My Life Between Coffee and Wine

Humor from the Home Front

EVELYN AUCOIN

Evelyn Aucoin

southern

My Monkey Butt Valentine

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When my boys were school age, every year before Valentine’s Day we made the requisite trip to Target for cards to share with their classmates. In 2005, after carefully selecting “Finding Nemo” themed cards, my younger son, who was in kindergarten at the time, announces he would like to select a special card.

“For whom?” I ask.

“Sara,” he replies.

I smile, Sara** is the cute girl across the street that he has known since they were toddlers.

Encouraging independence, I instruct him to select a card as I watch from the end of the aisle (mistake #1). He is about three feet tall, so his selection is limited to the bottom half of the display.

My older son is visibly annoyed by the delay, and stands next to the cart, sighing and kicking the wheel.

My younger son has an affinity for the ladies. When he was three, he took gymnastics lessons. He would get mesmerized by the girls practicing all around the gym and need to be constantly redirected by the coach back to his activity. When he was four, he had a day care teacher who was a knockout – talk, red hair and an hour-glass figure. Smoothest drop-offs we ever experienced as he bolted into her arms. Once when he was two, we were in church and he was standing up on the pew between my husband and I. When the priest directed the congregation to “share a Sign of Peace” with each other, he spun around to the well-endowed parishioner behind us, and sunk his toddler face into her cleavage. Luckily, she was mother to five boys, so nothing could phase her, including getting motorboated during mass.

It is a monkey in a diaper.

He proudly returns with a card. It has a monkey on the front, dressed like cupid, modestly wearing a diaper and holding a bow and arrow. I hold it so my second grade son can also opine on the selection (mistake #2).

It says on the front “To My Valentine – How I love your smile..”

Inside: “…and you also have a nice butt.”

I am momentarily stunned by the horny monkey my sweet boy has selected to convey his affection for our neighbor.

Although I am speechless, my older child points at his brother and yells, “You know you are not old enough for sex!”

In the middle of Target, in front of God and everyone.

(Note: My oldest son’s deficiency of an oratory filter is genetic trait.)

Spoiler alert: I didn’t buy the card.

I am doubly horrified. My little boy wants to confess to five-year-old Sara what a fine rump roast she has, and my older son thinks his younger brother is a sex addict.

Neutralizing my expression, I do not respond to either child. Remember, I am in the Deep South, and at this point, I risk getting nasty side glances from the elderly ladies thumbing through the cards with Bible verses.

Waiting until we are safely sealed inside my SUV, I debrief with the children on the incident. I ask my youngest if he understood what the card said. He quotes the front and inside of the card to me, and simply explains that he thought it was funny. I ask the older child if he knows what sex is, and he rolls his eyes and says of course he does. When pressed for evidence of his knowledge he says, “Kissing of course. What did you think I meant?”

A decade has passed since this incident.  We still refer to any slightly risqué situation as “playing the monkey card”.

Thanks Target. Could you stock cards that mention bootylicious Valentines a little higher on your displays? That would be great.

**Name changed to protect the “baby got back” innocent child.

No Birds or Bees, Just Giraffes and Chickens

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I was equally fascinated and horrified by the obsession with the knocked-up giraffe April and the associated Animal Adventure Park “giraffe-cam” earlier this year.  My Facebook newsfeed was peppered for six weeks with “She is in labor! This is it!” and my favorite comment – three weeks before the blessed event — “I know I see a foot sticking out!”

I accept people were naturally nosy curious, but this mania bordered on voyeuristic.  Anyone who burned precious daylight on giraffe-watch needs to reflect on their priorities, me included.

Did anyone, for a second, doubt this big event would be memorialized on You Tube for all posterity? As research, I Googled “video giraffe giving birth” – approximately 3,200,000 hits.

Let that sink in

(Note:When the feds come knocking, I plan to show them this blog in my defense.)

The giraffe-cam showed Oliver the baby-daddy in the background. I thought he appeared bored with the whole ordeal, while others commented how “worried and nervous he looks!” I had a fantasy April birthed an alpaca, and Maury Povich instantly materialized to film a segment of “Who’s The Daddy TV” – yes, it is a thing.

Spoiler alert: Giraffes are not endangered

This was baby number 5 for April. Obviously not her first birth rodeo, and even if the fetus was 100 lbs., her exit ramp was traveled as well as Route 66.  It is safe to assert she required no virtual doulas to pull this off (or should I say, push this out?).

My theory:

Parents seized this opportunity to divert from the dreaded talk about from where babies originate; encouraging their children to watch a giraffe pop one out so they could check the box. I say this with no judgement. After all, then they can move on to less stressful conversations, like discussing the current political landscape in America. Just like parents today, my parental unit, collectively with my grandparents, avoided the topic of baby origins like the plague.

I spent my preschool years hanging out with my grandparents, who lived nearby.  They lived in the shadow of downtown Houston, Texas. My grandfather, Bobby, was the third generation reared on the Chapman family farm, located in a remote corner of McLennan County, outside Hewitt, Texas. Although a successful businessman, and living an urban lifestyle, he embodied the adage “you can take a boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.”

While he was a Baylor graduate, his brother, Willis, attended Texas A&M. Willis once told me his nickname at A&M was “Country Chapman.” He clarified that if you were labeled a “country boy” at Texas A&M in 1936, that meant you were a hillbilly.

Bobby meticulously mowed and gardened his full acre property. The house sat on a curve, so the expanse of Saint Augustine grass was vast around the front side of the house, peppered with dozens of tall pine trees, and one colossal live oak. It was better maintained than most public green spaces.

My grandfather was organic before it was cool

He was an organic advocate, decades ahead of his time. I never saw a single pesticide used on any of his gardens. He fed his fantail goldfish – which grew to catfish size in a large back yard pond – oatmeal flakes.

Eggs were delivered to their home, direct from countryside, every Monday. A cheerful, aging farmer pulled up in his ancient pickup, and hand delivered a dozen eggs. In my grandfathers’ meticulous financial records, I determined he remitted $1.25 for this bounty.

I sat in the kitchen as Mama (my grandmother) would cook these prized eggs. I asked my grandfather, who I regularly accompanied to the grocery store, why he didn’t buy his eggs there.

“These are much better. I don’t trust the ones at the store,” he explained.

At the sagacious age of four, I was captivated by his cynicism of the eggs you could easily procure at the local Mini Max grocery store. Ever the inquisitor (my spawn come by it honestly), I pushed for justification.

“Evelyn, you should never eat an egg unless a rooster was involved. Do you know what I am saying?” he asked.

“Yes, Bobby. I understand,” I reassured him.

I was clueless

I didn’t understand the manufacture of eggs, babies or Cadillacs, for that matter. But I was entering Kindergarten later that year, I didn’t want the grandfather I adored to think I was a moron. Poor Bobby never intended to share quite so much over breakfast, but kids do that – take an abrupt turn in a conversation; creating opportunity for honing your aptitude for creative answers and refining your talent for diversion.

I have blogged about my sons for the last two years, so I obviously I filled the knowledge gap that remained after my chicken-based sex education.

This country boy’s granddaughter is not ashamed to disclose that I am an incurable egg-snob; I buy naturally-fertilized eggs, and I insist the origin to be Texas chickens.  Before you troll me, with accusations of being an egg racist, let me expound; Texas chickens equates to the eggs didn’t travel very far and therefore, should be fresher. At least that is what I tell myself.

I checked in with April; she has her own web page, an entry on Wikipedia, and 43K followers on Twitter.

So officially, a giraffe has a larger social media presence than I do

All for doing what hundreds of her peers were doing, but with a webcam. Obviously this is not a new strategy, but I give credit where credit is due; its application for giraffe birthing was an original twist.

Congrats! You Have Been Upgraded to Uncle

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There is a phenomenon in my family, and I’m not sure if it’s only a southern thing, but friends who are in the inner circle (i.e. they have seen you in your pajamas) get promoted to relative status, and are renamed in due course. I was 13 before I determined that all these other girls that called my namesake grandma “Aunt Evelyn” were not actually blood relatives. In that same vein, there was a gentleman who would come to Houston from the valley (the southern tip of Texas, not silicon nor Fernando), and he would appear for an extended stay with my grandparents a couple times a year. I remember him visiting as some of  my earliest memories at their home, and due to his pajama-viewing front row seat at the breakfast table, he was ordained Uncle Frank.

Now there’s a saying that in the south that we don’t hide our crazy people, we put them right out on the porch and serve them sweet tea. Uncle Frank definitely had a key spot on the porch.

He would drive up in his pick-up truck with a camper on the truck bed, loaded with the Texas valley’s most famous export, ruby red grapefruit, which my grandfather adored. Uncle Frank was an attorney, and a decorated World War II hero. As my grandma explained “He was one of the boys from the base in Terrell Texas who trained the Royal Air Force.” Every year, alternating between Dallas and London, the reunion of these Texas boys and their British counterparts was an event; anyone with a weak liver need not RSVP.

Uncle Frank was a life long bachelor, loved to cook and entertain. The first time I ever ate a stuffed mushroom, Uncle Frank had made it and talked me through the process. He never married, but collected friends like relatives throughout his life. He was eccentric (translation: wealthy and quirky) and as endearing as they came. He was generous with his time, talent and finances.

Uncle Frank’s one true love was V.O. Canadian whisky. Since my grandparents (and parents, including my minister father) were all Southern Baptist, no alcohol of any kind was around our homes, until Uncle Frank rolled in for a visit, yet he faced zero judgment with our family. In her later years, my grandmother confided in me that there was a picture of my grandfather drinking a beer at a party in the mid 1950’s, that she promptly destroyed when my father went to the Baptist Seminary out of fear it would be seen. But with Uncle Frank around, it was cool that happy hour started at 10:30 in the morning. As a tip of the hat to his passion about nutrition, he would only drink his V.O. whisky mixed with whole milk.

Once I was old enough to drive, I was appointed to chauffeur Uncle Frank and my grandma around Houston to fancy restaurants. Bless his heart, he would get toasted, and then thank me with some cash after our adventures. It was like driving Miss Daisy – but Miss Daisy (my southern belle grandma) has her aged, frat boy best friend with her, and a teenage girl is navigating a bronze Cadillac Coup D’Ville all around town. Note this car was only slightly smaller than an aircraft carrier.

Uncle Frank always said old age came in four phases: First you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to zip up, and finally you forget to zip down.

Uncle Frank lived in his boyhood home is whole life and actually passed (bow your head, shake slightly) in the same bed in which he was born, which makes him as Southern as they come. He always joked that at his funeral, he wanted to be buried with a bottle of V.O. and a telephone just in case he wasn’t dead. So sure enough, when we said goodbye to him in March 1994, the mourners called his bluff, and a phone and a bottle of V.O. were lovingly placed in the casket with him. Good thing he didn’t ask to be cremated; he probably would have burned for a month.