BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

I used to love Quincy.

Not Quincy himself; I mean the show. And the novelizations, even. It probably didn’t hurt that I happened to like Jack Klugman as an actor, because when you get right down to it the scripts weren’t stellar and the acting by some of the weekly extras was pretty wooden. All in all, it was a typical 70’s era crime drama that adhered to the strict formula of the day. Still, I loved the show.

These days we don’t have Quincy, M. E. We have “Body of Proof” with Dana Delany. Well, I’ll be the first one to admit that I’m more than happy to spend 42 minutes every Tuesday evening looking at Dana Delany. I like her as an actress, and I’m not opposed to the fact that they go to great lengths (pun not intended) to work a gratuitous leg shot into the scenes whenever possible. Hey, I’m not shy – the lady has a set of gams that won’t quit.

Still, while the acting from the weekly extras and peripheral cast members is far superior to that of the 70’s era shows, and the scripts are minus some of the appended melodrama that was the formula back then, they really aren’t all that much better. However, as a rule, TV shows tend to do only cursory research on topics and will adjust procedures to fit their needs at the time. Of course, that’s a wholly different topic… I’m not actually here to write about that today.

You see, there I was, standing in the back yard, chainsaw in hand, covered in wood chips and chain oil, sweating profusely, and aching all over as I went about the task of removing a dead tree from the back corner. It wasn’t a huge tree by any stretch. It only stood about 12 to 15 feet tall, and the trunk diameter was no more than 6 inches. No biggie. I’ve felled trees much larger in my day. Of course, I was younger in those days, but once again we are diverging from the topic at hand.

This particular tree had split off into a triple trunk, therefore in order to avoid turning myself into Shazam by dropping it all at once and taking out the overhead power lines, I went after it one section at a time. I had already removed the front split of the trunk and dragged it out into the yard, then taken my filthy, sweaty, tired, and achy self right back up the incline to begin sawing on the next. However, before I could start the chainsaw, I heard a thoughtful “Hmph” a few feet behind me. A second later the “Hmph” was followed by a curt, businesslike pronouncement: “This is a recent death…”

As you might expect, I was a bit perplexed, but not as much as I was about to be.

I turned and looked back over my shoulder. There, among the carnage of the fallen tree was E K, decked out in a stylish business skirt and blazer, stiletto heels, and a pair of latex gloves. For a minute I wondered if she had a sudden desire to play doctor, but she usually wears a white lab coat for that.

Even more confused I asked, “What?”

The sharply dressed redhead squatted down next to the tree and fondled the branches in a purely scientific fashion, or so it appeared. “See here?” she said, without looking up. “These branches bend without breaking, which means they are still green. This tree died recently. A month. Maybe a little more. I won’t be certain until I count the rings.”

“I thought that just told you how old the tree is,” I mused.

“Who’s the Tree Examiner here, you or me?” she snapped.

“Tree Examiner?”

“Yes. I used to be a Tree Surgeon, but that was before the accident.”

“What accident?” I asked.

“We don’t talk about that,” she replied.

“But you brought it up.”

“That’s not important,” she grumbled. “Right now we need to get this tree to the morgue so I can perform an autopsy.”

“Mind if I ask why?”

“Because it’s my job to be an advocate for the dead trees since they no longer have a voice,” she explained.

I thought about that for a moment, then asked, “Are you feeling okay?”

She ignored the question, answering instead with, “Like I said, have them get this tree back to the morgue right away. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” With that, she stood up, stepped over the tree carcass, and began to carefully tiptoe across the yard toward the driveway,  lest she skewer fallen leaves on her spiked heels. (Would have saved me a lot of raking, though…)

“Where are you going?” I called after her.

“There’s a shoe sale at the mall,” she shouted back without slowing her pace. “You don’t think I’m going to miss that, do you?”

And since they say a picture is worth a thousand words…

More to come…

Murv

There are certain things, that when said aloud, will bring most any conversation to a screeching halt. You know the things I mean. Stuff such as, “Whoops, my hair is on fire…” or “Whoa! Is that Dana Delany over there?”

Personally, I have an intense fondness for the Dana Delany comment, but then we already knew that, right? Well, if you didn’t, you do now… Oops… Guess that was sorta awkward, eh?

The thing is, there are several such phrases that can bring a conversation to a sudden halt. Case in point…

I was prattling on endlessly with my PA the other day. As it happens, the o-spring is out of school for the summer, so she was sitting there fiddling about with her Nook or some such since it is loaded up with a ton of summer reading for her. Since she’s all kinds of brilliant and has a high school level command of the English language, I often forget that she’s still just a tween, so my filters aren’t always in place. In this instance, they weren’t, and I was talking to my PA about Merrie Axemas, and In The Bleak Midwinter, giving him a synopsis of the stories, how they related, differed, and other such nonsense.

Well… Anyone who has read Merrie Axemas knows that there is a dismemberment involved. Merrie. Axe. Mas… You get the idea. So moving right along, as we are talking the o-spring pipes up and says:

“Did you know that when your head is chopped off you still live for eleven more seconds?”

This really shouldn’t – and didn’t – surprise me. After all, she’s my kid… But that’s not the thing that stopped the conversation. I mean, think about it. I research all manner of nastiness for my thriller novels… After all, I write about serial and/or spree killers for the most part. That’s why I’m a member of the HWA, and not the “Grandma’s Cozy Knitting Happily Ever After Ending Whodunit Club”…

But on with the story… you see, since both my PA and I know my kid, we just continued the convo, involving her at this point. Mainly discussing the fact that 11 seconds might be a bit of a stretch, but that there was some evidence to indicate that the brain continued to function very briefly following decapitation.

This then turned to different ways of dying, and before I knew it my PA and my daughter were into a discussion of which way to go would be the least traumatic. They got onto beheading, suffocation, drowning, etc, and I added my two cents, that being the fact that I was under the impression that suffocation wasn’t a particularly pleasant way to go, no matter HOW the suffocation happened. That’s when my PA regaled us with a tale of how he had almost drowned – or come somewhat close – when he was a child, and how it had gone from a fearful struggle to a simple calm… Well, obviously he didn’t drown, or he wouldn’t have been there having weird death conversations with my tween daughter.

But this was when the conversation stopper came.

Darling daughter pipes up, “Yeah, I almost drowned a few years ago.”

You could hear a pin drop. I stared at her. She stared at me. My PA stared at her. She stared at him. We all stared at each other.

Finally I broke down and said, “When was this?”

“A few years ago at blankity-blank pool,” she replied.

“How?”

She shrugged. “It was before I knew how to swim and my friend took me to the deep end and left me there because she didn’t know that I couldn’t swim.”

I stared some more. “Why am I just now hearing about this?”

“I dunno.”

“So, did the lifeguard jump in and save you or something? I mean, it seems to me they would have told us about it when we picked you up from summer day camp.”

“No,” she said. “My friend just took me back to the shallow end.”

“Well, did you start sinking or what? How did you almost drown?”

She thought about it a second and then said, “Well… I might’ve kinda exaggerated…”

Guess I can’t complain. She’s my kid. She got it honest…

More to come…

Murv