Lester the flying dog and other stuff

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

By Galloping Grandma

This has been a terrible year for bad weather in my home state of Iowa. Nothing has spared the state this year, not biblical rains, tornadoes or politicians. It never seems to get better, but at least the politicians are gone for now. I was reminded of Lester, a black lab belonging to Maygene Krutch, in Silo City.

On hot, humid summer days, Lester spent most of his time under the porch trying to keep cool. One late afternoon, a storm blew up, worse than people expected. Within minutes, a whirling mass of rain, hail and debris rolled in. First it took off Maygene’s porch, and then Lester was the next to go. A giant whirlwind lifted Lester up, and before he knew it, he was airborne. A neighbor told Maygene that she saw Lester flying by, headed east.

The storm was over in a minute, with little harm done, except for the porch and Lester’s dignity. He was found lying on his back in a nearby cornfield, more dazed and confused than usual, but OK. He was stiff and sore the next day and spent the following week under a bed, refusing to speak to reporters, and as far as I know, he never flew again.
As for the other stuff, the big thing this summer is the movie “Sex and the City,” based on the HBO series of the same name. I could never stomach the thing, but it chronicles the adventures of a bunch of women over-sexed and over-dressed, ricocheting from bed to bed and living just a fabulous life sucking down cosmopolitans and wearing $500 spike heels. Frankly, none of the girls are particularly attractive, but they dress well.

The movie premiere was attended by hordes of screaming women (and a few men) wearing sexy, faux designer dresses and what we used to call “hooker shoes.”
Now that these four twits are starting to get a bit long in the tooth, I got to thinking that when I was their age, I was fat, probably pregnant, and my exclusive “tar-get” wardrobe was covered with baby burp and gooey handprints. If I went out at all, it was to scream at some kid taking her clothes off in the middle of the street. Cosmopolitan was a magazine, and Manolo Blahnik was probably an Italian grocer in northeast St. Paul. My husband and I were like that old couple in the joke “when their house blew up, it was the first time they had been out together in years.”

As for sex, it was not a topic for dinner table conversation in that time and place where I grew up. The average third grader today knows more than we did and probably still does.  In seventh grade, we saw a very prim sex ed movie; the girls, by ourselves, and the boys with the science teacher, where they snickered and giggled. The one girl who fainted from shock recovered her wits and went on to marry a doctor and have six kids.
Since much of this was not considered fit information for our delicate natures, we were left to speculate about from where we came. I guess we knew where babies came from, but horrors, not us, for heaven’s sake! Our parents never did anything like that, we assumed. When my mother-in-law had her last child at age 40, her oldest child, age 20, had a fit - “Mother, how could you!” Now we all know what she met by “how could you,” and she wasn’t referring to the arrival of her baby brother.

Like the teenaged girl on TV said recently to her parents, “If you’re going to act like that, be younger, and not my parents!” I hope those four idiots in SATC have children like themselves someday. It will serve them right.
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Lester the flying dog and other stuff | Planet JH News Article: Galloping Grandma

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