BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

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

It was a day like any other day…

Well, that’s not actually true. It was a day like any other day in the first half of January, when just enough snow fell overnight – and was still falling that morning – that the schools canceled classes and left parents of Elementary school kids scrambling to make arrangements. Of course, what with me working from home – I mean, after all, you can write a book pretty much anywhere if you try, so why not at home… But anyway, what with me working from home there wasn’t as much scrambling as there was re-planning.

You see, I can’t work when I have people in my house.

This is not to say that I don’t love having E K and the O-spring at home. I do. Problem is, they are a distraction, even when they are trying very hard not to be. Either they end up making some sort of oddly repetitious noise that is at just the right frequency for me to be able to hear, or I just can’t concentrate because I’d rather be doing something with them than working.

The long and short of it being, on snow days I don’t get any writing done. I find other work to do. Used to be I’d play scrabble, monopoly, or something else with the O-spring. But these days she’s in that zone where dad is only cool if he has something she wants… you know… like money, or an orange that’s already been peeled and sectioned.

Therefore, on this particular day I parked myself in my office to do other work that comes along with the whole author gig. Answering interview questions, doing research, reminding myself to pay my HWA dues then getting sidetracked and forgetting. That reminds me, I need to do that…

Everything seemed to be plugging along okay. O-spring with her nose buried in her new Nook. O-spring singing. O-spring going all Rembrandt on some paper with her oil pastels. And me, sitting in my office, working and forgetting to do things I need to do.

Then I heard it.

“Heard what?” you ask.

The thing that strikes fear into the hearts of parents everywhere.

“Dad?” came the voice from the next room.

“Whatcha’ need, kiddo?” I asked.

“Ummm… Do we have any ‘Duck’ Tape?”

<silence> <blink> <silence>

Finally I asked, “What did you break?”

<silence>

Eventually the answer came. “Umm… Nothing…”

Snow days. Apparently it isn’t just shoveling the white stuff that’s hazardous to your heart.

More to come…

Murv