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Category: Laughing
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In the early days of the internet when everyone used BBSs and had handles, I was the Iron Orchid. She was a character in a Michael Moorcock series I had just read and the only one of the characters at the end of time to actually give birth from her body. I was the only one of my friends who had a kid at that point and I couldn’t think of anything else that suited me.
One evening there was a conversation about the war with Iraq and, pacifist that I am, I responded to some idiot that those soldiers were not actually fight for my freedom. There was a little more to that small skirmish of words, but, you get the idea. The idiot said something snarky about me being perfectly willing to reap the benefits of the sacrifices made by those soldiers and another user stepped in to back me up and used masculine pronouns. Which I thought was funny.
My response included my feminine pronouns. My (sort of) friend said “oops, sorry” and moved on in the conversation. The idiot got angry because I had been posing as a man. Iron, it seems, is a masculine substance and orchids are masculine flowers since the root of “orchid” is the Greek word for testicles.
I could almost hear him grinding his teeth when I asked how he felt about Steel Magnolias.
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My younger sister desperately wanted pierced ears when she was in elementary school. Our mother told her that she could get some self-piercing earrings if she wanted it that badly. They were hoops that slowly squeezed themselves through your earlobes. And she toughed it out. I thought “If M can do that, so can I. ” and I tried them out.
Nope.
I didn’t make it 24 hours. Those things hurt. My little sister is tough!
A couple of years later, when I was in junior high (before they included 6th grade and started calling it middle school), a friend got her ears pierced at the mall and I got permission to get mine done, too. That gun was genius. Pop! and it was done. I kept them clean and they healed up nicely.
Several years later, I was working at a jewelry store, living on my own, and they did piercings with the gun. I got a second piercing in each ear to wear studs over hoops or other dangling earrings. My mother was not impressed. She asked me when I was going to get my nose done. For. A. Week.
All I could do was roll my eyes and wait for her to get tired of it.
A little while later, might have been a year, might have been a few months, M got one extra hole in one ear. She called me and asked “When is your mother going to quit asking me when I’m getting my nose done?” I said, “Give it a week and she’ll get bored with it.”
I could hear the eye roll over the phone.
Time passed. Our youngest sister went to college.
When she came home with her nose pierced (having skipped over ears entirely), our mother had the grace to say, “I should have shut up about that. Shouldn’t I?”
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It makes me chuckle every time I pass it on my way to work.
It’s kind of blurry because I grabbed the shot with my phone on one of the rare occasions I have actually been stopped by that traffic light.
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My great aunt famously stood on the stairs of her sister’s house when a party went on too long and said “Come on, Bill. Let’s you and I go to bed so these nice people can go home.”
Lena and her sister, Della, were best friends and absolute characters. Bill was Della’s husband and Lena was leaving her sister to lock up since the party was at their house.
Later, after Bill died, Della moved in with Lena and her husband until her dementia required moving her to a care facility. She stayed gracious and entertaining, even though her short term memory crumbled away.
Della Mae Parmley Oakes 25 December 1966 Lena was a competitive bridge player and was packed to go to a tournament when she simply did not wake up one morning.
Lena Alder Parmley Foster Christensen
8 October 1982
I am the Audience 