It was suggested to me that I write a memoir. I wasn't sure where to start, so I looked for a sign. Here it is. Born an infant in the prairie province of Saskatchewan, Canada, where the tumbleweed danced, the deer & the antelope cavorted, and the summer sun shown well into the night, I now enjoy quite walks on the treadmill, diet water, and the covert founding of polyandrous sects in rural Utah.
I’ll never forget the day my mother packed my bags and sent me off to join the circus. She said she was doing it for my own good, so that I would one day have an interesting story to tell. “How tragic,” she would often say, “to emerge from childhood with not a stitch of Lifetime movie-of-the-week material. To squander one’s youth on avoiding tightropes and explosives is tantamount to owning only matching pairs of socks. What a colossal waste!”
As a frail child getting caught up frequently by the winds that rushed across the prairie, I was sentenced by my doctors to the mandatory consumption of only whole milk even though everyone else in the family got to enjoy mom’s secret recipe low-budget “mixed milk” with it’s charming granules of powered milk snuck into the watered down bottled milk. Ah, the seeds of eating disorders.
I’ll never forget my trip to the emergency ward to get my tongue clipped.
This time I will freely point out that this is a true story--with the rest I will leave you to guess where fiction meets non.
It all started when I was in junior high and one of my friends had a younger brother who had a crush on me. I’ve heard it said that being crushed upon can be a flattering thing. There have been women throughout history who have captured the hearts of men and as a result had a ship, a street, or even a city named in their honor. Would that my friend’s brother had been a sea captain or an engineer of shiny slick machinery... but, alas, little brother was but a lad in 4-H. I never did know what the four H’s stood for, but I suspect that one of them may have been heifer, because that’s what I had the pleasure of having dubbed my namesake, and that darn cow didn’t even win a blue ribbon at the Vernon County Fair... but I digress.
What does that have to do with my trip to the ER to have my tongue clipped? Well, when you think about people going to the ER to get their tongues clipped (and you know you do), don’t you think of blue-ribbon-wanna-be cows sitting around with their fat tongues hanging out? Of course you do. I know cows don’t wear orthodontic braces, so I’m pretty sure my bovine namesake never had to choose between the expensive propositions of calling in an orthodontist during off-hours to snip the offending bracket v. cutting the tongue out of the braces. So, if Becky-the-Heifer never would have had a similar experience, why do the two events get all clumped up together in my mind? Good question, but I’m bored with the topic so I will move on without answering it.
