not in this house, you don’t.

i still remember when jim croce died.  school was back in session, and i was a big third grader in a new school. my hometown was growing like topsy; and town fathers struggled to accomodate the gazillion kids flooding the current halls of education while deciding where and how to build new ones. the temporary solution? split sessions. i would go to another school — not my neighborhood school — and come home a full two hours before anyone else would.

this idea didn’t sit well with my mom, who taught at a very new school in a distant part of town. to this day, i’m not sure how she managed it, but she convinced the principal of her school to let me attend her school. and i did. of course, i knew exactly no one at this school; this part of town was nowhere near mine… so it was a slightly daunting undertaking.

but i grit my teeth and i went. i have always been one of those people you can throw into almost anywhere and i usually can end up talking to somebody. (my husband refers to that quality in me as my being friend to the friendless. thanks, hon.) so i figured sooner or later, i’d make a friend. and thanks to a wonderful teacher (who i heard quit teaching not soon after and went into business) and some pretty nice kids, it all worked out eventually.

but back to jim croce. i remember this time period pretty well; what i wore (my brothers’ hand-me-down pants, which were often p l a i d), what i ate (lots of TV dinners), what i played (almost always some dorky mischief with amy or jen-jen), and of course, the music. jim croce was all over the radio with songs like bad bad leroy brown and time in a bottle. being eight, i naturally enjoyed the former a lot more than the latter; anything sentimental made me cringe. and then, of course, just as quickly as he had hit the scene, croce’s  plane hit the ground.

the song i loved the most is a song no one else out there probably knows called rapid roy (the stock car boy). how can you quarrel with a description of a man that tells you:

He got a tattoo on his arm that say “baby”
He got another one that just say “hey”

(i dunno. it just cracks me up whenever i hear it.)

but because maybe only one of you have heard of rapid roy, i figured i’d pick number two, a sentimental favorite if only because of someone i know and love well. (we won’t mention names, BS.)

ah, my Beloved Spouse. one of the calmest people i know. if your head falls off and starts rolling down the street, all bloody and gooey? he’s the one you want to call. he’ll retrieve the head for you without blinking an eye while he’s getting you prepped for the ambulance. speaking in tongues? he’ll probably figure out how to translate the gobbledegook in 5 languages. your parachute isn’t working? call him.

but G-d help you if you’re a misbehaving computer. like our old one yesterday, f’rinstance. yes, old bessie went to the motherboard in the sky, and lord, it was not pretty.  let’s just say something melted (and not because of the heat from my cranky posts, either.) so now i’m typing on a cleaned-up old computer that was once my mother in law’s (thanks, MIL!) while i await something from Dell.

but. before you think we tripped merrily from point A to point B in computer land, step back. because before we admit defeat with a computer, BS  must throttle it to it’s last to make absolutely sure it’s truly, positively dead. he must scowl. he must growl. he must test it within an inch of it’s life. he needs to dissect it. resurrect it. and then try it again. ten times.

(and the rest of the family is trained: stay the hell out of daddy’s way until nice daddy returns.)

but then, the truth:

yes, the computer is morally, ethic’lly, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably and reliably dead.

jim.

so you don’t tug on superman’s cape. you don’t spit into the wind. you don’t pull the mask off of old lone ranger.

but if you’re a crappy POS compaq computer, you sure as hell can mess with jim.

(but you won’t live to tell the tale.)