Of Giant Lollipops, Stingrays, & a Girl Who Hated Weddings
Monday, February 27, 2006
Saturday had brought a rather quiet afternoon and evening. Earlier, at Flo Valley, as Carrie-Bri, Joe, and Rose entered the test room, the proctor hurried by the table where Collette sat in the atrium.
“Are you all quadruplets?” The proctor asked looking over her glasses, papers in hand, “You all look about the same age.”
Collette explained with a little laugh. She thought it was rather funny her asking, especially after she had already checked their IDs at the door. Collette liked the proctor – an older lady who was usually there on Saturday test dates. She had administered Collette’s own exams nearly three years before. And it was a quiet place. There were often times when Collette was the only one there to take the exams, the twenty or so times she had been there. A soda machine hummed in the corner near the glass doors facing northeast. And in the atrium was a full set of skylights.
“If it hails, they’re in trouble,” weatherman Joe was keen to point out as they waited on the girls later.
For lunch, Joe took Collette out for fried chicken and later they walked around the mall and people-watched a bit. They even walked by Trenton, who was leaning up against the right side of the door to “Hot Topic” while his pal leaned against the left. Collette noted that he had cut his fountain of black hair and reminded herself to warn Carrie in advance so that she would not be shocked when she first saw it.
Mr. Bulkey’s was last on the list and there they picked up a variety of candy for the next day including a bag of various colored rock candy for Carrie and Rose and a giant bright yellow lollipop, the size of a small planet, for Linnea.
“I’m going to eat it on the way to New Mexico,” she announced the next day, after looking agape at its enormity.
Meanwhile, Collette was surprised how strange it felt to be in public. Not every day did she mingle with people outside of her family and the church, as those were the fields in which her two jobs lay. She almost felt a little out of place walking around the mall.
Monday morning she sat at her desk and drank her mug of white tea. Blowing on it there she caused the reflection of the twinkly white and purple lights above her to become dancing stars on the surface of the tea. She silver spoon rested against her face, warmed through, as she blew on it. And she thought about things.
Saturday had brought thoughts of the modern Egyptians. Did they still believe in the old gods – Ra, Isis, Osiris? Or had they drawn a parallel between the old deities and the new faith of Islam? Or were the former gods completely irradiated and Islam was a tag completely separate. The old gods were ditched and they were converted. What about South America – the same deal? Most seemed to now be Roman Catholic, even in the most remote places. And the Orient as well seemed to have abandoned much of the old ways, minus the ancestor worship which still took place. The Middle East spoke for itself, and Europe was thoroughly “Christianized.” What about the Aborigines and the Native Americans? Were the old gods completely disappeared from their faiths?
“Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods?” – Jeremiah 2:11a
Collette thought it mighty un-coincidental that throughout the ages, the only true faith which had stood from the beginning was that of God’s own, which had never changed, despite the protests of the modern-day Orthodox Jews. From the Old Covenant to the New Covenant, there was no break in the same faith.
Sunday brought another guys’ discipleship group at Simple Simon’s while Rose opted to remain at home (in order to keep her cold from spreading to Freja Toast). And there was much discussion and argument at youth, following the groups, over the order of the dinner fund raiser. Collette rather wondered if they would decide on whether to have one dinner or two by the end of the evening. There was talk of Judah playing his accordion, a replay of the midget skit from previous years, and the like.
Bob, Joe, and Augustus seemed to have it worked out that the audience would have to bid on their dessert. And Jimmy tried desperately to steer the crowd towards a one-dinner deal while the rest of the kids insisted on the two-dinner bit.
“But… no!” Molly cried from time to time. “What’s wrong with two dinners?”
“That’s the way we’ve always done it,” Susie insisted.
“Why?” Pepper flailed his arms and legs dramatically from the couch where he was snuggled up next to Wally, head practically in his lap.
“It makes so much more sense to have two dinners,” Wally agreed very stiffly, trying to keep the mound of pillows on his lap from falling apart to have Pepper’s head fall in his lap.
“I understand what you’re saying, Jimmy,” Susie was almost out of her seat now. “But this is how we’ve always done it, and this is what everyone expects. If we tell them the first dinner is at five, then the auction and dinner are at 6:30, and then we slip in the second dinner right after…” She hit one hand with the side of the other, spelling it out with each hit.
“Yeah, that’s much better,” Rose agreed, sandwiched between Molly and Susie.
“I like it,” Wally agreed as Pepper continued to flail his arms about whenever agreeing or protesting.
“Let’s auction off Kent!” was heard from the Peanut Gallery from time to time as Augustus, Joe, and Bob laughed hilariously over their ideas.
Samantha amused herself with rubbing Molly’s head and arranging her red necklace.
“What about the bake sale? Do we have to have a bake sale at the same time?” Susie wanted to know.
“We could have a petting zoo,” Poseidon McCrae spoke up, pointing to Samantha’s fascination with Molly’s scalp.
And thus it continued, Judah and OLeif popping in from time to time with advice. And in the end, Collette couldn’t quite decide if any decisions had actually been made.
Alas, another Olympics had come to an end and Collette rather wondered about the next Games in Beijing. After all, the poor kids who were destined to be put through the project of “prodigy-ism” to win 186 medals for their country… the grueling hours, seeing parents only on weekends… Collette shuddered for them. And yet, she did look forward to the next summer games. And she was pleased to hear that the United States had won more medals than they had ever taken before on foreign soil. And interesting fact…
Upon entering the house that morning, Collette found Linnea standing on a chair in the living room underneath the ceiling fan holding two plastic sticks (taken from the corners of the walls) and she was attempting to pick up a dusty towel from the floor, as if the poles were giant chopsticks.
“How do you clean fan blades?” She asked Collette as she entered the living room.
Linnea seemed to give up that particular method and came into the kitchen to tape the towel to the poles, while talking to Mom.
“Mom, what’s for breakfast?” She asked.
“Scrambled eggs and biscuits,” Mom replied, busy over the stove.
“I shall not complain,” Linnea said bravely, known for her finicky eating habits.
“Good girl,” Mom said proudly.
But Linnea continued, “I can make myself some good ole grits.” She finished taping the towel to the pole. “OK; now I’m ready.”
And so Linnea continued to make an attempt at cleaning the fan blades from the chair while Carrie moaned to Collette about how she was now going to be a bridesmaid in a third wedding.
“Paige asked me to be in hers,” she said. “I hate weddings, and she knows it too.”
She sighed and went back to finishing her papers. She had a week’s break coming and decided to clean her room and make pretzels (Carrie’s pretzels, the best in the world) in honor of her first academic break since the previous August. In addition, she had apparently seen a clip about how the Ark of the Covenant had been discovered, on the History Channel, in Ethiopia. And she had also decided to accompany Mom, Grandma, Frances, and Linnea to New Mexico.
Meanwhile, Grandma Snicketts had called to see if Mom could pick her up another bottle of Clinique lotion (as Mom often did while out at the mall for her) as Grandma believed that someone had stolen it from her apartment, which was a possibility. Other little old grannies, despite their apparent sweetness and gray hair, could be thieves when pressed to it.
Linnea was still having difficulty with the fan blades.
“OK… I can’t do it.” She looked at Collette mischievously. “Maybe I need someone tall… and wise… and smart.”
Collette, however, was preparing to teach, where she read of American history, of Englishmen and oysters, strawberries, pearls, typhoid, the wilds, and waterfalls mistaken by John Smith to be the Pacific Ocean. John Smith, after all, was an odd sort of fellow. As was written of him in the text:
“He might have exaggerated a bit, but he really did do those things – like selling his schoolbooks and running away to sea. Or going off to Hungary to fight the Turks. There, one bloody afternoon, Smith beheaded three Turks. A grateful Hungarian prince granted him a coat of arms with three Turks’ heads emblazoned on it.
“He wasn’t a Hungarian hero for long; he was captured and sent as a slave to Constantinople, where a Turkish woman bought him. But her relatives didn’t think much of him, and he was sold again. This time he killed his master, escaped, got thrown into the Mediterranean Sea, wandered through Russia, Poland, and Germany doing heroic things, and ended up in North Africa fighting pirates…
“While exploring the Chesapeake Bay, he was stung by a deadly stingray and was in such agony that he had his grave dug. He recovered – and ate the stingray.”
– Making of Thirteen Colonies, p. 29/p. 31
And as bad as Jamestown ended, the ships that followed later, fared nearly worse:
“On their way to Jamestown yellow fever broke out… They were barely over the epidemic when they ran into a fierce Atlantic hurricane… One ship, the Catch, went down; all hands lost. The Sea Venture… was wrecked on coral rocks… within wading distance of the island of Bermuda.” – Making of Thirteen Colonies, p. 36
Finally the sailors built two new ships, the Patience and the Deliverance, and they went on their way to Virginia, met with the reeking disaster of Jamestown. Collette could not quite imagine the terribleness of it all.
Joe and Rose also took their turns reading and as Joe read, his nose began to run, whereupon Rose volunteered to bring him tissues. She returned with a Kleenex box filled with a roll of toilet paper, as the tissues seemed to be gone.
“That’s the way to go,” Joe laughed when he saw it. “If it’s soft for my bum, it’s soft for my nose.”
Meanwhile, Carrie marched through the kitchen with Pumpkin, who was wearing an ascot.
“You guys went to DQ without me last night?” Carrie-Bri wailed later, and quickly changing subjects: “Has anyone seen my Think and Grow Rich book?”
Carrie had gone out to Bread Company with Paige Popp and her friend the night before, entertaining them with her usual stand-up comedy stories while the rest of the family had enjoyed the traditional closing ceremonies over Dairy Queen.
“It is not his fault that instead of a heart he has a piece of cheese in his breast.”
– Quo Vadis, 7th paragraph, p. 412