We tempted fate again last night and took Leta out to dinner with my family. It’s become a pastime of ours, torturing the public with our monster offspring. Leta ate a plate of refried beans and then threw saltine crackers at the people sitting at the table next to ours. By the end of the meal she had beans in her eyebrows and a cowlick of beans at the top of her forehead. Oh, beanie baby.
On our way out of the restaurant my mom thought of something she had forgotten to tell me, and as we were walking toward the door she said, “Oh, oh, oh, I just remembered. Heather, you never crawled! You scooted around on your butt and never learned how to crawl. So it’s okay if Leta doesn’t ever learn how to crawl since we all know that you turned out okay.”
My step-father never misses an opportunity to take a whack at me, ever since I ate all his bologna and used his razor to shave my legs 17 YEARS AGO, and he chimed in, “Heather didn’t turn out okay! She’s a Democrat! Maybe if she’d learned to crawl she’s have some sense nowadays!”
And so right there in the middle of the restaurant halfway between our table and the door, surrounded by innocent bean-eating patrons, I screamed, “DON’T EVER CRAWL, LETA. OH GOD, OH GOD, DON’T EVER CRAWL!”
Who uses the word “nowadays” anyway?