A Letter to My Son

Dear Antonie, Your recent email nearly moved me to tears. It reminded me of a similar letter a friend received a while ago. I'll admit I'm woefully uneducated on the political climate of Zimbabwe, but learning of your plight has really opened my eyes. It's bad enough that your poor father, Mjaly, has been murdered in a land dispute, but now you and your family have fled to South Africa, living as refugees. Thank the Lord your father had the foresight to deposit eight million US dollars worth of gem stones in Johannesburg. If only he had known that he should have put it into a foreign account, since the South African Foreign Exchange policy...

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XXVII

A few weeks ago, my mom saved everyone's hash at her work. In gratitude, the salesman she works for gave her a hundred dollar gift certificate to a fancy restaurant. The very same restaurant my family had dinner in Sunday night. First we saw The DaVinci Code, which left me a little disappointed. Not because I didn't like the movie, but because I did. It was a perfectly good movie, maybe not the best work ever put onto film, but certainly not the worst. What was with all the bad reviews? All I heard in the week leading up to it's release was how bad it was, so I went in expecting the worst. Instead, I was entertained and engaged. One reviewer...

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Uh-oh

The first thing I saw when I got out of Arlington Station to day was a bomb squad truck. There's a large sphere on the back of the truck thant says "Bangy." I guess it's their bomb-diffusing robot. I don't know if this is the time or place to mention this, but I really like robots. Especially the kind that keep me from exploding. There's about a dozen motorcycle cops lined across the street in front of the Public Garden. And in front of our building, there's a state police K-9 car, a couple of BPD cars, an ambulance, and a caravan of black SUVs with blue lights on the roof. That can't be good. ...

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I Smell Like Bengay

When my grandmother feels that she's overdressed, her common remark is, "I look like a circus horse." If she goes out without makeup or her without hair curled, she'll say she looks, "like a foot." She's filled with sayings like that. "It's dark as a pocket outside." "I'm dressed like a flapper." "I feel like a nickel." One of my favorites is "My back is falling off." Your back can't fall off; it's what's holding everything else together. Your arm can fall off, but your back is pretty much secured in place. With that being said, my back is falling off. It started hurting yesterday and today I can't even bend down. I stayed home today, but...

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The Poseidon Adventure

For the past two days, Joe has been inserting our names into the Good 'N Plenty song. It's not the first time he's done this; only the most recent. You might be thinking that not every name has the right amount of syllables to fit within the structure of the song, but by God, he makes it work. I guess that's what makes him Joe. Anyway, yesterday was movie night. Michele has been taking spinning classes at night, so she didn't go. Oh, and if you're wondering what spinning is, it's just a stationary bike. At first I thought she was doing plate spinning. It didn't make much sense that they'd offer that at a gym, but all I could think of was...

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Wally

Last night I walked into the kitchen and found Michele standing in front of the stove making some kind of tofu noodle stir-fry thing. She poured it into a bowl, brought it into the dining room and started eating it with chopsticks. She said she'd been dreaming of it all day, whatever it was. I thought it was a pretty weird thing to dream about, and briefly thought of mentioning the dream I had one time where I was in a buddy cop movie with a talking turkey on the run from the mob. I ultimately decided it wasn't the right time for that particular conversation and went over to the refrigerator to get a drink. On the refrigerator door, there was...

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The Mother of All Posts

Sometimes I wish I was back in school. As each year of adulthood rapidly fades into the next, the desire for a return to those simpler days grows ever stronger. Such thoughts could be born out of a grown man's lament over his misspent youth, or out of a desire to get one's hands on some of those little yellow lunch money envelopes they used to hand out, which make for a perfect miniature puppet theater troupe when hoarded. I have a different reason for wanting to turn back time, although I do love making flappy-mouthed finger puppets. No, what I long for is the carefree days of school-supplied Mother's Day gifts. Back then, if there was even...

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Mailbag

Hey, let's check a little Blogger mail. Because I get that. All the time. Here's the first one: "Dear Guy who writes Random Squeegee, Why haven't you been writing lately? Did you contract some sort of flesh-eating disease that resulted in the loss of both your arms? That seems to be the only reasonable explination for the disturbingly low number of posts recently. I am not a made up person. Concerned in Hoboken" Thanks, Concerned! I'm sure you're as real as everyone else that wrote to me. You will be happy to know that my arms and most of my other body parts are completely intact, and as far as writing goes, well, I'm writing at this very...

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