Erma Does Not Live Here!

2010. Can you even believe you are alive in the year 2010? I mean seriously. Did you ever imagine when you were younger that you’d someday write 2010 on your checks?

My God y’all.

Every year I think maybe things will be different for me in the coming year than in the one passing. We all think such a thing, I’m guessing. I remember being told as a kid if I ate black-eyed peas that had been cooked with a dime in the pot, I would have wealth and health all year long.

I’m saying that’s about right as I’ve likely accidentally swallowed enough bean flavored dimes to have quite a tidy nest egg if I could ever afford to have them removed by a trained professional.

I hate it when I read blogs by syrupy sweet women who go on and on about how wonderful their family is and how sweet their friends are and how blessed they are. I know. That makes me a bad girl. I’m just saying I wanna hear the down and dirty. The nitty gritty. I wanna see the dog poop under the rug.

So in the interest of showing you what Tanner the Yorkie did in the corner of the kitchen by the possum belly table, here’s what I have to say about last year and the one that is now mere breaths away.

These are the 2009 things for which I am wholly thankful and eternally grateful.

I’m sucking air and my family is intact and relatively healthy. We all still have most of our teeth, some of us have more hair than others and none of us lost any fingers in a firecracker accident. I am almost positive I fell down less this past year than in previous years. I learned to open the peanut butter jar without saying the F word. My son is fifteen and so far, has not helped any unwed mother get her start. My beautiful daughter conceived my grandchild and praise the Pringles, I didn’t conceive anything but numerous hair brained schemes.

These are the things I am hoping for in 2010.

That I continue to suck air and stay on this side of the dirt, as will everyone I love even a little bit. My son will remain childless; my daughter will not. I will learn to open an envelope without getting a paper cut – and saying the F bomb. I won’t worry so much about how much I hate my ugly hands and instead embrace the fact that they still work. I will give less thought to my old lady waddle and more to the mature chick sway in my hips. I’ll look in the mirror and even if I can’t love what is looking back at me, I won’t smear toothpaste all over the damn thing to block the reflection.

Wherever you are, whatever you hope for, no matter big or small – that’s what I want for you. Unless you hope to kidnap me and sell me into some sort of slavery situation.

Happy New Year kids!

Merry Sherri

For the last several days I’ve been in the Kansas City area with my pregnant daughter, Kitten. She’s been quite sick and so she and my “still in the oven” grandchild have taken top priority.  No matter how old your child, when THEY are not OK, YOU are not OK.

Back at home, a few hours away from here, presents are scattered around my bedroom still unwrapped. I haven’t bought Christmas groceries. I haven’t done the Christmas prep. The Christmas work. The Christmas shizzle.

And I don’t much give a slutty Tiger, either.

So long as Kitten gets better and that tiny lime-sized angel who has taken up residence in her baby maker is unharmed, I can and will appreciate this holiday as though it were picture perfect.

Yes, we may eat instant oatmeal instead of a Christmas goose, convenience store cheese from a pump instead of figgy pudding and sing Inagaddadavida instead of Jingle Them Bells.

It’s true that my stockings aren’t hung anywhere with care. It’s also true that the odds of my suddenly experiencing tremendous stocking hanging feelings of care are slim to none.

I’m going to have a house full of people sleeping over in my tiny ghetto house, so I’m not feeling “nestled snug in their beds” is as accurate as perhaps “crammed in like festive sardines.”

There are no mother trucking candy canes, but there is Mr. Man’s cane, so maybe Santa can get on board with it.  If he won’t allow the substitution of cane for cane,  it’s strictly because of that bad break-up we had in ‘92 and has nothing to do with cane envy.

I was drunk and Rudolph was lonely and get the hell over it already.

I have baked no Christmas cookies, formulated no wassail, nor fruited up any cakes.

In short, the look and smell of Christmas will be absent from the OCD Chick house. Sad as that is in some ways, there is no question in my mind the FEEL of Christmas will be so heavy in the air, it’ll stick to the very walls. We’ll open our small number of presents and we’ll laugh and by freaking-sweetened-condensed-milk- fake-fudge, we will carve the roast beast.

Merry Christmas to each of y’all. I love you terrible.

Disclaimer! Erma Does Not Live Here will not be held responsible for Sher’s misuse of the following words as she has NO idea what the hell they mean: Wassail, figgy pudding, slutty Tiger.

PawPaw C.J.

For weeks prior to the 25th, my PawPaw would spend every available non-cotton-mill-working moment stapling lights to the house. They’d be on top of the house, on the side of the house, around the front porch, and if he still had a single strand of brightly colored orbs left, by jiminy something was getting lit up.

When he wasn’t going about the business of stapling, we’d spend hours upon hours, my PawPaw and me, talking about Christmas. I’d tell him in detail what I wanted Santa to bring me and he’d tell me in detail how his plan to finally catch that fat man in the red suit was all coming together once and for all. “When ‘ern I git my hands on him, I’m gonna take over and I’ll be the richest man that ever were.”

Even up until I was practically grown, his Santa nabbing plans seemed to me to possess all the necessary elements for success.  He knew his target well and he was all up in his head. If anybody could catch Santa, it was gonna be my PawPaw. While I felt some sadness for all the other little children around the world who would certainly be sad at not finding anything under the tree, I could never really contain my selfish delight as I knew my primo status as the apple of PawPaw’s eye ensured I would get to lay my hands on the whole pile of loot for myself.

Being a good Southern Baptist girl, it did cross my mind a time or two that Jesus might not look too favorably on me for being so selfish. That’s why I’d usually toss in a disclaimer meant strictly for Jesus’ ears. “PawPaw, if you catch him this year, I thank we should still take presents to all the other kids anyway.”

On the other hand, the public-North-Carolina-elementary-school educated side of me said if someone of Santa’s considerable training and experience could be nabbed by a chain-smoking, coffee-swilling, PawPaw, surely I could not be held responsible in this life or the next.  Just in case this kind of thing was covered in the Book of Revelation though, I felt it best not to take chances.

I have to say, if my sense of humor came from somewhere along the path of my blood line, it was from C.J. Willis. He was a clown in every sense of the word. He was quite handsome, too, my PawPaw. He kept his blond hair swept straight back  and he fancied himself a snazzy dresser.  He enjoyed looking good and smelling even better.  I can still picture him, getting so tickled about something, that tears would pour down his face and he’d shake all over. Lord I loved that about him.

“Why you so purty, PawPaw?” He loved for me to ask and so it became a running joke between us.

He’d flash those teeth, clench his Lucky Strike tight in his teeth and hold up his favorite coffee cup, stained from years of use, “Coffee makes you purty. If you wanna be purty like me, you need to learn to drank coffee.” He especially loved it when I’d ask him that question in front of company.

“How you gonna do it this year, PawPaw?”

“Let me tell you something, Honey,” he’d say. “That old man is gonna come down that chimney this year expecting to find cookies and when he does, Ima gonna jump right out at him, slap my hands around his belt and hang on fer dear life. I don’t aim to turn him loose until he hands it over. Ever last bit of it. Won’t we be fine with that sled parked out there in the yard?”

I thought to myself we surely would be fine. The nicest thing I’d ever seen parked in front was the long, black, shiny, hearse that would carry our people home after they’d passed away. I was almost positive the sleigh would be bigger.

Year after year, no matter that I wasn’t seven years old any more, PawPaw and I would spend countless hours talking about kidnapping Santa Claus and what in the big, wide, world we were going to do with all those presents. MawMaw would sit smoking and listening and every now and again, if she felt like PawPaw was getting too carried away, she’d shake her head and say, “Daddy.”

MawMaw Rosie & Me

“What is it, Mother?” That’s what he called her. She was Mother, or if he was willing to risk her pretend scoffing, it was My Sweetheart. He was Daddy. “Can’t a man sit in his own living room and plan to kidnap Santa Claus with his grandbaby?” She didn’t argue. Anything that entertained Sherri Lynn was always OK.  I was a princess in their eyes, and although we never had much money, come Christmas time they’d break the bank on my behalf.  Every candy, cookie, toy, shiny tinselly thing was rolled out for me.  Of course there were other grandkids, but no one in the family had any doubt about what was what.

The last Christmas I spent  in my PawPaw’s house I was eighteen years old and it was the only Christmas we didn’t plot or plan. On December 10th, fourteen days before their 50th wedding anniversary, My Sweetheart went home to be with Jesus – as C.J. would say if he were telling this story.  I lived with them by this time, and so it was just the two of us who came home from the business of burying MawMaw to live in a house that still smelled of the carnations in funeral arrangements instead of Christmas pies and cakes.

I didn’t know what to do, so I laid down where she had always slept and I hoped to drift away to wherever it was she’d gone. The pain in the house seemed almost loud to me.

Three or four days before Christmas I heard the front screen door slam and the sound of something being dragged across the floor. I drug myself to my feet and when I walked in the front room, I saw PawPaw pulling behind him a cedar tree he’d chopped down that was so big it just almost didn’t fit through the door.

“Your MawMaw would not rest if she thought her baby did not have a Christmas tree,” he said through tears. “You know how much she loved you.”

Christmas was rough that year and the year after and truly, for several years to come. She’s been gone for many, many years now and still this time of year always brings memories of her.  I wear her Poinsettia apron on Christmas Day – even though I’m not 1/100th of the cook she was.

I have no doubt that if I live to be one-hundred years old, I’ll never have another gift given to me that was so much from the heart as that one. I was truly, truly blessed to have had such a precious, pure, love in my life.

Merry Christmas C.J. & Rosie. I love you.

Kitten

Dear My Beautiful Kids: Kitten & Big Dog (and My Son-in-Law Guy and My Unborn Grandchild Whom I Am Now Calling Baby Fetus Britches),

I know that you are used to receiving traditional Christmas gifts from me, and that if I do say so myself, they always rock in a big way. Like remember that one time I got you a tiny beer keg thingie, Guy? What about that sweet iPod, Big Dog? And Kitten, you know how Mama do you right every year with the clothes and the shoes and the whatnot.

This year though, Mama has been busy. What with doing that thing I do and feeling that way I feel and then of course, my working so hard at getting this whole tap dancing business off the ground – I have not had time to shop.

Now with Christmas merely days away, I can either drag myself to the mall and try to purchase some sub-par, last minute gifts, OR, I can do what our North Carolina ancestors did during Christmases long, long ago. I can give you something that really matters. Something from the heart. Something you won’t have to take back to the store on the 26th.

Big Dog

A poem. A festive Christmas poem.

Once upon a Christmas cold and snowy…

Mama didn’t buy presents when she should have and so was gonna have to go the the mall at the last minute

And she didn’t wanna do that because she hates malls and hates mall people and those mall germs could kill a bitch

So she decided just to write a poem, print 4 copies of it, wrap it in some Christmas paper, and slap a nasty ass bow on it

Except she forgot she can’t rhyme and she hates poems, but hey – it’s the thought that counts – and I thought I could pull this off.

Merry Christmas kids. Please don’t put me in a nursing home.