if my mother were a nutter

As you should very well know, my little sister and I love making fun of the Local Paper. It's not a horrible publication or anything, but the frequent typos, hick headlines, and overly earnest attempts at portraying wholesomeness ruffle our feathers. Maybe we're just bitter and jealous of all the fat and happy midwestern folk, but damnit, what's wrong with shooting some fish in barrels from time to time? One of our favorite fish has a regular column about her wholesome, Christian family. Her maiden name is Nutter. This week she tells us about her adult children, with whom my sister and I went to school, and how wholesome they are. Here is what this column would look like if it were about my family:

Children Grow, Get the Hell Out of Community

This past Saturday night, my husband and I walked to The Cinema in downtown Marshfield to see the summer comedy "Wedding Crashers." He thought it was hilarious, but I thought it was crude, vulgar trash--almost as bad as the Simpsons cartoon show. That Owen Wilson is pretty handsome, though. Anyway, I only agreed to go because my husband works 90 hours a week and I hardly get to see him.

Several years ago, we chose the town of Marshfield to live in because my husband got job offers in both Marshfield and Boston, but because Boston is more expensive and he had massive graduate school debts to pay off, we had to settle for Marshfield.

On the way home from the movie, we walked by the Recreation Tennis Court, which is located at a relatively busy intersection. Fifteen years ago, our oldest child harrassed us endlessly about waiting forever to cross it and looking both ways about twenty times while driving her to daycare, and later high school. We would always say, "When she learns to drive, she will have an accident at that intersection, and even though we'll have to pay for the damages, we'll laugh a little inside." Walking by the intersection that night, we commented on how glad we were that she only rear-ended our friendly neighbors and they were nice enough not to sue us for whiplash. We commented on how the Marshfield community fosters such a sense of community. And how quickly the years passed by.

We visited about* each of our children and where they are now. We talked about how difficult and exhausting it was to have them at home and that Marshfield was a nice community in theory but nearly bored and isolated our crazy kids to death.

When my husband's mother died, her brother, who was a priest and the head of a monastery, gave each of our small children pendants with pictures of Jesus on them. They only liked the pendants because they were free and shiny. The priest uncle died shortly thereafter and was found naked on the floor of his bedroom with his butt up in the air. Silly Uncle Joe.

Upon graduating from Senior High, our daughters fled to huge cities on opposite ends of the country. Gina has been living in New York City for six years now. Since college she has been working at jobs she doesn't care about and spending her free time getting really fucking drunk, sleeping with questionable men, and urinating in public. She comes home to visit twice a year and expresses appreciation for the use of our minivan and all the free food. After a hearty course of psychotropic medication to help her get through high school, Carrie now works to help the hell-bound homosexuals at her hippie college in Los Angeles and spends her summers in Marshfield watching television and walking the family dogs. While she expresses appreciation for the Marshfield schools which allowed her to take enough AP classes to get into a faraway college, she doesn't give a shit about the community atmosphere of small town caring.

Yes, this last Saturday night was a good night to remember memories and reflections while we walked home from the movie.

*I can't let that one slide. Even my mother, who has been known to say "warsh" instead of "wash," would never replace the word "discuss" with "visit." Good lord.