Escape

We would escape on the river. The laundry bag, we had been told, would turn into a boat when it hit the water, but we--the two ghost-costumed children and I--we jumped too early and we almost went under before a wooden rowboat began to build itself around us.

On The Road, Almost

So I'm packing for the asteroid collision. Or maybe it's a nuclear explosion. At any rate, something is going to happen tomorrow, and intend to be ready. All the small frogs in my collection are going with us, carefully rolled up in toilet paper. I hate to leave the rest behind. I'll miss them.

The frogs will travel in a hatbox if they have to, but I want to have my hands free, and when I've put them all in my backpack, I'm pleased to find that I still have room for t-shirts and underwear.

Toy Story

I am a plastic figurine, and my role in the game is to belly-slide through a patch of clover. On the second try, there is a big bee in my way.

Lincoln at Gettysburg

Gettysburg. 1863. President Lincoln is attending the theater, attired in a suit made of an American flag.

It turns out John Wilkes Booth does a pretty good stand-up comedy routine.

When the word comes through that there has been a threat to the President's life, all in attendance draw their guns, eager to defend him, and those of us travelling with the President (e.g. me and Mark Twain) pull him down behind a balcony and escape to the parking lot.

We quickly clothe the President in the uniform of an Union soldier (I mean, really, the flag suit is a dead give-away) and hustle him into an SUV. As we peel out of the lot, I realize that someone is giving me a massage.

[Intermission to reposition George, who is running his toenails down my back in his sleep.]

The drive to our hideout takes us through some beautiful swampland. I think I see an Anhinga, but it might just be a Cormorant, I'm not really sure, and I don't have my bird book with me. I point out to the President the walruses and carnivorous rabbits.

Arrived at our hideout, I need to text my mom to tell her why I can't join her for church in the morning, but George keeps plyaing with the buttons on my iPad and I can't get the message to go through.

Little Pink Houses

Down a long, rainy path to a river, where I find a little pink house, the abode of a long-ago friend who invites me in and offers me a bed for the night. When I wake up, I argue with my mother about whether or not it is ok to put George to bed next to the dry cleaning.

In the kitchen, there is a display cabinet of Dr. Seuss books.

Way Out West

So I'm on a family vacation in Montana. There is corn growing on the Interstate and a glass building running alongside it that seems to go on forever. "But we're Out West!" I say, and the building disappears.

I've forgotten my binoculars.

My dad says that maybe I could buy new ones.

I sit George under a tree with his cheese Cheerios and chocolate wafer cookies, and when a dog (or perhaps it was a bear) tries to take them, I teach him an important life lesson: give the food to the dog (or the bear, either one); Mommy will have packed more cheese Cheerios and chocolate wafer cookies.

Road Trip, Scholarship

So Wayne decides to take us down a dirt road, and it suddenly gets dark and we're being chased by two dogs--one black, one white--which may or may not be made of smoke. We hurry to get to the light up ahead and discover a farmyard filled with cartons of eggs. (Wayne doesn't like eggs.)

Then we're drving around an island off the coast of Wales and discover an enclave of hotels and diners that are still operating under the assumption that it's the 1950s. We haven't brought any luggage, but we decide to stay the night anyway. Mostly, I spend the evening looking for a bathroom. They're all out of order.

[Intermission to go pee and try to figure out when George got into the bed.]

It turns out, this island takes in fifteen people each year on a kind of scholarship. Wayne and I fill out applications. They require algebra. I do pretty well.

[George kicks me and laughs in his sleep, so I don't know if we got accepted or not.]

Grammar Kills

So I come home each day to discover that someone has broken into my house and left me a gift--a quilt here, an embroidered pillowcase there. By the time the intruder has left me a shoebox diarama (horses made out of cottonballs painted blue) I've discovered that the gifts coincide with a string of murders. I write a letter asking the intruder to stop; he returns it with grammar corrections.

Not Your Average Bear

So we run into a blizzard on the way to Florida and decide to abandon the car and walk the rest of the way. When we go to pay for the (creepy!) hotel where we've spent the night, I discover that a bear has stolen (and this detail is important) my patent-leather, turquoise purse. We raid his den to get it back.

He hasn't spent the money.

We take a bus.

No Accounting for Taste

So the wind is blowing so hard through the cabin of the airplane that my salmon tastes like the hamburger the passenger behind me is eating.

Not a Haiku

My parents' dining room furniture.

Pink food.

My high-school boyfriend comes to dinner with a big perm.

Moonlighting

So my eye doctor has structured his practice to resemble an ancient Greek amphitheater, and we sit on stone benches and watch him treat other patients as we wait. The patient before me is a young blind woman, and as the doctor looks at her eyes, I get a call from Wayne that one of my English Department colleagues is missing. Apparenlty, we're not just mild-mannered composition instructors. We're also detectives!

I bring the blind woman with me to our colleague's apartment. Her sense of smell is such that she can tell if a room has seen violence, and this one has, she assures us, although there is no trace of it, no blood, not a thing out of place. It's a wonderful apartment, a whole floor of a former factory, and Wayne and I wander through room after room of art studios and galleries and finally end up looking at a back-to-school issue of Seventeen magazine circa 1983.

Orange Isn't My Color, Anyway

So I'm in a park to go birding, and I go into this old shed and run into the guy who writes the bird blog I read every day. Also in the shed is a closet full of my clothes, including a favorite tank top I'd forgotten all about: tangerine orange with gold metal straps. Turns out, you can't wash such a garment--although I give it a good try--and (alas!) my bird-blogging friend tells me that the store where I purchased it is no more.

[Intermission to rearrange George, who is stuck to my head like a giant squid.]

So I go to another favorite birding spot, which has been turned into a tearoom full of Victorian kitsch. What used to be the pond is now a pool full of old ladies in bathing caps and surrounded by lounging cats, including one that looks exactly like my (deceased) Emily. She swipes at me, I push her into the pool, the old ladies are stern, and I flee to the top of a wardrobe. But there are plenty of birds to be watched--red and black ones drinking tea with hummingbirds, yellow-rumped warblers who use their tails to fly, yellow birds with bright blue faces . . .

Book Shifting

So Wayne and I had just attended a book lecture. The author in question--a nineteenth-century writer named Nunez--had written a series of Narnia-like books and then died without telling anyone how to sequence them for reading, and there was great debate about whether or not they had been published in the right order. We had the whole set, but--alas--left all but one of them in the taxi. When we went to the bookstore to buy the rest, no one knew what we were talking about, and every time I showed anyone the one book we had left, it turned into a volume of Lord of the Rings.

Ladybug, Hairdryers, Cigarette Lighter

So I'm at the opthamologist, and once the ladybug has taken me back to the examining room, the doctor comes in and asks if the guy that's always with me is my husband or my father. Most definitely my husband, I answer, and then the doctor examines my eyes, declares them healthy, and asks if I want to take a walk and get some lunch. But I'm in a hurry, and I drive off, only to discover that I'm early for wherever it is I'm going. So I decide to drive up and down the road a few times, when I suddenly notice that there's this huge park that I'd never seen before, even though I've driven this stretch of road hundreds of times. So I pick up my friend Mary Herbert, who is walking along the berm, and we drive through the park and then suddenly we're in a village where the women have their hairdryers set up outside for when they get their hair done, and someone reaches into Mary's purse and steals a cigarette and her lighter.

Paris Calling

So I'm going to Paris with my friend Eric L., and my mom has come to see me off at the airport. We take an electric couch from check-in to the terminal. Eric is dressed for a Clash concert circa 1979; I've packed for summer 1983.

Blue Skidooed! We Can, Too.

So I'm online at Amazon, ordering George the books I'd loved as a kid--all in the old, familiar editions--when I'm suddenly sucked into one of them. There's a creepy old rectory, a winding staircase, and a strange man that looks like Icabod Crane.

Birds II

So I went into the city with my mom and climbed up onto the roof of a church rectory (with my blanket and pillow) to watch the hummingbirds. Then I went home to discover that Michael Scott was in my kitchen cooking. When he announced that he was going to go to the bathroom to disrobe, I decided to take a real-time satellite tour of Prospect Park, although when I logged on to the computer, I couldn't decide whether the ducks were actually there or had been placed by the software company.

[When I got up, I almost got out my Peterson's Guide to look up the hummingbirds I'd seen from the rectory roof.]

Birds I

So we took a rowboat to a nearby beach to look for birds, but when we got there all we could find were pigeons. Suddenly, I spied a bald eagle coming in for a landing! Alas, it turned out to be a big, floppy white duck, the likes of which would make a good stuffed animal for George.

[I think I've been watching too much Blue's Clues.]

Night of the Five Georges

So I wake to discover that we have five Georges, although one is lost among the piles of gifts-to-charity clothes in the spare room. Wayne and I take the remaining four Georges for a walk and debate the merits of four versus five. And then we go home and find the fifth George and he's fine and so are we.

Hands Off My Elephant Lamp!

So I get out of the shower and return to my room (actually, the guest room of the Winstead house), and I realize that someone has been in there in my absence: the fan has been turned on. I do what anyone would--that is, I get dressed (car-and-truck tunic, red leggings), grab George, and run down the street to play checkers with my friends.

Later, Wayne and I discover that the intruder has been back. This time, he has turned on the elephant lamp! Much throwing open of closet doors ensues, but no one is there, not even in the deepest recesses of the basement workshop.

When Cutlery Attacks

So Wayne and I are packing to move, and we're making really good progress. Then out of nowhere the cutlery goes on the attack and starts breaking all of our ceramic knick-knacks.

Post Apocalypse II

So Wayne has determined that some cataclysmic weather event is about to take place, and we have to go to Mesa, Arizona in order to survive it. We gather together a small band of people to make the trip, but we can't actually travel until the cataclysm nears. Wayne forgets to pack my black turtleneck and jeans, so we go to Old Navy and charge up a bunch of clothes. And why not? By the time the bill comes due, the earth will have been all but destroyed.

Soon, we discover that the people we have assembled are losers, as all they want to do all day is smoke pot and play badminton. So Wayne and George and I strike out for Arizona on our own in our minivan.

[I really want a minivan.]

Post Apocalypse I

So I'm about thirteen and living with a few other people in an enclave of aluminum-sided ranch houses in the middle of a desert. Robert Duvall comes with horses to save us, but we can't leave until we see the dust from the enemy's horses and know which way they are approaching. We see the dust! We mount up to leave!

I have to go back for my purse.