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Chapter Ten: “Our neighbours in the house on the hill were so rich, night didn’t so much fall on them as climb up.”

 

Were you ever scared of the dark as a kid?  I was.  But that’s only because my mother didn’t cut my hair as frequently as she should have, so it was getting in my eyes.  Not that having her reach out to my eyes with a pair of scissors was all that great either.  Especially not while pushing me backwards on a swing with her free hand, at the same time.

 

Ah, but mother’s laugh.  If you could bottle her laugh…well you’d have some really psychopathic imagery there.  Whoever heard of bottling a laugh?

There were no accidents with Mom and the scissors.  It could have been worse. She came from a short line of cutters.  She could have come from a long line of cutters but they cut themselves to save time and resources.  Once the bleeding had stopped the survivors were granted extensions, which they frequently tripped on, these hair extensions being too long, and would propel them crashing through their walls, which were like paper anyway.  You could tear off a piece of the living room if you had to go to the bathroom. The only complication might be if someone already in the bathroom had already torn off a piece of the bathroom, so you couldn’t even shut the door for privacy. 

 

Mom really had her work cut out for her…so she was lying when she said she invented paper dolls.   

Of course I wasn’t there, so I can’t claim she didn’t.  It’s like if a tree falls and no one hears it, does the tree make a sound?   Mom says she later became a rocket scientist.  Prove it, I said.  Show me.  She said, “If rocket science is ‘not rocket science’ to a rocket scientist, then the rocket scientist in fact does nothing at all.   So I have nothing to prove.  Nor show, for that matter.” 

I worried after that that my mother may have made me into a neurotic. I’ve since met others with these fears and we’ve come out.  We even have a parade.  I well remember the first neurotic pride event, it was a great success.  People were all over the place.  The event was kept successfully out of control.

 

Of course you don’t have to learn from just your parents. There were books in our house, but I recall they were badly written.  They were autograph books, so, yes, the penmanship was consistently lousy. 

 

One time Mother tucked me in at night, and I asked her what Good Night actually means.  She explained that a good night was when nothing happens.  Well since nothing should happen at night, why doesn’t the country vote for an extension of Night for safety.  Mother said they did this on the olden days, they won their extension but on the first night of it she took a walk to see the difference but couldn’t tell if it had been successful on account of its being in the dark. 

She went on to say a number of people had the same problem and got lost and were also wandering to the wrong places.  This went on for some time and no one complained, but about nine months later it seems a number of them became mothers and fathers.  I was born.  Then there were complaints.  She ended by saying, I preferred the good old days when there wasn’t any nostalgia.

 

Moral:  Your mother may appear to be a big letdown, but then so is a fire truck ladder. 

Chapter Eleven: “TV adds 10 pounds to you?  What will I do with British money?  And so little, at that?”

 

I don’t care for binge watching of television.  I prefer a sporty approach to things. So I do bungee watching, where you bounce from a cord in front of the TV.  Of course you risk missing the show, but then, not missing it could mean a concussion.  

 

The first newscasters in TV history weren’t very good. Legend has it they said “Will work for food” over and over again before they realized the first cue-card guys were in fact homeless and were carrying their own cards.  The homeless were subsequently hired as the first cue-card guys. To celebrate, they paraded streets carrying cards that said, “Have great job and full stomach” and were subsequently beaten with their cue cards and robbed by the homeless.  

 

Like a lot of my generation, I grew up on television.  Really on it.  The Shea Clee Show was a public access show in Winnipeg which aired from 1964 to 1982, during which I grew up.  I never quite understood why mom and dad placed cameras in the house to record our every move, especially when we weren’t even playing ourselves and were in fact played by a cast of actors as the Clee family, sharing the home with us at the exact same time. 

 

So we were beside ourselves the entire 18-year period and were relieved to be cancelled in the early 80s.  Cancelled as a family, that is, the show featuring us would continue, only they brought in a second family to play the real us alongside the fake us, when letters came pouring into the station asking what became of the real Clees.  It’s just too bad they recognized our handwriting. 

 

Some people asked me, couldn’t you watch from the control room?  I tried once but it wasn’t much of a control room, not with the tables and chairs and consoles flying around.  This grew to be Manitoba’s Great Unrecorded Cyclone of 1982.  It went unrecorded due to the records being blown away.   But I was there.  Well, briefly there, before the cyclone sucked me up by the legs and blew me away, bouncing down the hall and out the door, before it spit me back in, a judgmental sort of a cyclone. 

 

And so, being a cancelled but buoyant family, the Clees continued in relative anonymity, which is harder than it looks (but easier than it is to pronounce).   Living in anonymity makes it hard to tell knock-knock jokes, for instance.  I asked my folks, “Knock-knock”, they said, “Get lost, stranger, or we’ll call the police.”   This is the trouble with being anonymous.  The good part about being anonymous, you get credit for tons of wise sayings in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.   Inspired by this, I went on to change my name back to Shea Clee and wrote Clee’s Unfamiliar Quotations, such as “Get that dog some kitty litter,”  “I’m as blue as a forest fire,” or “The pen is mightier than the sword…GAHH!  No, I’m mistaken. And stabbed. (Falls dead)”, about things I’ve overheard from people who are unfamiliar with certain things.  I figured the book would make a great TV show.  The station agreed and literally filmed the book.  I wasn’t sure exactly why they were training the cameras directly on a book just sitting there, but they assured me things would be clear once they set it on fire. Actually that just made it less clear, it made the whole studio downright smokey, and so the Clee’s Unfamiliar Quotations Yule Log Holiday Special instead became a reality show about our fire department. 

 

I remember, while they were putting the fire out, there was a caption on the screen, “Professional.  Do not attempt this yourself.” So instead of attempting to put out the fire myself, I went in first dressed as Napoleon Bonaparte with a firehose (cleverly concealed under one hand in my tunic, as indeed Napoleon had in his day).  But I found I saw things better dressed as the aviator Charles Lindbergh.  The other firefighters saw me dressed as Lindbergh and hung me up on a nearby tree by my scarf, and indeed from that height I was able to see things much better.  The only difficult part was when the tree caught fire and fell.  On my house.  Luckily I was not hurt, nor was my wife.  She wasn’t hurt, just annoyed.  So much so she refused me entrance to the house.  She pointed first at my Charles Lindbergh outfit and then at our mailbox.  Sure enough, “No Flyers”.

 

Moral: “I was understanding of my husband.  Now I’m over it.” – Mrs. Clee 

Chapter Twelve: "Why do I look so good?  I took a year off.  In fact, the more years I took off, the younger I got.  The trouble was I got to 14 and they took away my driver’s licence.  Then I knew I had to write another meaningful column and the worry caused me to age rapidly, this time in the right direction.  I’m now 182 so I’ve already gone too far.  And the column hasn’t even started yet.  Not officially.  Ever time I start a column an official checks in that I’m not being a pest to anyone. I’ve stopped that, as the giant size housefly suit I used to wear in order to be a pest made it difficult to write, what with the sticky legs.  I did like having millions of eyes, though, it meant I could watch more television. And I certainly liked having millions of dollars. But then the officer reminded me I really only had two eyes.  And therefore only two dollars. And that’s why I no longer wear a housefly suit.  As of this writing I wear a spider suit.  It’s not so easy to type with eight legs, but on the other hand, or leg, I could if I wanted run away from the official four times as fast.  None of which, despite my increased speed thanks to being an arachnid, is getting me past the matter at hand, which I had intended to be about noses.  Now with that in mind – putting your hand to your nose – let us both dive in – and ignore any smells.”

 

It is said, prominent men have prominent noses.  It’s equally true that prominent noses have prominent men, in the case of Mount Rushmore, wherein the huge heads of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln had their sculptors living in their noses for a time. 

It is rumoured the four presidents were supposed to have full bodies rather than just be the heads, but in fact the intent all along was to have the four heads appear to be all wrapped up in a towel.  It’s based on a dream Roosevelt had about having a drunken party with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, and all of them ending up with a hangover the next morning and sharing the same towel with their bare feet all in a big tub of hot water.  They were even to have had ice packs on their head at one point but this got to be too dangerous as well as costly.  Many U.S. helicopters were employed to ship the ice packs up to the heads of the presidents and the ice invariably melted before it could even get on the heads of the presidents.  And so the Mount Rushmore sculptors inadvertently invented waterbeds.  The concept of waterbeds was intriguing to many young couples, but the promise of safe sex in a waterbed was somewhat quashed by the practicalities of such an arrangement, namely the bit about going to bed with your partner and your waterbed subsequently being flown out to South Dakota to be placed on a president’s giant rock head. 

 

I hadn’t intended to tell this story but my parents made me.  My parents made me by going to bed and their waterbed subsequently being flown out to South Dakota to be placed on a president’s giant rock head. 

 

Moral: You can take a punch in the nose, but there are easier ways to smuggle fruit juice.

Chapter Thirteen: “Do I make a good friend?  Yes, out of Plaster of Paris.  My wife is tolerant of this unless I try to make "Henri Bonhomme" as I call him, talk back.  So much for ventriloquism. My lawyer made me say that last part, while he drank a glass of water.”

 

My wife suggested we take this act on the road, and that's when he was hit by a truck.  My lawyer, so that wasn't so bad.  But to get a Plaster of Paris dummy to hit a lawyer with a truck!  Quite a trick.  My wife wasn't impressed, though.  Its’ being a Tonka toy truck thrown by me pretending to be Henri.  That's when I first cracked up, after the plaster hardened, and my wife had come after me with a hammer.  In fact she just liked coming after me with a hammer, and hadn’t realized I was impersonating a French ventriloquist dummy done in Plaster of Paris as opposed to wood.  She did have some nails in her pocket, though, just to be on the safe side.  Then again if you fall with nails in your pocket, your side is no longer safe but punctured by nails.  Just don’t carry loose nails in your pocket, I say.  Nail them to your pocket and you’re good to go.  Unless the nails have also caught your workbench in the process and then it has to go with you too.  But you’d get a reputation for being handy, if a little slow, what with having that workbench dragging behind you. 

 

See, to me, it’s that kind of concern for others that I think makes me friendly.  People always say a dog is man’s best friend, but I was encouraged by my folks to think big.  “Go make friends with an elephant,” they’d say, having realized the line they used to use, “Go play in traffic” didn’t work since no one would come near us for miles, and therefore there was no traffic to play in.

 

And so I set off to befriend an elephant.  I’d heard the story of a thorn being removed from a lion’s paw, which caused the lion and the man to become friends. 

I found an elephant with what appeared to be a thorn in its paw and attempted to remove it.  No sooner was the one removed than I was “shot at” with another hundred thorns.  It seems what I had really done was remove a quill from a porcupine, who proceeded to shoot me with his remaining quills.  I realized I’d forgotten to ask what an elephant looked like.  So now I looked like a porcupine and the porcupine a naked, rodent-like boy.  We agreed to trade places and while I became bored with the porcupine cage at the zoo, my grades went up at school with the porcupine pretending to be me.  This ruse lasted all of two weeks before the school insisted I trade places with the porcupine.  So, it was back to school, and I hadn’t even gotten any back-to-school supplies.  “You’ll need a Jumbo Eraser” said the teacher, so I came to school with my grandpa’s elephant gun. 

 

During detention I was of course asked why grandpa had an elephant gun.  I explained it was because he said he saw pink elephants when he drank, and wasn’t tolerant of that, being a self-described pachyderm-homophobe, meaning an intolerance of gay elephants, what with them wearing all that pink. 

 

I was then asked where grandpa got the gun.  “From a white elephant sale,” I explained.  So grandpa was clearly more than just a pachyderm-homophobe, but white-elephant-supremacist-pachyderm-homophobe, racist about elephants as well as sexist.  I was told white elephant meant something useless.  I rebutted with grandpa’s claim that he supported white elephants, as they clearly suffered from scurvy and never got to the beach to tan and be pink…so he could kill them.

 

So finally my teachers and principal said “Shea, we need to address the elephant in the room.” 

 

“What does that mean?” I asked.

 

“It means something big and important that no one can see clearly.”

 

“Like a ghost?” I asked.

 

“Something like that,” they replied.

 

“Well ghosts are white.  And the biggest, most important thing in the world than no one can see all that clearly, is God.  So are you suggesting God is a white elephant?”

 

And from that time on I was home schooled.  So now you know my secret.

 

And sharing secrets, I discovered, is a great way to make friends.  Recently I traded secrets with a colleague, but this doesn’t worry me.  I made up those secrets. Even better, I don’t remember hers!

Moral: Elephants never forget.  This would make them good flight attendants on airplanes, except for the obvious problem.  They'd eat all the peanuts.

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