by Kathy Brasby | Aug 12, 2019 | Family, Humor, Stories
In the days before I had much money or sense – OK, I was still in my 20’s, and that’s the best explanation I have – I got myself a poor person’s cruise control for my car.
This was back in the days when you could drive a dinosaur or, in my case, a Volkswagen Rabbit.
My Rabbit had a red racing stripe down the sides, but it was no sports car. You’d think a Rabbit would be fast, but this one was a hatchback. Not fast.
And who names a car Rabbit anyway? Volkswagen, obviously.
My brother is a mechanic, and so I sweet-talked him into installing a throttle lock. Cost me some chocolate chip cookies, as I recall.
The system had a gadget attached to the gas pedal and another line attached somehow to the brake. When you engaged the button, the gas pedal was locked into place. Pressing the brake released the lock.
It seemed safe to me. All I cared about was if it worked. And it did. My brother was good.
I don’t think you can buy them today. They might be a tad bit perilous now.
I thought I was brilliant at the time. Because the area where I generally drove was flat, the system worked adequately. I’d reach cruising speed, lock in the throttle, and relax. My pace would change with any slight rises or drops in the road but not much.
I was now in league with those fancy-schmancy cruise controls at a fraction of the cost. Cost of the throttle lock plus chocolate chip cookies was less than $100. Sweet deal. What could go wrong?
So, one day, my sister and I took off for Denver in my Rabbit. I don’t remember why she was driving, but we had a good-sized hill to clear on the route.
Those of you who know Wiggins hill on I-76 can visualize our trip.
Whenever I drove, I disengaged the throttle lock when I got to a long incline.
My sister didn’t.
So up the rise we climbed. Gravity being what it is, our speed dropped.
Cars overtook us. Semi-trailers whipped by. Snails pulled ahead. Sloths waved as they left us behind.
We chugged our way to the top like the little engine that could.
We took a long breath at the summit, like a mountain climber surveying the ridges after an arduous climb.
And then we started down. Gravity being what it is, the Rabbit transformed. Once progressing at a turtle pace, the Rabbit turned into a rocket.
We zoomed down the hill, shooting past the sloths. Racing by the snails. Whizzing past the semi-trailers. Cars were quickly a blur in the rearview window.
“Those people think I’m crazy!” my sister wailed.
It didn’t really matter because we never saw any of that fleet again on our trip.
I’ve been thinking about that car, though. It could be faster than a speeding bullet and more sluggish than a lumbering sloth. Volkswagen called it the Rabbit but maybe a better name would have been the VW Chameleon.
by Kathy Brasby | Jul 22, 2019 | Family, Humor
You know how these projects get started. It’s like If You Give a Moose a Muffin. First, you want a muffin and the next thing you know, you’re buying pool noodles.
Mine got started when I opened a kitchen cupboard to notice a two-quart bottle holding about two inches of gray powder. Like this bottle had beamed in from my neighbor’s house or something. Why hadn’t I noticed this waste of space before?
Worse than one useless bottle was the other jars also holding minuscule amounts of things. Pasta. Petrified cranberries. Old keys. Green lumps.
You get the idea.
I dumped contents I couldn’t identify and found jars that actually matched. The cupboard shelves look marvelous now. All labeled and sweet.
New problem: the big empty jars loitering on the counter. I didn’t have room to bake, so I did consider making the loiter zone permanent. But that’d never fly with my cookie boys.
I have a closet of sorts where I put extra jars. Because I would rather write about it than do it, I have ignored this closet for years. There are quart, pint, and half-pint jars perched on shelves with more laying on top of jars. Quit cringing.
I have my first baseman glove close by when I open this closet.
It was a Saturday morning, and I really had lots of exciting things scheduled, like watching a movie, reading a few chapters, eating fudge – important stuff like that.
But maybe I should find a place for all those jars hogging space on my countertop. I got the softball glove and eased open the door. Landfills were more organized than this closet.
I started unloading shelves. That would save a lot of glacier sliding.
Going for the sympathy angle here, I have to tell you that I had a lot of jars. I’m talking innumerable. Countless. Profuse. Multitudinous. I’m closing the thesaurus now.
Buried at the back of one shelf was an instruction manual for a landline phone from 2004. We haven’t had a landline in eight years. There is history in that manual. I’ll bet the kids remembered that phone and would want the manual as a nostalgic reminder.
I uncovered a little fountain with a plug-in pump. It didn’t work, but I think it was a birthday gift from one of our kids. Maybe Mother’s day. More sweet memories.
I found notes for the dishwasher we installed in 2006. A memoir of our early years in our house.
There were six pint jars labeled, “Peach. ’09.” I remembered the box of peaches that I’d turned into peach jam. Apparently, I hadn’t remembered long enough to serve any of it.
You know the cans of cranberry sauce you can buy for Thanksgiving dinner? You slide the can-shaped sauce onto a plate and slice it. Well, ten-year-old peach jelly looks just the same. Slice and serve.
I now have two different cupboards organized. But I reminisced over the items hiding at the back of the shelves.
So I called one of the kids. She’s married now, a responsible adult, but maybe I could still trick, er, influence her.
“Hey, I’ve started a time capsule for you. I found the most amazing gems in the closet,” I told her.
“Really?” She sounded more like I had called to tell her the grass needed to be mowed.
“I think you should scoop them up to preserve all those memories.”
“If I come over, Mom, it would be to scoop those things into a trash can. And I think you can handle that yourself.”
Kids. You teach them to think independently, and what do they do? Not collect vintage peach jam, that’s for sure.
by Kathy Brasby | Jul 15, 2019 | Family, Humor
You may know that I have helped rehabilitate several sad houses. My sister and I work together sometimes, and other times I help out my husband, the construction genius.
We have bought some forlorn houses together and given them new life. It feels good. Most of the time.
But buying an old house is a little like the first vacation you took together after you get married: you’re not really sure what you’ll discover.
I’m not going to tell you about our first vacation together. It wasn’t as wild as this story.
The house was a foreclosure followed by an eviction – the ugly kind of eviction where a crew entered a packed house and emptied it.
The crew was instructed to remove everything from the house and deposit it in the garage. They left the garage door open, which was a signal in the city to come and take whatever you want.
This house isn’t in the city. It’s in a small town that’s pretty honest. Nobody took anything. Lucky them.
For six months, nobody touched that stuff in the garage. When we bought the house, we got the garage contents, too. Yippee.
The garage was literally (and I am using this word properly) full, floor to ceiling, front to back: overstuffed. We didn’t know what we’d find in there. Treasures, we hoped. Maybe expensive gems? Antiques?
We didn’t really hope for that. We assumed the eviction crew would have pocketed the good stuff.
Still, we needed to get the garage emptied out. So we started tunneling.
We found an end table with a broken leg. We found a brand-new starter that my husband nabbed. We found an old trunk that went to our daughter-in-law.
Some of the kids got to help. Under protest. They called themselves servants. We called it paying off their room and board and clothes. No digging in the garage, no birthday cake. That kind of enticement.
We were on an archeological dig but without the little brushes and shaker screens. We found the obligatory metal bed frame. Those seem to be left in every garage we’ve ever acquired.
We uncovered an old wedding album and a big envelope of x-rays. I might have an imagination, but I couldn’t make that up.
As the kids dug toward the back of the garage, they picked up a scent.
“Maybe it’s a body,” said our son. He’s always hopeful for creative bloodshed.
His sister wasn’t intimidated. “I hope it’s on your side of the garage,” she said.
They tossed aside more trash and kept digging deeper into the garage. “Think we can get this finished today?” I asked. I’m about using conscripted help for all they’re worth.
They ignored me, but they did keep excavating.
The smell morphed from a faint scent to a definite stink. When it crossed over from stink to stench, the kids bailed.
“Your turn,” said our daughter. “You said you wanted to get done today.” Kids are so good at throwing your words back in your face.
I could say I took a deep breath and started in, but I didn’t. Would you take a deep breath with that stench? Me, neither.
I put on a mask and gloves and goggles. I pulled junk out of the way and discovered our treasure.
Some yo-yo (and I’m saying this in the nicest way) had pulled a frozen turkey out of the freezer at the eviction, wrapped it in a plastic bag, and dumped it in a trash can at the back of the garage. For six months.
Foolishly, I compared buying an old house to going on your first vacation. It is nothing like that.
Buying an old house is like an excavation site with a tomb curse.
by Kathy Brasby | Jul 1, 2019 | Family, Humor
When Facebook added Sibling Day to their long list of reasons to post on their social media site, I knew it was time to tell all.
You might imagine my siblings are cowering as though a bomb is about to drop near them. You don’t know my siblings. They are preparing their own bombs to send my way.
Today’s post will have to do with my sister. She’s eight years younger and my first impressions of her were not good. When she arrived home from the hospital after her birth, I was at school. All day, going through my classes, I imagined coming home to a cute, round-cheeked Gerber baby. Instead, there was this useless red little thing lying on my parents’ bed. What was this good for?
Ah, but I found out!
By the time she was four, I had the perfect subject for my experiments. Don’t be thinking needles in her ankles or any weird science. My method was aimed at making her smarter. More well-rounded. Better equipped.
It started with subliminal learning. I wanted to know if that stuff worked. Well, at four, my sister was the perfect subject because she fell asleep before I did. Plus, she knew next to nothing so any new learning would be obvious. And she was conveniently close by.
So, when she’d fall asleep, I’d whisper a fact to her over and over. I needed to find out if she learned while she slept. I chose a list of the order of the planets. Because everyone should know those, right?
To this day, she still knows the order of the planets. So do I, for that matter. She doesn’t thank me much for this amazing feat, though.
Subliminal learning worked so well that I started teaching her new words I was learning. Like the meaning of annihilate.
I heard it in history class and wanted her, too, to know the meaning of total obliteration.
She had nightmares after that.
Speaking of nightmares, when I had a literature class studying Edgar Allan Poe, I figured she ought to hear some of those stories. The Tell-Tale Heart, with the murdered heart pounding under the floorboards, kind of affected her.
She didn’t care much for The Cask of Amontillado either. We didn’t use the term freaked out in those days, but you get the idea.
She was five by then. You’d think she could handle it. As if I thought about how it would affect her.
The day came when she was not so open to being educated. Who’d figure that she’d like posters of Donnie Osmond over stories from the American Revolution? Pictures of cute boy singers began popping up on our bedroom walls.
And she got stubborn. We shared a room and one night I, in my great wisdom and older-sisterism, told her to shut off the light since her side of the bed was closer to the light switch. She refused. I offered practical advice like, “I’m not doing it.” She out and out refused.
And then she fell asleep. The choice was clear: sleep with the light on and win the argument. Or give in. I shut off the light.
She got defensive, too. I liked to call her sweet names like Squirt or Kidlet or Dork. One day I said, “You’re a Silly Willy.”
After all the educational nuggets I had shared with her, after all the intelligence I had groomed, after all the Edgar Allan Poe….. That girl reared back and glared at me.
“Don’t call me names, you Big Ape.”
by Kathy Brasby | Sep 24, 2013 | Family
Since my husband is an expert in measures and machines, he was the logical one to ask.
“How much does a Chevy S-10 pickup weigh?” I said.
“Oh, about 3200 pounds.” He was working on a game on his iPad so I didn’t get much of a look.
“And an old Ford half-ton pickup?”
“About 3500 pounds.”
“And a flatbed trailer?”
He still didn’t look up from his game. “About 1500 pounds. And that’d work. The Ford could easily pull a trailer with the S-10 on it.”
“No, the other way around,” I said.
And I had his attention. He’s a protective guy and he shook his head. “Oh, no, you’d never want to pull a Ford pickup with an S-10. Maybe across town if you went slow.”
“Well, I already did it.”
When we were first married, he might have berated my foolishness. But after all these years, his response was, “Oh,” and he went back to his game. He’s met some of my ideas.
I wish I’d known him when I launched the great idea of helping my brother. I owned the S-10; he had the Ford which died at my house.
We lived about 80 miles apart in those days and I figured I could bring his pickup home on a trailer.
Have you seen that Ford pickup commercial where the driver sees a boat on a trailer go by and realizes it’s his?
That was nearly me.
Visualize the dinosaur tail wagging a terrier and you’ll get the idea.
I made it home. On the interstate. At 40 mph. With the monster disguised as the Ford half-ton breathing hot on the back of my neck while it lurched toward the edge of the road every one of those 80 miles.
I get many ideas but let me assure you that this was not one of the good ones.
by Kathy Brasby | Sep 3, 2013 | Family, Hope, Humor
I’m always amazed at how common life experiences translate into metaphors of meaning.
When my daughter and son-in-law moved from one apartment to another, they were forced to leave their beloved goldfish behind.
They’ll probably read this account so I’ll try to be as accurate as I can remember. That’s code that means I’m making up most of it.
Goldie was a beloved fish who would follow them from corner to corner within his little aquarium and never needed walking or rabies shots. He was the perfect pet.
But poor Goldie couldn’t live in their new apartment.
After great discussion, they decided the kindest thing for Goldie would be to give him his freedom. So my son-in-law, as compassionate a guy as you’ll ever meet, drove Goldie and his fish bowl to the edge of the river.
Kneeling at the edge of the water, he met Goldie’s eyes. “You’ve been a great goldfish. Go and have a good life.”
And he gently poured Goldie into the river water.
The little fish took three brave swishes of his tail into his new freedom when a big fish came out of the murk and swallowed him whole.
The number of metaphors in that story are staggering.
Do we learn that little fish have no chance at the good life?
Do we learn that big fish can be counted on to spoil the day?
Or that well-intentioned plans for good don’t always work out?
Those are pretty deep for me. What I learned was when you set your goldfish free, don’t watch afterwards.
