ginnygram

On more than one occasion, I’ve heard my husband wisecrack to my listeners, “She sure doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.” But I swear that was not the case in my last ginnygram about the dread lifeguarding tests.

Friends, my reality is rocking, and not in a good way.

I have just learned that Julie did pass her test that spring day back in 1968.

Wow.

That’s like finding out that you were separated from a twin at birth. Or that your father is really a handsome secret agent, and not a dorky computer salesman. Or that your husband isn’t actually allergic to cats. He just says he is, so you can’t keep the stray, half-frozen kitten that you named Millie, short for Millennium, because it was January 2, 2000.

So.

Will I change my last ginnygram to speak the truth? I think I’ll leave it alone for now, as if it were published in an immutable form, and hope that readers find this “errata sheet.” And by doing so, Julie’s reputation as an able lifeguard will be restored.

And will I change my evil storytelling ways? What do you think?

You can’t even hardly see it now, but it kept me from being Miss America: A one-inch scar on my right knee.

Back in 1967, my little brother Bucky and I were horsing around on Granddaddy’s burn chimney-pit-rock-pile, and I slipped and fell and cut open my right knee real good. I was pretty sure it needed stitches (it didn’t), and I insisted that I shouldn’t go to my piano lesson (I did).

But the gash was ugly. So ugly, that I sniffled, “Now I can’t be Miss America.” Because I was no longer perfect.

Every year, when I watch the Miss America pageant, I smile and silently thank Bucky for his sweet words: “Well, I’d vote for you.”

Being a police wife means spending New Year’s Eve apart from your police husband, unless his RDO — regular day off — falls on the holiday, which is pretty rare. So, early in our marriage, I got into the habit of assigning myself New Year’s Eve Projects. When Ginger was little, she and I worked on the Project together, and when she was old enough to escape to a slumber party, I muscled through it with Dick Clark. Whatever the Project was, it served its dual purpose: It helped to pass the time more quickly, and it helped to steer my thoughts away from crazy drunks firing guns at midnight.

And because I am a creature of habit, I’ve pretty much continued my tradition of my New Year’s Eve Projects, even though my husband is safely retired from the force. We all know why, though, right? Because now I am a police mother, wishing for the night to hurry into a crisp and happy January morning.

This year, my Project is to collect and organize pages and pages of household documents into reasonably logical storage files. And I’m finding “stuff” along the way. Look in this box that I’ve just brought up from the basement. I think it is the contents of a former junk drawer in a former home, and it all just got lost in the last move. Do you see those two pagers? (Do you remember pagers?)

Let me tell you a story about the PageAmerica pager. If you were feeling any sympathy for me a minute ago, this will cure you.

Back in the 1980s, when Bill was on a tactical team, he worked long hours with a tight group of guys. This tac team was so tight, in fact, that they often had to spend time together after work, to relax and review. As a young working mother, this “relaxing and reviewing” ran counter to my need for a good night’s sleep, and so I would page my husband to kindly request that he come home. Now.  Remember how pagers worked? You phoned a number, entered your number, and maybe the person you’ve paged will see your number and call you back, from a pay phone in the bar. Where he is relaxing and reviewing.

One night morning, after hours of frequent and unanswered pages, my husband walked in, and proceeded to the basement laundry room to shed his stinky bar-smelling clothes. I followed, not caring that I was acting like a fishwife, and declared how I’d been paging him all night.

He looked at his pager and said, “Nope. No pages from you. It must be broken.”

“Let me see it.”

Would you have handed your pager to me? Well, he did. And I whipped that thing at the steel security basement door.

“Yep, it’s broken, all right.”

And I went to bed.

Postscript: He repaired the darn thing from pieces of pagers that they’d confiscated from bad guys. But it wasn’t long before he got a new-fangled cell phone. Which didn’t work any better than the pager, I’m afraid.