At work, the file cabinets have been known to contain strange and magical and sometimes terrifying surprises, mostly related to the culinary realm. I suspect that a small nomadic tribe could subsist solely from what they could forage from the maze of filing low filing cabinets (which often resemble a Vegas buffet, complete with grazers wearing plastic track pants and off-colored foundation that ends at the jaw line) and in fact, I think if one day I turned a corner and saw a yurt set up in an empty conference room and perhaps caught just a glimpse of an errant llama disappearing betwixt the rows, I would be ridiculously happy about my job. And who wouldn’t.
(I tried to talk Esteban into ceasing the home renovations and just buying a yurt. He wouldn’t go for it. Something about winter something freezing to death or other and ended with the conversation ‘I love my undercover hippy wife but as God as my witness, I can NOT explain to my friends that we’re moving to a yurt!’ (Ah, but that is the beauty of a yurt. The yurt moves to YOU, my friend.) Regardless, vacationing in one is still on the table, so I think ‘yurt sweet yurt’ would look lovely on a cross-stitch sampler.)
And given that it is prime garden season, people often bring in extraneous garden fare and leave them out for anyone to grab. Last week, there was a bounty of lovely cucumbers. I like cucumbers. They’re probably one of the few vegetables that I really enjoy raw. I especially like them in a summer salad with tomatoes, feta and balsamic vinegar and that sounded lovely, so I grabbed a nice-sized one and brought it back to my desk.
However, I kept feeling a bit ashamed of this cucumber on the desk. It just looked so’ phallic. I finally stashed it in a drawer and forgot about it until it was time to leave for the day. I was forced to carry it out through the office, the whole time thinking, ‘Oh my god, people are going to think that I want this cucumber for inappropriate reasons!’
People, think twice before sending your kids to archaic parochial schools, ok? Just a little public service announcement.
I had to go to my physical therapy appointment (the last one, by the way, because my delightful physical therapist/cheerleader and I have decided that there hasn’t really been all that much progress made on what I have begun to not-so-affectionately call ‘Hump o’Pain’ and I’m going to go back to Dr. Perky and talk about our options and probably also try to get her to prescribe me some medicinal marijuana, because hey, wouldn’t that make this whole messed up knee thing worth while? Damn right it would) and then run some errands (because my life apparently is simply the stuff that happens between errands), so I threw my physical therapy shorts over the cucumber so that no one would pass by it and think about it going into someone’s vagina.
Clearly I am not right in the head, I know this, but damn, once you start thinking about that scene in Animal House where Otter picks up Mrs. Dean Wormer by commenting on the size of his own cucumber, it’s all downhill from there. Or at least, since 1978. I’m a zit. Get it. See. You’re broken too. Welcome to the club.
Anyway, I then forgot completely about the cucumber, which then started molting into a weird vitaligo cucumber and was, dare I say it, becoming flaccid. And one morning when Esteban and I were leaving to go somewhere, I moved the shorts and saw the tragic spent cucumber, lying there limp and twitching in my shorts (*snort*), I knew that if Esteban (who is always irritated by the number of random magazines/empty Dasani bottles/unprotected mix CDs/Sbux cups which live in my car) saw a half-bad (but half GOOD) cucumber lying directly on the leather seats, well, he’d have a fit. And rightfully so, but still, I wasn’t in the mood, so in a move normally reserved for John Woo movies, when he was bending to get into the car, I whipped the cucumber in the vague direction of the alcove for the entrance of the breezeway.
Would that this were a perfect world and would that I threw like anything other than a kid who was always picked third from last in everything but tug-of-war, it would have fallen into the camouflage of the licorice plants in the hibiscus topiary or maybe into the stinky bush where it would molt into a puddle of rot (you think I’m making that up? Obviously you’ve never forgotten a cucumber in the crisper drawer for a month and been astonished when you retrieve something that is seriously no longer a cucumber but is now rather a strange cucumber/pond scum slurry) and I’d never had to think about it again. But no, I hit the corner of the alcove and then rested near the bottom of the topiary pot (and did not, thankfully, explode with a sickening schpleck!), all unbeknownst to my beloved obsessive compulsive husband.
It was so elegant and so flawless a maneuver that I may have chortled softly to myself. Just a little.
So then we went off to get our Starbucks and breakfast and because I sometimes have the brain capacity of a fruit fly, I promptly forgot all about the cucumber lurking at our front door.
(Oh my god, doesn’t the phrase ‘The Cucumber Lurking At Our Front Door’ scream to be a children’s book or perhaps a porn movie?)
On Monday, I pulled into our driveway (after running another errand! Gah! On my tombstone, apparently, it will say, ‘She forgot to pick up the dry cleaning’ oh, and we’re out of cat litter.’) and watched as a squirrel was poised over my potted mandevillia (note to self: take pictures of that before it dies because it’s GORGEOUS), furiously scooping my special fluid-retaining genetically altered soil out of the pot, a crusty old black nut in its jaws.
I jumped out of the car and it ran under the pine trees. I grabbed the broom and dustpan and swept the dirt up and then refilled the hole with more dirt. Then I realized that the reason that one of my other pots had a bunch of dead plants in it was due to the fact that something had dug six inches down and left a big gaping hole and exposed all of the roots. And the worst part was that this audacious little lawn rat was sitting there under the pine tree, nut in its craw, waiting for me to go away so it could continue to destroy my container plant stuff again.
And that’s when I apparently lost control of my faculties and tried to chase the squirrel out of my yard with my broom and dustpan. And may or may not have sworn at it using choice words that would have made the cast of Oz blush (fyi: that’s someone else’s line but I don’t remember where I heard it, so thank you for letting me borrow it, whoever you are).
And just then, Esteban came home. I ranted to him about the squirrel and how it turned me into an 86-year-old woman who yells at lawn animals and shakes her broom at them and how the next thing we know I’ll be wanting to watch Lawrence Welk and give money to the television preachers because they said they’d pray for my gout. And as I was showing him the dead plants and the holes and the black dirt still scattered on the driveway, he bent down and picked something up.
‘Wow, apparently it was going to bury a cucumber too.’ His eyebrow was raised in confusion.
Ah yes. The cucumber. This is, of course, one more reason to hate the squirrel. He foiled the Great Cucumber Bamboozle.
So then there was that whole messy explanation, which took far too long and made me sound mildly retarded, especially after just confessing to declaring war on a damned squirrel. And I felt really stupid and guilty and apparently had a sad little lost girl look on my face the entire time which is proof that I could never be an evil mastermind because I would spill every genius scheme the very second any single thing went awry.
When my husband listened to my confession patiently and finally said calmly, ‘In the future, remember… we don’t throw cucumbers at our house.’ it was then that I knew that I married the right man.
