Last Friday we hosted my brother’s fiancee’s wedding shower. We spent all day cooking and setting up. I got to cut open a bunch of tomatoes and scoop out their insides, much like you would do to a pumpkin at carving time. It was so slimy and gunky, like I was sticking my fingers into an alien’s gut. I loved it. When I had vacated all of the tomatoes of their guts, I had three bowls full of liquidy red goo, complete with seeds and chunks of flesh. I had to carry them out into the wilderness behind the back yard, and carrying an overly-full bowl through a forest of overgrown scratchy scotch broom is a lot harder than you’d think. I was being supremely careful not to let the dangerously sloshing gunk inside the bowl overflow to my clothing, and after a couple of close calls I safely deposited the sludge in an obliging thicket. When I got back into the house, sans tomato juice, my mother was in a tizzy because she hadn’t purchased enough tablecloths for all of our tables, and she needed three more. She also needed some props for the VBS skits she was in charge of, and didn’t have time to go get them.
I looked around, and met my grandmother’s glance. Both decided we asked for the list and headed up to the Dollar Tree. When we got there we had to go on a hunt for a rubber snake and a treasure box. There weren’t any boxes at all, and there were no snakes in the toy aisle either. Not wanting to go back home empty handed, I desperately got down on my hands and knees and overturned the toy bins in my search for a snake. After sorting through mounds of useless junk, I stood up ready to admit defeat. Before walking away, I turned one more time to glance behind me hoping beyond hope that I would find a snake. Nothing.
Wait, there was a rubber string sticking out of the farthest basket. I knew it wouldn’t be what I needed, but something urged me to go back and check. I knelt down, grasped the tiny rubber, and pulled. As I pulled the string started to thicken, lengthen, and curve. With a final tug I freed the toy from its prison (upsetting several other products nearby) and gasped with joy because I was in fact holding a rubber snake. Pleased with my success, I showed off my prize to Grandma and then we both headed over to the tablecloths.
Once there my enthusiasm dwindled a little, because there were no purple tablecloths, and no round ones. There were blue, red, white, and green rectangular cloths. Lovely. Trying to be helpful I called my mother’s cell phone and asked her if we could use the green ones. She (of course) said absolutely not and told us to go to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart (as everyone knows) has everything so Grandma and I conceded and hopped back into her big powder blue van and drove across the street. When we got to Wal-Mart, at first we couldn’t even find the tablecloths. I knew we were in the correct aisle, but I just couldn’t find the tablecloths. There were the party cups and plates, the sliverware, but no tablecloths. We went around the other side to make sure, and there amongst the greeting cards we found a Wal-Mart employee. I kindly asked her where the tablecloths were and she–quite rudely–told me they were in the next aisle. Now I knew that that was where they were supposed to be, but I also knew that they just weren’t there.
Rather than addressing the evil employee again, I decided to give it one more try. After all, if it worked in the Dollar Tree then it had to work in Wal-Mart. Nothing could shake my unconquerable belief that (if you looked hard enough) Wal-Mart always had everything you needed, or something else that would work just as well. On closer re-examination of the aisle, I discovered that the reason we couldn’t find the tablecloths was simply because they weren’t there. The bins marked tablecloths were in the aisle, but they were empty. After going through all of the bins we managed to find a couple of bright bubble gum pink tablecloths. They weren’t what mom wanted, but they were certainly what she was going to get. Desperate to get out of the store (and a feeling a little betrayed that Wal-Mart didn’t have precisely the right shade of burgundy we needed) Grandma and I hurried down the party aisle. Then, to the left, something shiny, plasticy, and purple caught my Grandma’s eye.
“What about this?” she asked. I looked at the tablecloth that was in her hands, and then laughed out loud (get it? lol) in the middle of the store. The tablecloth she had found was the absolutely perfect shade of purple we needed, it had a slight gradient on the outside, and a pretty ruffled design printed on the gradient. I was awestruck by my Grandmother’s find. It was absolutely, positively, exceedingly–unusable. The entire edge of the table cloth was emblazoned with “Hannah Montana”. If we tried to use that, Rebecca (my future sister-in-law) would have a heart attack. Why did the perfect tablecloth have to be ruined by pre-teen exploitation? Unless….
Grandma and I bought both the pink and the purple tablecloths and then headed home. We showed my mother the spoils, and then I set to work in order to obtain her approval for my plan. I took the Hannah Montana tablecloths, and I simply cut off the edge that read “Hannah Montana” following the printed scallop. When I was finished nobody could tell, and mom was happy with the color. (Luckily for me Hannah Montana’s face wasn’t emblazoned across the middle of the tablecloth.)
So thanks to Hannah Montana, the Disney conglomerate, and their unashamed overkill marketing of no-talent pre-teens to children from birth to adolescence, my belief in Wal-Mart’s credit was unshaken and the wedding shower was saved from being shoddy and mismatched.
After the shower was over I showed Rebecca a slideshow I had made for her, and then headed down the stairs. On the way down I slipped on the super gloss varnish Dad had used on the hardwood floors. Thump thump thump thump thump THUD.
I landed at the bottom, with my skirt halfway up my body, and I let out a scream. “Oh fff—–” Luckily I still had enough presence of mind amid my pain to keep that one from coming out. I got up, hobbled over to the couch, and kept an incessant stream of “ouch ouch ouch ouch” going through my head. I was close to tears for a second, my eyes were watering, and then I got the pain under control. Meanwhile everyone who had seen (or heard) me go down were anxiously gathered around (some quite hysterical) to make sure that I was ok. The rub? Over half of these were my future in-laws (Rebecca’s family), one of which I had only met that day. Well…All I could think was, “Welcome to the family.”
Yesterday, after months of promising, my uncle finally showed up on my doorstep with the information I needed to register for the Chickasaw Nation. I had just sat down to work on a birthday present I was painting when I heard the doorbell ring. I made it downstairs and opened the door. The first thing my Uncle says is “Is there a table I can use?” I’m shocked to see him, didn’t know he was coming, and was also shocked at the horrid lack of greeting. But I gathered my smiles and led him to a large table. We went through the kitchen to get there, and on a fridge was a picture of my mom and dad. The next words out of his mouth are, “Wow. Your Dad is really getting old.”
Did I mention I really don’t like this Uncle?
The next hour or so were spent in almost complete silence (except for when my Uncle tried to convince me that I didn’t have a real birth certificate, that my name had been changed, and that my mother was born in April. On all accounts he was wrong, but he most certainly didn’t like to hear that.) His daughters, my little cousins, are really nice though. After a while my Uncle went to the DMV to get something notarized, and then I brought out my collection of coloring books for his daughter. They were both really sweet, and quite dramatic. I wouldn’t doubt it if at least the younger one ended up on the stage. So eventually my paperwork was filled out, and I will send it in. Hopefully pretty soon I will be an Indian.
How.
Sincerely,
Emilie ESTHER-ANN
(that is too my name, stupid uncle)
