This was a nice, low-key weekend which for once consisted of NO FIGHTING! And I mean between Chooch and me. It was nice to relax and be languid instead of being all GO GO GO like I usually am on weekends.

Olympics, horror movies, cemeteries and red velvet milkshakes.

Yes. That was all I needed.

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We didn’t have much time after eating breakfast at the Traveler’s Club International Restaurant in Michigan (it doubles as a TUBA MUSEUM and was a great pick by our tour guides, Bill & Jessi) because I had this dire urge to see the world’s largest cuckoo clock in Sugarcreek, Ohio. Every time I brought it up to Henry, he tugged on his collar and looked around for diversions, chainsaw guys, ditches in which to push me.

I wouldn’t drop it, though, and continued down the list of merits I had made for the cuckoo clock.

By 2:00pm, we were on the road. We made a quick stop in Luna Pier, because seeing Lake Erie was another very pressing thing on my list. Sure, I’ve seen Lake Erie from Pennsylvania and Ohio, even took a boat tour in Cleveland (if you were me, you too could live such a thrilling life). But I really needed to see it from MICHIGAN.

That fruity red dot of menstruation up there is Henry.

This is the closest thing to a beach we’ve come to since that shitty fucktastic trip to Okracoke we took in 2006 with those asshole Civil War reenactors. Chooch and I kicked off our shoes and took off.

Henry’s feet never even touched the sand.  “It’s just Lake Erie,” he kept saying, while Chooch and I squealed and frolicked like Hansel and Gretel dining on the witch’s carcass. Spectators probably thought we had just been let out of our cage in the basement. Henry does resemble a grizzled captor. In fact, on our way to Michigan, I mouthed “help” to the girl in the toll booth. Thanks for all the help, whore.

After Luna Pier, A LOT of driving happened. I found religious programming on the radio and pretended to be holy for a good hour while Henry scowled and periodically asked, “Can we turn this now?” while Chooch read his comic books quietly in the backseat. Jesus music is calming. Or maybe it’s hypnotic. In either case, it zipped my child’s lips, so praise be to Jesus and his Lambs of Christ.

At some point in Ohio, we turned off the highway and found ourselves up to our ears in Amish. (Henry says they were Mennonites, so we argued about that for awhile.) We rounded a bend and an old Amish man was standing on the side of the road.

I screamed.

“What? He’s probably just waiting for a buggy,” Henry reasoned.

“He looked to me like he was cursing us bastard civilians,” I argued. And then, “What happens if you run over an Amish person?”

Henry averted his eyes from the road long enough to look at me in disgust. “Um, you go to JAIL. They are people,” he reminded me. “Not animals.” A minute passed and I heard him repeat my question under his breath, shaking his head in exhaustion.

I didn’t know if they utilized the same legal system as us, OK? Jesus Christ, Henry. I thought maybe they left it up to the Lord; chased you around the farm with pitchforks, Benny Hill-style.

Aside from Amish culture, other things that jack off my fascination are all things Bavarian and Swiss, hence my determination to see this fucking cuckoo clock. Some of my fondest memories  are from childhood trips to Europe, helping my grandparents pick out cuckoo clocks in the Black Forest and traversing covered bridges in Lucerne. Eating fondue and watching lederhosened men blow into those Ricola horns. That’s always been my favorite region of Europe. And since returning there is nowhere in my near future, making pilgrimages to chintzy, kitschy Swiss-American tourist traps is the best I can do to keep my heart full of Toblerone and army knives.

I regaled Henry with stories from these past vacations while he prayed the GPS on his phone wasn’t leading us to our fate of becoming shoo-fly pie filling.

“You weren’t even listening to me,” I whined as he consulted his phone.

“Yes I was, and I’ve heard all of those stories before.”

Bastard. What a fucking bastard.

Here are some of my tweets from the Great Cuckoo Clock Pursuance, to give you a real-time feel for the awesomeness of being in our car:

About the same time my phone lost service, we crossed the threshold for the town of Sugarcreek, Ohio’s Swiss Wonderland.

The bad vibes were immediate. Something made me feel uncomfortable; maybe it was the lack of people and how it caused the town to be quiet as a graveyard. I don’t even really remember many cars passing by, although we did see a cop idling in a parking lot with a book.

The downtown portion of Sugarcreek was quaint, charming. But also mostly deserted. There seemed to be some people in one of the restaurants, which has swiss steak on special. I wanted to go. Not to eat the swiss steak, but to see what the townies were like. Henry said no, of course. Why eat at a real restaurant when we can stop at a gas station and get hot dogs?! (Because that’s seriously what he did. And I got a Special K bar. Now there’s a real meal to say grace for.)

Henry’s GPS alerted him to make a left off the main road. A few feet later, I saw it.

And it was in pieces.

I didn’t tell Henry this, but a Roadside America user posted a tip saying that as of March, the cuckoo clock was out of commission for repairs. If I told him that, he definitely wouldn’t have taken the chance. But I thought maybe it might have been all bandaged up by then and ready to cuckoo. I needed to see for myself.

“You’re a fucking asshole,” Henry muttered. But we got out of the car anyway. Chooch and I went over for a closer inspection while Henry leaned against the car, texting his work boyfriend about what an awful lay his shitty girlfriend is.

Further research (which would have been helpful prior to making this ridiculous detour) informed me that pieces of the clock have been auctioned off, including the evergreens and little  Swiss people.

Shit, I thought driving through the town was creepy? Poking around this over-sized clock at dusk was even more spine-tingling. I had a distinct sensation that townies were watching us from their windows, sizing us up  for future cuckoo clock adornments. Can you picture a taxidermied-Chooch twirling out from the clock’s bowels every hour? Because I kind of can. I ushered him back into the car, ducking around Henry’s choleric glare.

“We should come back for the Swiss Festival in October,” I suggested, reading  from the town’s official website on my phone. I looked up just in time to see Henry vivisecting me with his mind.

Somewhere between more Amish arguments (which found Henry yelling, “Shoo fly pie is regional!”) and crossing the Pennsylvania border, two vultures nearly careened into (MY SIDE OF) the windshield.

[Ed.Note 8/5/12: I still want to go back here sometime for the Swiss Festival! Who’s with me?!]

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The “GTFO, I’m Trying To Fix the Car, Stop Embarrassing Me In Front of Hot Naybor Chris & I Know You’re Only Taking Pictures So You & All Your Little Friends Can Laugh At My Bandanna” frown.

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One of Henry’s favorite things in the world is when he thinks he has some semblance of an itinerary in his head and then I breeze on by and trample all over his pre-planned travel route with my ridiculous tourist attractions.

We had just left Conneaut Lake Park and, if you were to have asked Henry right then, he would have told you that we were en route to Erie, where we would be checking into our hotel before he tried to drown me in the lake.

However, I had heard about this Victorian baby carriage museum a few months ago and when I eagerly looked it up in my Roadside America app, I was delighted to see that it was only about 30 miles away from Conneaut. Henry squinted at the map on my phone and barked, “Yeah, but it’s the opposite direction!” which made me start chirping about it being my BIRTHDAY WEEKEND^TM and god forbid I should ever have the audacity to suggest going to some obscure museum to see a collection of Victorian wonderment.

“Goddammit, Erin,” Henry sighed as he turned the car in the complete reverse direction from where it was headed, and thus began our hour-long trek to a dead end street in Small Town, Ohio, peppered with arguments over the radio (“I am NOT listening to a hockey game from 2003!” – Henry J. Robbins, anti-NHLite).

The museum was easy enough to locate using just the map on my iPhone, and I think I heard Henry quietly curse God for fucking his life as we rolled up to what turned out to be someone’s house. I had no sooner snapped a picture of Chooch with a carousel horse on the porch, when the front door flung open and a diminuitive middle-aged woman in a lime green romper beckoned us inside, her hunger for tourists obvious and slightly off-putting.

Inside the foyer, she introduced herself as Janet and gave us a quick rundown of rules. There were only two: No cameras AND NO TOUCHING ANYTHING. Her eyes lingered unsmilingly on Chooch for that one and I could tell she was pissed that we had the audacity to bring some snot-nosed six-year-old boy into her lovingly curated stroller abode. However, I had groomed Chooch for this excursion by telling him that all of the baby strollers were haunted, so not only was he quiet and respectful for the entire 45 minute tour, he was downright frightened. So what’s up now, Buggy Broad.

The tour started off kind of rocky, with me trying not to laugh; Janet bracing herself for Chooch to pull a slingshot out of his back pocket and go to town; and Henry looking intensely uncomfortable and agitated, like a big dumb bulldozer amongst fragile wicker and porcelain. Janet dove right into her spiel, pointing out various pieces of antique prams with a delicate Vanna White flourish and giving us brief history lessons. Did you know that in Victorian times, some strollers were actually pulled down the street by goats?

WELL I DID NOT.

We were still in the first room when Janet’s twin sister Judy appeared with her own tour group: a grandma and granddaughter pair. The granddaughter was wearing a Sleeping With Sirens shirt and I kept trying to get Henry’s attention but he shrugged me off.

Did I mention that this place is curated by twin sisters? And that they’re so obsessed with baby carriages, they even wrote a childrens book about it?

At times, it was hard to concentrate on what Janet was telling us because there were never less than 15 sets of deadened doll eyeballs boring into our souls in all ten of the rooms of the house.

Hummel collection, get Bavarian!

Even with the No Camera policy, I tried to snag a few “from the hip” shots because this place was absolutely fantastic.

My favorites were the prams that bore a likeness to various animals, like peacocks. “Can you tell what that one is supposed to be?” Janet asked Chooch, and I was turning blue in the face waiting for him to say, “I don’t know, daddy’s furry weener?” Instead, his guess was a very age-appropriate, “Um…Cookie Monster?” I didn’t even know he watched Sesame Street.

It was actually an owl, so we all got a laugh at Chooch’s expense, a mere hour after his bumper car snafu at Conneaut Lake Park, where he was stuck in one place the whole time because he couldn’t actually reach the gas pedal and everyone laughed at him each time he got lapped. Or maybe that was just me.

In the gutted bathroom, Janet pointed out a wicker childrens’ wheelchair. Henry and I made eye contact and he gave me a very slight “don’t do it” head shake, but come on. I couldn’t pass up this photo op, so I waited for Janet to guide Chooch into the next room before stopping abruptly and snapping a picture, causing Henry to crash into me.

Janet was wise and focused all of her attention on Chooch, even draping her arm across his shoulders at various points throughout the house and pointing out Shirley Temple dolls and, once she learned of his obsession, weathered-paged cat books and handmade plush cat toys. This was the key to corking his douche whistle and keeping him interested. The kid was completely enrapt by every room.

I think he was also intimidated.

Haunted. It’s all fucking haunted.

In addition to the 200+ perambulators (there are so many, that some of them have been strung from the ceiling like carcasses), their house also boasts an impressive collection of 1800s tchotchkes, dollhouses, paintings, music boxes & organs (Andrea would have hated this place!), dresses from the period, and copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Little Black Sambo, which Janet interestingly said was her favorite.

I’m not exactly sure how one gets into collecting baby carriages, but these ladies have accumulated an impressive fleet over the last 30+ years; I can only hope my future with wheelchairs is even marginally that impressive. Not only do they have in their acquisition the oldest carriage in existence (they were exactly one week quicker than the Smithsonian in procuring this one), but they also have a majestic fire engine red carriage called The Regent which was used at one time to transport a baby Queen Elizabeth II around London. Oh, it was so hard not to touch that one. Janet admitted that this was their prized possession and she hoped to someday encase it in glass once they find a bigger location for the museum.

If you can believe it, I was being completely respectful through the whole tour, but I don’t think Janet fully believed my intentions were pure until she pointed out a Victorian funerary wreath made of thread, and I asked, “Weren’t those often made of hair, too?” She stopped and looked at me curiously before confirming, and I could tell she was pleased to see my interest in her antiquated livelihood was legit.

The tour concluded back in the main room, where the small gift shop was located (basically a desk piled with copies of the twins’ children’s book, post cards, and their gilded miniature carriage ornaments). Janet was so impressed with Chooch’s (uncharacteristic) attentive demeanor that she let him pick a post card for a souvenir. I didn’t see Judith doing that for the Sleeping With Sirens fan on the other tour.

(I’m convinced he was only so well-behaved because he was scared stupid at the thought of ghosts.)

And of course I bought a copy of their children’s book.

On their website, the twins say, “Some of the many words that our visitors have used to describe their experience are: awesome, fabulous, beautiful, overwhelming.” After we left, I asked Chooch what he thought.

Well ladies, you can now add “creepy as shit” to that list.

[If you ever find yourself near Jefferson, OH, you owe it to yourself to stop by the Victorian Perambulator Museum. 45 minutes of ogling a compulsive curation of Victorian niche will only set you back $5, and it is so goddamn worth it. Even Henry said, “That was pretty cool.” HENRY SAID THAT!]

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Chooch has a scar on his leg from a shrubbery battle he had a few months ago. To make him feel better, Henry showed him his own scar on his hand.

“Oh my God, I didn’t know you have a scar!” I screamed, resulting in Henry giving me a stern That Was Unnecessary look. I thought to myself, “Finally, maybe he actually has a good SERVICE story to share for once, something about hand-tohand combat!”

But no. It was from a WART.

A wart.

And not even a wart he got in the SERVICE, what the fuck, Henry.

***

At work the other day, I was doing one of a million things that makes Lee’s head go into explode-mode.

He scowled at Barb and said, “The problem here is that too many people enable her to be a diva.”

I just laughed haughtily in agreement.

I mean, duh, right?

***

Asked Chooch what he wanted for breakfast yesterday and he sneered, “Oh, I don’t know. Something that involves milk?” Like I’m the stupid one for asking when we all know that cereal is all that I can prepare for AM eats. I’m also adept at squirting in some chocolate syrup too if his mood ever calls for flavored wets.

***

Today, I received a package in the mail full of Urban Decay treats. I was so excited (if whoever sent that is reading this — THANK YOU! I LOVED IT AND MY EYES ARE WEARING IT RIGHT NOW!) but then Chooch totally lost his mind over it and started crying, “It’s always for you! I never get ANYTHING in the mail!” This is not true at all, but I was so irritated that he was ruining my post-birthday treats that I shouted, “Then go get a goddamn pen pal!”

This was moments after he randomly flipped out because I always beat him at Wii tennis.

“You ALWAYS win! It’s like you don’t ever want to lose! WHY DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO WIN?!” And as he ran off in tears, I yelled, “BECAUSE I’M THE BEST!” (We were not playing Wii tennis at the time of this argument.)

Luckily, Henry came home from work shortly after this to facilitate positive dialogue between us kids.

***

The new Alternative Press arrived on my birthday, featuring Chiodos & Pierce the Veil!  Happy Birthday to me.

Wendy got me this cool locket for my birthday and I couldn’t wait to slap a picture of Jonny Craig in it, until I saw that she had already prepped it with a photo of her eyeball and Barb’s eyeball. God, they’re such creeps. I love it.

OLYMPICS NEEDS MORE BELA KAROLYI! My friend Regina just walked by and saw this and said, “What is up with you and Bela? You do know about all the negative things about him, right?”

Of course! I love feisty old men.

I made this shirt during the 2008 Olympics. Underneath, it says, “Yeah, he said it” because of how outspoken he was about the other gymnastic teams. I just found it in the back of one of my dresser drawers (I don’t fold – I employ the “stuff n’ punch” method of putting away clothes) and I think I might have to start wearing it again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And since I gave you a picture of me in 2008, I will leave you with a photo from today. THIS IS MY FAVORITE SHIRT. And now that I have declared that on  the Internet, I will probably plunge into a vat of Ketchup on my way home from work tonight.

 

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Most kids my age would be planning clandestine keggers while their parents were away, but me? I was ironing out the final details for my first real dinner party, and a vegetarian one at that.

It was going to be so perfect.

I was a senior in high school that September in 1996, and opted out of my family’s weekend trip to Tennessee. If you want to get technical, I think it was more that I just wasn’t invited because my step-dad and I hated each other. My mom didn’t really have a problem with me staying home, especially since her sister Sharon lived two houses up the street and we all knew that Sharon would be popping over in regular intervals of excess.

My dinner party was scheduled for that Friday night. I stayed home from school in order to get a head start on preparations, and by that I mean I was trying frantically to learn to cook. I had a few recipes torn out from Vegetarian Times and, aside from all the ingredients I couldn’t pronounce, it seemed like it was going to be a breeze.

Apparently, in the mid-90’s, being a vegetarian wasn’t the cool thing to do yet; I had a horribly difficult time finding nori flakes and tempeh, and truth be told, I didn’t even know what those things were. Most of my day was spent calling around to various markets, trying to not only locate these ingredients, but explain to the confused employees what it even was that I was asking for, and setting the dining room table with my mom’s good dishes. I was stressed. Harried. Frazzled. A good bit of the pumpkin puree for my soup was splayed across the backsplash like the arterial spray of a grisly gourd murder/suicide.

By the time Lisa arrived at my house after school to take me on a wild nori flake chase, I was down-right furious with a tinge of self-pity, and on the verge of calling the whole thing off.

“It’s going to be a disaster,” I wailed to Lisa, slouched down in the passenger seat of her Jeep. “No one’s even going to eat this shit!”

But then we found the nori flakes and tempeh at some frou frou health food market in one of the yuppier parts of town, so I started to have hope again.

Lisa dropped me off and left to get ready. She was bringing a date with her to my dinner party. His name was Jon and he went to a local Catholic school. A mutual friend of ours had hooked them up and it was going to be their first date. Even more pressure for me to make a perfect dinner and tone down the crazy.

By 8:45, everyone had arrived. The guest list included: Janna, Keri and her boyfriend Dan, Sarah, Angie, Lisa and Jon.

My unassuming guinea pigs sat around in the family room for social hour while I put the finishing touches on the pumpkin soup. I was still in panic-mode and unable to properly entertain everyone like I had wanted with trays of hors d’oeuvres, clove cigarettes and scantily-clad virgins performing parlor tricks. I felt bad that Jon, a perfect stranger, had found himself sitting in a rocking chair in some maniac girl’s house in the suburbs, waiting to eat a crap dinner made of pretentious faux-meat ingredients and inadequacy.

The entree, something called a Layered Tofu Supreme which I’m sure was actually just a glorified meatless lasagna, had finally been slid and slammed into the oven, and I was ready to start serving the soup. Everyone took their places around my family’s barely-used dining room table and stared at their small glass bowls with upturned lips and scrunched noses.

“That looks disgusting,” Keri scowled, creating persimmon peaks with her spoon.

“It’s just soup!” I yelled. “Made with pumpkin! It’s not disgusting, it’s fabulous.” I stamped around the table, firing my homemade croutons into everyone’s bowl, like angry yeast torpedoes. Clearly, this was sometime before basic white girls made pumpkin food popular.

And the pumpkin soup was fabulous, much to my surprise. I honestly wasn’t expecting it to be.

But it was thick and rich and full of hayride-memories and cornstalk maze-dreams, and well, pumpkin patch-reality. It was the perfect starter for an autumn dinner.

Dan liked it so much, he ate Keri’s too. Her palate was clearly too pedestrian to handle such an elegant waltz with flavor.

It happened during the salad course.

While everyone picked around the tempeh strips and nori flakes in the “sea-sar” salad (which I actually really happened to enjoy, thank you), the phone rang.

It was Sharon, and in true Sharon fashion, she sounded frantic.

“Did you see that car that just pulled into your driveway?” she asked, her voice strained with concern. I had in fact noticed headlights, but saw that the car had turned around just as quickly. “So, that wasn’t someone coming to your dinner?”

“No, it was probably just someone turning around,” my reply was packed with teenaged attitude. I was trying to host a dinner party, not get a Neighborhood Watch detail from my tightly-wound aunt. Plus, every time the phone rang, my heart would race because I was hoping it was my true (and verboten) love Justin who said he was going to “try” to attend my dinner that night.

I hung up and returned to the table in hopes of coaxing my guests to give my salad a chance. I found it to be quite delightful and couldn’t imagine why they were rejecting it.

“What exactly is tempeh?” Jon asked, spearing a strip with the tines of his fork and holding it up to the chandelier.

“You want a jeweler’s loupe for that?” I asked scornfully. Really, I had no idea what tempeh was, other than it was a bitch to procure and these ungrateful fuckers were going to eat it and like it.

The stacked tofu extravaganza was still baking in the oven, so I filled the gap between courses by breaking out a bottle of 1986 Sutter Home White Zinfandel I had been hoarding since I was seven. It was a Christmas gift from my cousin/godfather Chris, who had attached a tag that read, “For the girl who has everything.” And it was true. When I tell people about this, they usually say, “What a stupid gift.

” But to me, that bottle represented my future. I kept it on my desk for years, and couldn’t wait until I was old enough to open it.

That late September night of 1996 seemed like the perfect occasion. It was my first taste at being an adult, having a real dinner with my friends that wasn’t served by a waitress at Denny’s. It was a glimpse at living on my own, away from parental supervision. It felt good.

But then came the ensuing fuckarow of trying to open the wine bottle, which sent my feel-good coming-of-age moment straight down to Hell in a shit-and-tempeh-coated pipe. Jon was ready to break out the samurai sword until Dan finally ripped the cork from the neck of the bottle in eighteen crumbly pieces. We had just toasted and were about to pretend to be teenage sommeliers, swirling the Zinfandel in my mom’s wedding glasses when the phone rang again.

“That car was on the lane again!” Sharon shouted. “I stopped them this time.” (What was she doing, sitting on the street with night goggles? Probably.) She went on to say that she asked them what they were doing and they said they were looking for me. “I told them they don’t need to be going to your house, then I think I saw one of them in a bush!” Sharon added, filling me with a dread that I desperately did not need right then.

My family lives on a private lane. A little ways past my house were two more houses, and then a dead end. People didn’t usually just drive up and down my lane, and any time this happened it was alarming because there are some big houses on that street. My house was surrounded by woods on two sides. It didn’t take much more than a creepy car casing my house to put me on edge.

I hung up and was explaining to everyone what Sharon had said, when the phone rang again. Everyone jumped, and then laughed. A male voice was on the other end.

“Hello, Erin,” he said. I still had hopes of hearing from Justin that night, but this wasn’t Justin.

“Who is this?” I asked, calmly at first.

“A friend,” he answered in a deep monotone that implied the absolute opposite of camaraderie.

“Who the fuck is this?!” I screamed, because there is no keeping calm and carrying on with Erin R. Kelly. And then, from the living room window, I saw headlights. A car was idling at the end of my driveway.

Phone still to my ear, camcorder dutifully recording in my other hand, I ran out of the house, shouting, “Who are you? What do you want?” while everyone else was trying to get me to come back inside and STFU.

“They could be dangerous!” Angie cried, tugging me back inside. Meanwhile, it turned out to just be one of my neighbors, pausing at their mailbox before continuing on down the lane. (They were previously privy to my crazy rep, so I’m sure they thought nothing of this latest public outburst at 120 Gillcrest.)

Still, the phone calls had been enough to encourage Jon to retrieve a tire iron from his car, and Dan was pacing around the house with a knife.

We all crowded back in the dining room. In all the commotion, I hadn’t heard the oven buzzer and the tofu crap souffle had all but burnt down the house. And then a dish towel went up in flames on the stove that I forgot to turn off. It was all too much, and I ran up to my room to pout, after hurling my camcorder into a corner. I mean, I’m naturally dramatic on regular nights, but throw in some mildly threatening phone calls and a failed salad course, and the crocodile tears and butt-hurting are out of control. Dan followed me to my room and took this as an opportunity to put the moves on me, which he was always trying to do every time Keri had her back turned. Yes Dan, there’s a maniac casing my house and prank-calling me, please fuck my fears away. I won’t tell Keri.

That only angered me more.

“My entree is ruined! No one liked the salad! My vanilla rice milk tastes like shit and Justin obviously isn’t going to come tonight!” I sobbed into my pillow.

And then the phone rang again.

“It’s them again!” Keri called up the steps. I rejoined everyone in the dining room, with the plates of wilted salad and flutes of warm wine, and snatched the phone from Keri.

“Nice little dinner you’re having there,” the voice. “Is the wine any good?”

“Whoever it is can see us!” I hissed, hand covering the receiver. Dan and Jon picked up their weapons and went into the backyard. “What do you want?” I asked again, trying to think of who I had pissed off lately at school. This guy Damien had been acting weird toward me, and he knew about my dinner. I added him to my mental shit list.

“Your dog’s not really all that tough, you know,” the voice went on. “All I had to do was feed him some of my fries and we’re best buds now.”

I ran to the front porch to find my German Shepherd, Rama, smacking his lips next to an empty bag of McDonald’s fries. Great watchdog.

While I was on the phone with him, Sharon came screeching to a halt in my driveway. “Those fuckers drove past again,” she said, marching up to the house.

I waved the phone at her and whispered, “They’re on the phone right now.”

Yanking it from me, she started screaming into the receiver some spiel about this being private property. Then she paused and asked, “Are you threatening me?” Meanwhile, Jon and Dan were walking along the perimeter of the property, like they expected to see the culprits perched on a tree bough.

“I’m calling the police. This is ridiculous,” Keri muttered after Sharon hung up. So Keri was on the phone with the 911 dispatcher while Sharon told us that whoever she was talking to was somewhere watching us, because he knew we were all standing out in the driveway, and apparently at one point, he threatened to kill my sheep. (My family had pet sheep. Don’t judge.)

I went back in the house and stood in the kitchen next to Keri, who was still on the phone with the police. My private line rang and at this point, I was ready to murder a fool. In lieu of standard telephone salutations, I yelled “WHAT?” into the receiver.

“Mrs. Kelly? This is Sergeant Hanson from Pleasant Hills,” the man on the other end said. I felt like an asshole for yelling and quickly put on my sweet little girl voice.

“This is her daughter,” I said politely.

“I just wanted to inform you that we’ve been receiving reports from other residents on your street of potential burglars in the area. Whoever it is could be armed and dangerous, so you should remain inside and keep all the doors locked.”

I was just starting to explain to the officer that we had been receiving threats when it dawned on me that he had called my personal, unlisted phone number. Why would the cops call that number and not the main house line. BECAUSE IT WASN’T THE COPS AND I WAS A FUCKING IDIOT.

Just as I started to say, “Hey—wait!” the fake cop disconnected the call. I was less creeped out and just really fucking pissed off at this point. Because the real police were on their way thanks to Keri, I had to pour all of my wine into the sink since I wasn’t sure if they would be coming inside the house, and if they would even take note that a bunch of underage kids were imbibing alcohol.

All that wine. All those years of dreaming of the moment I’d finally get to savor this gift from my cool godfather.

All down the fucking drain.

This was the impetus; this is what set me over the edge. I grabbed a cleaver and ran into the backyard, with Angie and Lisa trying to stop me. Everyone knew that if this was a real life horror movie, I’d be the first bitch to bite it.

And while I was out there, cutting the night sky with a cleaver, screaming threats to my hidden harassers, the real cops arrived. Sharon spoke with them first, out in the driveway, while I waited impatiently for my turn to speak.

They said they would search the area, that they would report back in a few hours.

That was pretty much the ultimate party foul, so everyone left after that, except for Keri, Dan and Janna, who decided to stay the night with me so I wouldn’t have to be alone.

I cried about it for awhile that night. The fact that my tofu entree had turned into an inedible brick of charred vegetarianism. That I never had the chance to prepare my baked apples for dessert. That I hadn’t succeeded in converting anyone to the meatless side of life.

“Hey, that pumpkin soup was really good,” Dan reminded me.

It was really good. Somewhere in between the harassing phone calls, flaming dish towels and threats to slaughter my sheep, I had forgotten all about that damn soup.

And what a great first impression for Jon, this poor unsuspecting guy who was just being introduced to me. Somehow, he stuck around for the next five years. Every once in awhile he liked to remind me that I still had his tire iron.

“Oh look, Halloween 6 is on,” I said. And that’s how we ended that scary, Scream-esque night. Watching a goddamn movie where people get stabbed to death by a psychopathic stalker.

Big surprise, the cops never did follow up.

***

About a week later, the truth came out. It was Janna’s boyfriend Matt and one of his friends. Matt despised me back then, certain that I was getting Janna to do drugs and have recreational sex with bait shop owners. So he did all of that to scare Janna into leaving, because god forbid she was spending a night doing something without her crazy-possessive boyfriend.

And how did that work out for you, Matt?

He did eventually apologize, and asked how he could make it up to me. But all the wine in the world could have never replaced that one special bottle.

(l to r) Janna, Dan, Lisa, Sarah, Jon, Angie and dumb old me in the front.

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My brother Corey sent me this picture yesterday when I was at work and I just lost it. It’s from Thanksgiving at my grandma’s house in 2002, when we were all still skilled at maintaining a shiny familial veneer in front of company. In fact, I think this may have been Henry’s first holiday with my family so I’m sure everyone was on their best behavior and my grandma probably only referenced me being a literary failure three times over the course of the night. (She used to lie to her friends at our tennis club and tell them I was going to Kent State for journalism because she was embarrassed that I was a lowly office manager in real life.

)

Oh geez, there goes my shoulder chip again!

Anyway, I love this photo because it captures us so well: Henry, looking exhausted, mildly frightened, and certainly sleazy. Me, looking adorable, mildly pouty, and certainly plotting.

I often find it incredibly surreal and hard to believe that we’re still a couple.

We sit closer together now, though.

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