Mr. Dressup-what is really in your tickle trunk?

I was about 2 when my family decided to take in the town fair; not our town, someone else's town.  Our town was too small for a fair, or a hospital, which is why I was not delivered in my home town.  Instead my first breath, and my first near death expiriance took place in a town where the local paper mill provided most of the jobs and a foul stench that earned the coveted tile of "stinkiest town in Canada."  So if you are ever in Ontario, and feeling a little like you want to vomit, you may want to swing by... airsick bag in hand.  I am not sure what town we were in for this fair but it was evidently quite the hot bed of entertainment because the popular host of everyone's favorite tv show was there.  The loveable Mr.Dressup.  I had seen enough of his shows to know that he had a magic trunk that produced a different costume every time he opened it.  And for reasons that I can not fathom, my parents let my brother and I sneak into His tent, and for reasons that I can explain, we could not resist seeing what He had in his trunk.  It was at that moment when a very angry Ernie(his real name) burst in, eyes bulging, his face contorted with rage.  I have no memory of what happened next, possibly I have blocked it, due to the trauma.  My brother never got over it.  I continued to watch the tv show, always straining to see the contents of the tickle trunk whenever he opened it.  It became a proverbial Pandora's box for me, forbidden to know what was really inside, only ever seeing what he wanted me to see, his costume for the day.  Years later I would wonder why it didn't seem strange to anyone else that a little boy with no parents lived in a tree house alone in His back yard and spent so much time playing "games" with a grown man... this was around the same time that I noticed that the Smurfs lived in a communist cult like world and that there was only one girl, and all those blue brothers, who were totally subservient to Papa, and somehow smurfett managed to get pregnant... but I digress. Mr.Dressup, although a gifted artist(his sketches were excellent) clearly had issues, and maybe his secrets were buried there at the bottom of this trunk, buried beneath the disguises that we all wear, the clown, the good daughter, the rebel.  And that is pretty much life, we all have parts of us that we really don't want people to see, but eventually the contents of your tickle trunk will be strewn across the front lawn for the whole world to see, if not the whole world, than at least some curious toddler,in a tent in a small town fair, who now has access to the entire world... 

idle chatter

Lately I've been thinking, and by lately I mean the last 17 or 18 years, about  the affliction that many of us have, but few are willing to talk about. A fact which is itself a bit of a mystery, when you consider that people will openly admit to all manner of hideous acts, latent desires and an entire array of pure stupidity.  Many of these being admitted to strangers on busses or to television audiences.  It seems you have really get to know a person, and then one day out of the clear blue sky, they will admit that they have word-a-phobe.  Just the other day as I swooned over particularly beautiful plant at the Farmer's market, my friend giggled, but refused to say the name of the plant(clematis) due to it's perceived similarity to a certain STD. She confessed to hiding her fear for years.  Another friend recoiled in disgust when the word bulbous was used in reference to her toes,  which honestly bear a striking resemblance to very thin men in old fashioned diving helmets.  Another friend simply can not abide the word moist, and so her entire extended family endeavors to bring up topics like cake, and how it was not dry at all, the condition of their armpits, or towelets.  My best friend despises cheese and cites some early childhood sandwich, with thick slices of sharp cheddar,  prepared for her by her auntie (not the same one who served her horse meat) as her reason.   Her husband hates clowns, although I suspect that it is more a fear, that and he has an aversion to makeup, but I digress... For my part, I hate the creepy little word of "pym" I had to close my eyes to type that.  I hate it for it's wimpyness, for the fact that they couldn't even scrape up enough courage to use the letter "i" I mean "i" is not exactly a tough or overly intense letter.  What a bunch of creeps!  Ok now I have that off my chest, I feel a flood of relief washing over me, like a tidal wave of pre moistened lysol wipes.  Now, where once grew bulbous, carbuncles of fear and loathing, clematis blooms in my heart.  There is  a street in Nanimo B.C. named Pym St. so maybe me and all my similarly afflicted friends should go there and shout "the words" out loud, thereby releasing it into the air and in turn releasing ourselves from the stranglehold we have been suffering from in silence.  Or if you too have word-a-phobe you could just go to Nanimo and write it in a slip of paper and tape it to the road sign, symbolicly  leaving your fear there and moving forward... at the very least, knock the stupid sign over.  On a less serious note, I saw a clown bang his head during a trapeze act at the circus when I was 4, and he just fell to the ground, and never moved again.  An attempt was made to divert out attention to one of the other rings, but to be honest, it is pretty hard to ignore some dead clown sprawled out in the sawdust.  Being the type of kid I was I made a mental note that although I admired the attempt at a glamorous death, I felt that he lost points on his outfit, and the distasteful way that he landed.  And that is pretty much life, even the best laid plans can sometimes go awry.

The saga begins

So here it is, the long awaited first installment of my blog.  Let me preface my remarks by mentioning that this is not my idea, in fact one could almost describe me as a hostile witness.  While it would be unfair to say I was forced, it would be apt to say I was compelled, by a few misguided souls to write (what will later be described as strange or perhaps even sinister) about my life. I should also warn any potential readers that this blog will never contain cute stories, recepies for cookies, or photos of cats wearing clothes.  If that is the kind of thing you are looking for, I can probably provide some links for you.  And while we are talking about blogs and their owners, can I just mention what an incredibly cool page I have?  This is not as self serving as it sounds, I  had my close friend create it for me, she is a wizard and I am pretty much Amish...which is why I am feeling inconceivable trepidation about this blog.  But I digress;best get used to that.  I really don't know where to begin, at the beginning seems as likely a place as any but it is for that precise reason, that I doubt very much that I will start there. The end is anti climactic, and more difficult to describe. So that leaves us all here in the middle. One of my babies is leaving for university, she is 17 and i am not.  I am so proud of her, she has shown me courage and grace, she was my first new heart beat, my first angry cries at the injustice of being pulled from her warm safe watery world into this this one. She was my first soft breaths against my neck while I rocked her, first smile, and who knew that two teeth could be so cute?  She has always been in a hurry, why walk when you can run?  And now is no different, I am so excited for her and so sad for me,those little feet are still running, but now I won't be right there jogging to keep up, or scooping her into my arms, kissing away her pain.  I will be on the other end of the phone listening, on my knees pleading, or in my truck driving 12 hours whenever she needs me.  From this awkward vantage point I find it difficult to be as flippant about my life as I have become comfortable with, and the emotions a little too raw to really be all that amusing.  So on a lighter note, when I was 4 I got my head slammed in the second story window. I called for help but my voice was going outside, combined with the fact that the window was probably crushing my windpipe against the sill, so nobody heard me. I was pretty sure that I was going to die, and being the sort of kid that I was I considered my demise and knew that it was not a very glamorous way to go. Some how I was able to get my hands at an angle that allowed me to slide the window open and free myself.  And that is pretty much life. Something bad happens and then something good happens. Remind me to tell you about the time my little boy took a severed deer's leg for show and tell...