Fixation Fridays

For those of you who know me at all, know that my kin are beyond 'splaining. Those who have the misfortune of crossing our path or God forbid, being invited to dinner, are lucky to survive the interaction with their sanity intact. This isn't because we attempt to poke out your eyes with dull spoons or have an unusually large taxidermy collection - no serial killers in my family. Instead, it's because we appear so normal, so plain potato chips that the an objective third party observer is inevitably struck by the incongruity of the apparent normality with the craziness that lies just beneath the surface. The Lemony Lemonades are a bunch of stark raving mad lunatics who someone, anyone, should clearly be medicating before we are allowed to do any real damage.

That being said, we are also a great source of humour for those who are not actually related, but poor Mr. Lemony Lemonade had the misfortune to marry into the madness, so, he finds it less funny than others.

Of all the Lemony Lemonades, none is more entertaining on a pound for pound basis than my father - likely because he is downright likable and genuinely humorous and because he appears to be the most normal of the bunch making his idiosyncracies all the more hilarious. Of all of his characteristics, his most marked is his unerring commitment to his views on anything and everything ranging from controversial political issues to country music. No matter how many times we tell him that we could care less about his views on weather or capital punishment, he persists in providing said views. This characteristic is only slightly more prominent than his anal retentive commitment to pattern and routine.

With summer in full force, I recently reflected on my most favourite summer memories and was immediately reminded of my love of the smells and sounds of summer. Unlike some, however, my smells and sounds of summer are not of the laughing children and bbq variety but instead are tangled with memories of my father's unerring commitment to life's injustices.

We previously lived next door to a prolific, amateur, lawn care specialist who, for whatever reason, chose to trim his delectible lawn right around dinner time or at least right around OUR dinner time because clearly he cut his lawn AFTER his dinner time, which apparently was about 4 p.m. Needless to say, just as our collective asses would touch the chairs around the Lemony Lemonade table, the mower would start up. Every time, without fail, my father would freak out which involved him getting alarmingly red in the face and tirading about how "every goddamned night....just as we sit down to goddamned dinner...how many goddamned times can you cut a goddamned lawn...one day...going to set that goddamned mower on fire" and so on. It never occurred to him that the neighbour sensed his displeasure and that was why he cut the goddamned lawn every goddamned dinner time - because that is the role of the neighbour, to grate on your nerves with their own idiosyncracies and issues until you think that if they park their car too close to the edge of the driveway one more time or drag their rubbish loudly to the corner at 5 a.m. or remind you one more time that your children are loud, drunken, louts who should be imprisoned for staying up past 11 p.m., that you will be justified in egging their house and flipping them the finger every morning as you both leave for work.

All of this common sense, however, was totally lost on my father and as such, we lived in the house for 25 plus years which conservatively means that we were treated to the lawn mowing tirade about a thousand times and God bless him, it never changed, it only got more intense until I was sure that his head would explode, or at the very least spin around.

More recently, my siblings have moved out, I now have my own home with my own family and my parents sold that particular house a number years ago but I still get a warm, fuzzy feeling when I hear lawn mowers and smell the scent of freshly cut grass - for some inexplicable reason, I sort of miss those summer dinners around the family table, accompanied by the dulcet tones of the neighbour's mower and my father's impending infarction - because these are the comforting, sentimental sounds of my life...GODDAMIT.