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The Hamburglar
This year, Superbowl Sunday finally made my Shitty Days List. No, not because Kurt Warner bit it (though he did). And no, not because companies keep running ads we’ve already seen (though they absolutely did). I now hate the Superbowl because it was 3:30 on Sunday afternoon that I received the phone call from my mother.
She’d been burgled.
The unfortunate side effect (not that the main effect is fortunate) is that the Superbowl is forever besmirched. Because, I don’t know about yours, but my brain has a way of never letting go of these things. EVER.
So the Superbowl will henceforth be the day that all my fears about my childhood house were vindicated; it will be the day to remember and relive all those tiptoe down the stairs and make sure no one’s hiding in the kitchen before I can get my glass of water fears.
(My husband is reading this and cringing and/or rolling his eyes and huffing because all his considerate, logical, calm words about being safe and ignoring irrational fears appear to have been lost in the ether.)
Anyway, now we’re dealing with the fallout: fun stuff like itemizing the missing, going through receipts, finding photos, talking to detectives, and finding out that the insurance isn’t going to cover 99.99% of the loss. Woo! It’s been an awesome week.
(BTW, I’ve also learned that the stuff they use to dust for fingerprints is Super Dust; you can’t wipe this stuff off – you merely wait till it has decided it’s time to go. And then you help it pack its bags, give it some money for the Greyhound, and drive it to the station.)
Yesterday I went over there to procure us one of those new-fangled alarm systems, and what an innocent pre-burgle household we were. Merely locking our doors and windows, not tethering them to a call center poised to reach the 5-0 within seconds in case of emergency. What fools!
Well, those were the days of old. In short time, this creaky Colonial will be one badass, keypad-monitoring, window-securing, door-boarding, motion-detecting motherfucker of a house.
Anyway, when I was done with that, Mom and I went out intending to grab some pizza.
But we walked outside and a bitter wind shot the cold all the way into my spleen, so I needed some baked ziti, which is why we ended up at Joe and Pat’s, where we found the super-futuristic typeface sitting there in the midst of a menu trying to evoke the Tuscan hills right there on Victory Boulevard. Star Trek meets Under the Tuscan Sun.
And before we ordered, my Mom decided to ask some questions about the evening’s offerings.
(If anything can be said about my Mom, it’s that she likes to fuck with people. Sorry, she likes to engage them in what I guess you could call banter, and if you’re lucky you could add a witty to that. But she lives in the wrong place for it – Staten Islanders aren’t usually built for something that takes a quick system and the files to back it up.)
But there we were anyway, she, asking our attitudy waitress how to pronounce the last item on the menu (Stuffed Paccheri Pasta) and me, watching a show I hadn’t seen in a long time.
The girl wasn’t overly responsive at first. “I dunno, is that what you wanna eat?”
But later on (while my mother was eating the aforementioned that) she came back to say, “So I found out how you pronounce your meal there.” (For effect, this is someone for whom the th in there calls for a d, making it dere.)
And then in the time it took for her to say those words, she’d forgotten. “Uh…”
We wait.
“You wouldn’t believe, I forgot. I’ll be back in a minute.”
And eventually she returned to tell us that Paccheri should be pronounced PO-CHEE-CARE-EE. Which, to those of you paying attention, sounds a lot more Native American than Italian, no? Not to mention that PA somehow became a PO.
“Great, thanks.”
I don’t really care that Lady Waitress couldn’t say the damn word. I just think it’s funny that my mother (who knows that I can SPEAK AND READ ITALIAN) decided to ask her.
Mom didn’t want the information; she just wanted to play with someone. Wait, that sounds wrong. She wanted to instigate someone. Nope, still bad. She just wanted to make us laugh.
And despite the shitty days behind us and the not so great ones ahead, that she did.
And now I’m exhausted; can I have a cheeseburger?
