Clogging

I am an inconsiderate walker in that I walk too fast and refuse to cede my side of the walkway. Also, other walkers with their molasses pace tend to cause feelings of road/sidewalk rage within me. Recently I was forced to slow down, which takes a lot of concentration on my part-to consciously think about each step I take- and this slowdown was because of the recent snow and general iciness of the walks. Each step causing me to slide a little and almost slip and fall, I wondered how pregnant people manage in the snow. Their weight is shifted to the front, and most pregnant people are therefore forced to lean backwards a bit to compensate -I should think they wouldn't have any balance at all. The weight of my backpack causes me to lean forward, making my feet slip out behind me, so for them it must be the opposite - that their feet slip out from under them leaving them on their backs.

At this I had the glorious mental image of some preganant woman standing at the top of the ramp, only to have her feet slip out from under her, and her shooting down the iced ramp like she was on a waterslide, waving her hands in the air and yelling "wahoo!" all the way to the bottom. And then I remembered that in designing my future home, I used to plan for a slide that came from the upstairs down to the kitchen, the idea being that it would be a quicker way to get everyone ready in the morning and around the table. It was a roller slide to be exact, but looking back I wonder if that's really the best option. People are getting rather fat these days, and it's probably more beneficial to take the stairs down - yet, I don't really consider going down stairs to be the same as going up stairs - it's the going up that exhausts you, so it must be better for you. I'm still undecided on the whole issue, but in the process of thinking about it, I wondered what would happen if a fat kid were to get stuck on the kitchen slide, and clog the whole thing up, and I thought once again about the pace at which other people walk, and the clog that occurs outside of the building where I have my noon class, and then my thoughts diverged on two different clogging trains of thought.

(1) was about the clogged drain in the box shower of the upstairs bathroom at home. It's because of "girl hair" as my brother calls it, (which I think may be what he calls long hair) that our shower ceased to drain properly. There were a lot of us who used it, and we did so without following the advice about navy showers that my dad has tried to instill in us over the last 20 years - "you should be able to take a shower in three minutes - that's how they do it in the navy!" So once when our drain got clogged, and possibly remembering the last lecture delivered at the last unclogging, and because our parents weren't home, we went to fix it ourselves. I unscrewed the drain cover and fished down in there with a bent coat hanger and what I pulled out is the sickest thing I have ever encountered. It was completely rotten and black, but with a slight whitish goopy coating from recent conditionings and it was roughly the size of a gopher. To this day I can still smell it, the whole thing rotting away. We put it in a bread bag, and then because we didn't know what to do with it, left it on the front porch and forgot about it as best we could. Mom wasn't too happy to see it when she got home, and I'm pretty sure we still got the navy shower lecture from Dad.

The wonderful thing about having sisters with red hair is that there's no way to pin the clogging on any one of us specifically. It could just as easily be the other person, so you're safe from accusations. Being a boy and having short hair, my brother F has no such sense of security- but I'm pretty sure he doesn't need it because his hair has probably never caused a clog.

My mom tends to get us kids confused with each other - for a long time my name was fr-aud-mar-mar, as she went down the list, briefly exhausting the names of my older siblings to get to mine. She eventually settled on the phrase "you with the hair" to summon us, which could refer to anyone but our dad. H and A have always been confused for each other because of their looks, and I have always been confused with my brother F. This is upsetting to say the least, and it's mainly because for a good number of years we had the same voice. Mine is too deep, and his was too high, and so we were always mistaken for each other, especially over the phone. This is how I came to develop my phone voice. When answering the phone I speak higher than I would ordinarily, insomuch that people still don't usually recognize me, but at least I'm being mistaken for my mother instead of for my brother.

Clog train of thought (2) was about clogging -that thing that's kind of like tap dancing. My 3 oldest sisters were all in theatre in high school and so they all learned to clog. One day when we were all upstairs watching TV we heard a tapping sound, and to explain it we assumed that our dog, which had very long nails, had gotten into the basement, and was clicking away on the cement floor beneath. When this happened we always sent someone down to put the dog back outside where she belonged, only this time, we found not the dog, but our sister who had found her old shoes from high school and was practicing her tap.
She was more than slightly offended -"You thought I was the dog?"