuesday? Mardi Gras is so continental, so exotic and sounds so sexy. Unless you understand French, you would never dream it means something as mundane as Fat Tuesday (Tuesday Fat, that is). Somehow something is lost in translation from the French. That certain something, that je ne sais pas quoi, doesn’t make it through.

For one thing, it’s so much more fun to say Mardi Gras, even if your French accent needs help. Before I studied French in college [most of which I’ve forgotten], I thought Mardi Gras was French for party—an extremely huge, wildly exciting, decadent and lengthy party.

Fat Tuesday is humdrum. It isn’t fun to say Fat Tuesday. It sounds like a cruel judgment: “You’re fat, Tuesday.” It’s not the least bit exciting, exotic or decadent. It doesn’t say party at all.

Lively Miss Mardi Gras dances through the streets chanting, “Feast today for tomorrow we fast.” From break of dawn to the stroke of midnight, everyone feasts on all manner of delectable creole favorites and other mouth-watering N’awlins goodies.

Mr. Fat Tuesday just lays around like a couch potato and says, “Stuff your faces, people; lent begins tomorrow.” The face stuffing generally involves whatever and whenever—no special feast.

In the USA, the premiere Mardi Gras celebration takes place in New Orleans and justly so. New Orleans and Mardi Gras were made for each other. People from all over the country travel to The Big Easy for Mardi Gras because Mardi Gras events elsewhere pale by comparison.

I believe many of those people would not be as willing to travel across the country to take part in a “Fat Tuesday” parade, or a “Fat Tuesday” costume ball, or wear a “Fat Tuesday” mask, or if young women would flash their bare bosoms for “Fat Tuesday” beads. Nah. Wouldn’t happen. The Mardi Gras magic simply isn’t there.

While I’m not fortunate enough to be in New Orleans today enjoying the festivities, you can believe I’m celebrating Mardi Gras and not Fat Tuesday. In true Mardi Gras tradition, we are feasting all day—Italian style, of course. Somebody pass the pasta, please.

Snuck.

I have no love for that ungainly and ungrammatical word, and I cannot abide its use. Just the sound of it makes my flesh crawl. For the life of me I cannot fathom how it managed to smuggle itself into the English lexicon.

I would love to travel back in time to meet the first person to use snuck instead of sneaked as the past and past participle of sneak. No, I would not shoot him or even slap him upside the head—I’m not a violent person—but I would wash his mouth out with soap for using foul language and convince him of the error of his ways.

Snuck makes no sense when you conjugate sneak. It should be sneak, sneaks, sneaking, sneaked, has sneaked, have sneaked, and so on. Snuck doesn’t fit the pattern: sneak, sneaks, sneaking, snuck—huh? No, no, no! What happened to eaked and where did uck come from? Unfortunately, no one seems to know. Even more unfortunately, no one seems to care.

Well, I care. So, let’s conduct a little experiment, shall we? I’m going to write a short paragraph using the past tense of verbs that end in eak. I’ll write it two ways. First, I’ll write it using the standard past tense for each verb that ends with the letters eak. Next, I’ll write it using a nonstandard uck tense for each verb ending in eak. Got it?

Standard: The kitchen door hinge squeaked while she was watching her favorite TV show. She turned down the volume and peaked over her shoulder. She was sure she locked that door. The kitchen floor’s loose boards creaked ominously under the weight of someone’s feet. Her face was streaked with tears. Someone had definitely sneaked into her house. She freaked out and called 9-1-1.

Nonstandard: The kitchen door hinge squuck while she was watching her favorite TV show. She turned down the volume and puck over her shoulder. She was sure she locked that door. The kitchen floor’s loose boards cruck ominously under the weight of someone’s feet. Her face was struck with tears. Someone had definitely snuck into her house. She fruck out and called 9-1-1.

See what I mean? If none of those eak verbs are acceptable or intelligible with an uck past tense, why should any English speaking human willingly accept snuck as the past tense of sneak?

For years, the Oxford Dictionary of English stood firm against snuck. The Oxford defied the conjugationally challenged masses and defended the purity of the English language from the barbarians at the gate who would savage it. The Oxford refused admittance to snuck. Thank Heaven for the Brits.

Here in the States, the Webster Dictionary people caved early on to vulgate usage. Webster’s included snuck in its pages as the accepted past tense of sneak. For shame, Webster’s, for shame. I hope Noah Webster never suffered from motion sickness, for surely he is spinning in his grave.

Here’s how the Oxford American Dictionary explains the usage of sneaked vs. snuck.

“The traditional standard past form of sneak is sneaked (she sneaked around the corner). An alternative past form, snuck (she snuck past me), arose in the U.S. in the 19^th century. Until very recently, snuck was confined to U.S. dialect use and was regarded as nonstandard, but in the last few decades its use has spread, particularly in the U.S., where it is now generally regarded as a standard alternative to sneaked. In formal contexts, however, sneaked remains the preferred form.”

I definitely prefer sneaked to snuck. I only wish I were not in the minority. I am disheartened to report that the Oxford Dictionary of English (the British version) in a recent edition sounded an alarming note in its description of usage regarding sneaked vs. snuck:

“In the Oxford Reading Programme, there are now more US citations for snuck than there are for sneaked, and there is evidence of snuck gaining ground in British English also.”

Please say it isn’t so, Oxford. After learning that snuck is gaining ground in England, I’m not sure I’ll be able to sleep tonight.

Oh, the humanity. Wasn’t including ain’t in the dictionary more than enough for the English language to bear?

True, it can be. In fact, I have a confession to make. When I attended mass at the previous parish to which I belonged, my most fervent prayer was for the mass to end as soon as possible. [Try not to judge me. If you were there, you’d understand.]

That parish’s uncharismatic, soft-spoken, monotone-voiced priest just about put me to sleep every Sunday morning with his uninspired homilies that were intricate efforts to interpret the meaning of the Gospel passage of the week. He dissected each Gospel sentence-by-sentence, even word-by-word. His homilies were more like theology lectures and boring in the extreme. I struggled to keep my eyes open, and I could not stop yawning.

Yes, church can be a drag, but it can also be lively and enjoyable. It all depends on the church you attend. Specifically, it depends on the tone the church’s pastor sets. [Please, not a monotone.] When Macho Guy and I moved to a neighborhood just outside a small Michigan town, our new neighbors urged us to changed parishes and I’m so glad we did.

Our new parish is smaller than the last and its faith community friendlier. The new parish’s pastor is a refreshing change too. In the first place, Father Duaine actually has a personality and he does not speak in a soft monotone. Yay! He has a good sense of humor. Yippee! He has an incredible memory—he heard our names once and the following Sunday morning he greeted us both by name when we entered the church. Wow! We learned from our neighbors that he remembers everyone’s name. Impressive. I don’t know how he does it.

I enjoy Father Duaine’s homilies. They are entertaining as well as enlightening. Instead of dissecting the Gospel, he links it to life in today’s world. He always begins each homily with three humorous anecdotes that are connected to the theme of each Sunday’s Gospel. He finds his stories in publications for pastors.

He also shares his own life experiences as they relate to the Gospel reading. He gets his point across with lighthearted humor and simplicity. I have yet to fall asleep during one of his homilies.

Here is the story Father Duaine told that got the biggest laugh of all:

A man, his wife and his mother-in-law travelled to Israel together. Not long after they arrived, the mother-in-law suddenly died. The man spoke to a mortician who gave him two options: hold the funeral and burial in Israel for $5,000 or ship the mother-in-law’s remains home for burial at a cost of $10,000. The man decided to ship his mother-in-law home. The mortician asked why the man didn’t choose the less expensive option and bury his mother-in-law in Israel. The man replied, “About 2,000 years ago, a man died here and was buried. Three days later, he rose from the dead. I just couldn’t take the chance.”

Holy homily humor!

The church we attend in Florida during the winter is architecturally unusual. It is an octagonal shape with walls of glass surrounding the nave; the pews face a center altar. Father Tom, the church’s pastor, has a headset mike and walks around in the nave instead of speaking from a pulpit, and he comes out to chat with the congregation before mass begins.

His latest chat involved parishioners who come up to receive the Eucharist and then leave the church immediately afterward instead of remaining until mass is over. To everyone’s amusement, he demonstrated how they tuck the missal under one arm when they come up to receive the host, then nonchalantly stroll toward the church door and casually drop off the missal onto the missal and hymnal shelves without breaking stride. He suggested they try to be less obvious—they should ask the person beside them to return the missal for them. That got a lot of laughs.

Another thing that sets Father Tom apart is his “church dog” Bridget, a yellow Labrador retriever who greets parishioners at the church door with tail wagging. When mass is over, she enters the nave and carries Father Tom’s missal in her mouth as he exits during the recessional hymn.

A few years ago, when Father Tom’s homily was of necessity about the annual Catholic Sharing Appeal, he brought Bridget into the nave and she lay beside the baptismal font near the entrance. Father Tom said he needed Bridget there because he was going to talk about donating money, and he wanted to be sure to have at least one loyal friend in church who would listen to what he had to say. We all chuckled at that.

Father Tom walked about the nave and began enumerating the needs of the less fortunate in the diocese. About five minutes into his spiel, when he had his back to Bridget, she got to her feet, turned and began to walk out of the nave. The congregation absolutely lost it, most of us laughing so hard that we cried. [I sure did.]

For an instant, Father Tom looked stunned—it didn’t make sense that everyone was laughing because of the CSA appeal. He whirled just in time to see Bridget exit the nave. He did a double take and then called after her, “Et tu, Bridget?” The congregation broke up again, and it took quite a while for the laughter to die down.

Holy homily humor!

In the past, I never suspected that practicing religion could be entertaining. These two charming and fun-loving pastors make me look forward to Sunday mornings. Of course, that means dragging my bod out of bed earlier than usual to attend mass, but it’s well worth it. Barring illness or seriously inclement weather, I wouldn’t miss it.

You know how your ear feels with it fills with water and you can’t get it to drain, or how it feels when you’re in a plane climbing to a higher altitude? My left ear felt like that. I figured I only needed to make it pop. I’m so naive at times.

I made myself yawn, which wasn’t difficult because I had yet to drag myself out of bed and wasn’t fully awake. I opened my mouth really wide and waggled my jaw. I tugged on and wiggled my ear lobe. I poked my pinky finger inside my ear canal and wiggled it. No pop.

Aha. I remembered an ear-popping trick a pilot once showed me. I pressed my lips together tightly and pinched my nostrils shut so no air could escape, and then I blew air into my nose. Hard.

The air pressure should have been equalized on both sides of the eardrum. It wasn’t.  My eardrum should have popped right then and there. It didn’t. I should have been able to hear normally again. I couldn’t.

Uh-oh.

Panic set in. The obvious conclusion was that my body was finally falling apart. First the memory went bye-bye—it’s always the first to go—then the 20/20 vision took a hike, and now I feared I was experiencing the onset of hearing loss. Was I over the hill? Don’t answer that.

Church that evening was something of an embarrassment. I’m not all that good at reading music—I never learned how. We sat too far from the pianist and the choir for my one good ear to hear the music well enough. I was hearing in mono instead of stereo. There were two hymns we sang that I hadn’t heard before. I made sure not to sing loud, but from some of the glances Macho Guy sent my way, I’m pretty sure I sang off key. Thank Heaven that’s not a mortal sin.

The following morning, my left ear felt worse. The ear canal was beginning to swell shut. I told Macho Guy that I needed to go to the Urgent Care facility nearby to have my ear checked.

MACHO GUY: [glancing at his watch and appearing perturbed] Can you be ready to go in half an hour?

TIME OUT FOR THOSE WHO HAVE EVER ROOMED WITH ME TO DISSOLVE INTO HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER AND THEN COMPOSE THEMSELVES.

MACHO GUY: If we don’t leave by ten-thirty, I’ll have to take you there after three-thirty.

ME: [annoyed] Why can’t we leave after ten-thirty?

MACHO GUY: [impatient] So there’s enough time for you to be seen and so we can be back here no later than noon.

ME: [more annoyed] There’s no law that says we have to have lunch at noon on the dot.

MACHO GUY: [more impatient] I wasn’t thinking about lunch. The game starts at noon.

ME: [even more annoyed, thinking—sports, it always comes down to sports] What game?

MACHO GUY: [much more impatient—about to explode, actually] The game, the Spartan game! The Spartans are playing Wisconsin today at noon.

ME: [miffed that a Spartan game takes precedence over my sore ear but hiding it] Ohhh. That game. Of course.

MACHO GUY: [earnestly] It’s a very important game. The Spartans have to win to stay number one in the Big Ten and to stay in the top ten nationally.

ME: [thinking I’d get more respect if I painted myself green and white] Right, right. Tell you what, Honey. Why don’t you just drop me off at Urgent Care? I’ll call you when I’m done. If it isn’t half time, you can pick me up after the game so you won’t miss anything. I’ll hang out with all the sick and dying in the waiting room until you come for me.

MACHO GUY: [face lighting up like Lady Liberty’s torch] You’d do that? Are you sure? I’ll stay with you if you want me to. [big insincere grin]

ME: [trying not to scream because it would hurt my ear] Yeah, sure. I’ll take my iPad along and work while I wait.

I hoped Macho Guy would rediscover his humanity by the time we reached the Urgent Care facility but the cad thoughtlessly dropped me off and zoomed back to the cottage to watch the Spartan game. You would think after all these years that he could recognize sarcasm when he hears it and know I didn’t mean it when I said I didn’t mind being dropped off. Men.

As it turned out, the culprit that ultimately messed up my left ear was Macho Guy’s snoring. If snoring were an Olympic event, he’d blow away the competition and claim the gold. I have to wear earplugs every night if I hope to get any sleep.

The Urgent Care medics determined that wax build up formed a plug in my ear canal causing an ear infection. We figured out that the earplugs I use to muffle the sound of Macho Guy’s plaster-shattering snoring push the earwax farther and farther back into the ear canal. Eventually, that wax can form a plug like the one they flushed out of my left ear. They also informed me that my left ear canal has an odd shape—it takes a 45-degree turn about halfway—which exacerbates the problem. Well, of course. If anyone were to have an oddly shaped ear canal, it would have to be me.

On the upside, I can hear normally again, but there is a downside too. Treating the ear infection creates a waking nightmare for me. I must put drops in my left ear for the next seven days. During that time, I can’t put an earplug in that ear at night to muffle Macho Guy’s rafter-rattling snore, and I left my earmuffs in Michigan.

I feel a week of sleep deprivation coming on.

Just kidding.

Actually, growing another year older doesn’t bother me one little bit. The alternative to growing another year older is a downer and sure would bother me. Getting to stick around for another year is a priceless gift.

My Baby Sister and I have winter birthdays that are only two weeks apart [five years and two weeks, that is] so we try to celebrate our birthdays together. Last year, I milked the occasions for four birthday dinner celebrations: one for her birthday, one for mine, one joint birthday celebration, and one on Super Bowl Sunday—which happened to fall on my birthday in 2013. I suppose all those birthday celebrations could have been aired in an episode of American Greed.

Yes, happy birthday to me. Aside from all those luscious birthday dinners, I received the gift of spending more time with my loved ones and getting more hugs and kisses from my grandchildren. I received the gift of seeing more of my children’s and my grandchildren’s accomplishments this past year—and seeing more of their comic antics.

I also saw another year’s worth of God’s comic genius, of his quirky sense of humor, of those little jokes he plays from time to time on members of the human race like the Polar Vortex. His best joke of last year: He actually had Miley Cyrus convinced that she is sexy and that people want to see more of her tongue. Ha-Ha! Good one, Lord. I’m still in stitches.

Birthday gifts are great fun. My Baby Sister gave me two dressy T-shirts because she says my T-shirts are not feminine enough. I don’t agree. I have one that says: “If a man speaks in the forest and there is no woman to hear, is he still wrong?” How do you get more feminine than that?

I hope to be around to celebrate more birthdays for a long time to come. I’m not ready to go to Heaven yet–presuming I will go Heaven, that is. At certain times, I’m not sure that my going to Heaven is a given.

One of those times occurs when I’m writing and I must sully my keyboard with some of the naughty words with which my characters insist on expressing themselves. Shameful. They make me want to wash my keyboard and my fingertips with penicillin.

Then there are the times when I experience a twinge (more like a stab) of envy when another writer experiences publishing success of some kind. I always feel petty afterward, I always remove the pins from the little doll afterward, and I always repent and sincerely congratulate the successful author afterward.

If I don’t go to Heaven, if I go in the other direction, I’m certain of the culprit: my writer’s mind. I don’t know if this happens to other writers, but my writer’s mind takes me elsewhere mentally no matter where I happen to be physically. I’m embarrassed to confess that I have been known to lose focus when I’m in church during Sunday mass. My writer’s mind wanders in the direction of my current work in progress. I find myself plotting when I should be praying. I’m hanging my head in shame as I write this, even though I know it is bound to happen again. ::sigh::

Macho Guy will be back from playing golf very soon, so I’m going to cut this short and get gussied up for my birthday dinner—and birthday cake, lots of chocolate birthday cake and ice cream. Mocha Almond Fudge, of course. Mmmmm.

What? I forgot to tell you how old I am? Well, they say the memory is the first to go.