Friday, May 13, 2005

socks, rocks and Chankelmas

Beddy-bye time for Palinode and Lotus. Streetlights slice through venetian blinds, finches in their cages shuffle and mutter on their perches. No one stirs. But they talk! Oh, how they talk.

Lotus: You're wearing my socks.

Palinode: How can you tell?

Lot: My eyes are open and I can see your feet. My socks are on them.

Pal: But how can you tell whose socks they are? They're all black.

L: All black? Those are grey.

P: And there are those argyles I bought from that angry woman in Chicago.

L: So our socks, contrary to your claim, are not all black. That was a ridiculous thing to say. [Note: we have a huge ungodly mound of black socks. Our sock drawer is a pit of black polycotton serpents. To pair them all up is a full day's work, I swear. So it wasn't in the least ridiculous to say that all our socks are black, just slightly inaccurate.]

P: Where did you get these socks?

L: I got those ones for Christmas.

P: Thank The Jesus for Christmas socks, hey? Otherwise, we'd have to buy our own. [Every Christmas we receive a three-pack pair of socks each from every member of The Lotus' extended family. This comes to approximately 66 new pairs of nearly identical black socks per year. This is why our sock drawer is such a Well of Souls nightmare.]

L: Yeah, Christmas rocks.

P: Thank The Jesus for Christmas rocks. They come in a big bag. Remember those days as a child when you'd run downstairs in the morning before your parents got up, and there would be that big bag of Christmas rocks?

L: Those were awesome days. I'd say "Thanks Mom. This rocks".

P: And she'd say, "No, Lotus, those are rocks".

L: HEY! YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD BE INCREDIBLY COOL?

P: Waking up the finches by shouting?

L: It would be so cool, if we had a kid, and we made up this holiday, and observed it every year, and we invented all these customs for it? We could get our friends to play along, and one day our kid would come home and say, "Hey guys, what the fuck's blahblahblah?"

P: Chankelmas. We'd call it Chankelmas.

L: And I'd make a special dish every year. Our kid would go to school and be like, "You don't celebrate Chankelmas?"

P: We'd have roadkill for Chankelmas supper.

L: Oh, that's gross.

P: No, it wouldn't really be roadkill. We'd just tell the kid that it was roadkill. We'd say that we're eating a lamb hit by a truck.

L: Every year the farmers let the lambs run across the highway for Chankelmas. We'd call it the Leaping Of The Lambs.

P: That's a proper Chankelmas feast.

4 comments:

blackbird said...

I think you should go for it.


My brother taught Oldest to say
"I want a giraffe"

for
"I need to use the bathroom"

It's fun to fuck with kids like that.

palinode said...

I'm nine years older than my brother. Once, when I was young and he was younger, I convinced him that a birdcage was actually the dog's house.

Anonymous said...

I'm glad I don't remember that.

Anonymous said...

You have no idea how much i enjoy these dialogues. you and the wife, really do kick ass.