Unknown relative needs to crawl away now

June 30, 2019

An open letter to my “son” (or are you my “nephew”?): Hi, You don’t know me, although judging by your claims, I either birthed you or one of my siblings did. So I guess that makes us family. And, since we’re kin and all, I’m going to have to give you some tough love: You’re a poopyhead. First, I don’t appreciate you cold-calling “Grandma.” Or hot-calling her. Or even referring to my mother as your grandma, ya little lunkhead. I say that with the utmost affection. Well, as much as a “mom” can muster for a fake kid trying to bilk money from her ...

Mom is tops because the details tell us so

June 23, 2019

I’ve become quite used to it, frankly. In fact, I cannot recall a single occurrence when it’s been guessed correctly. And people always suppose the same wrong answer. ALWAYS. Not that it’s not a nice middle name. It is. It’s just not mine. But whenever folks see or hear my name — Patricia A. Kimerer — they believe the moniker conjoining my first and surnames is Anne. Or is it Ann? For the record, I also get a little salty about misspellings of my middle name. We’ll get back to that. The reason it irks me is that it’s my Mom’s first name: Arleen. Not Arlene. Not ...

My pop has been reincarnated in my offspring

June 16, 2019

It was when Kyle and his other lifeguard buddies were clowning around for a photo a few summers back that I knew for certain. There they were, flexing and shoving each other good naturedly and acting all teenage boy. It wasn’t until I inspected the pictures the next day that it hit me. Without so much as a hint of leading the witness, I silently showed Exhibit A to my sister. Her face went whiter than Snow Miser’s. “Right?,” I said. She was like, “Um, that’s the spitting image of Dad all right.” A few years later, when it was high school senior picture time, there ...

You got your coffee in my morning cereal … Mmm!

June 9, 2019

I was at my sister’s the other day when she busts out Kranch sauce by Heinz. I was like, “What in the????” Come to find out it’s ketchup and ranch dressing mixed into one bottle. Guess they also make MayoMust and MayoCue. You get the gist. It reminded me of that commercial for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups from the early 1980s, judging by the bell-bottom jeans and Walkman technology. You know the one. A man is walking down a city street munching on a candy bar, likely jamming to Culture Club on his Walkman. Simultaneously, a woman (equally enthralled by tunes emanating from ...

Divine intervention or no, some friends are family

June 2, 2019

The thing about having a friend since early childhood is she knows where all your bodies are buried. In fact, she likely helped you dig most of the holes ... and cover them back up, you know what I’m sayin’? It’s that way with my friend Shelly. I can still remember the day we met, aged 5. (Insert imaginary squiggly-line time warp effect here.) For reasons neither of us remembers, she was a few days late to kindergarten orientation, so our teacher asked for a volunteer to be her buddy. I scanned her sweet face with her big brown eyes and long brown hair. As my little noggin ...

Memorial Day to Labor Day, 15 weeks and counting

May 26, 2019

We were sitting on the outdoor patio deck overlooking Lake Milton while visiting some of our favorite peeps recently when it happened. It was one of those rare, glimpse sightings, like a shooting star streaking across the cloudless night sky or a sudden waterspout churning off the shores of Key West or Kim Kardashian’s marriage to Kris Humphries. Blink and you could miss it, you dig? It was a stealth attack, so seemingly innocuous and lasting mere seconds from start to finish that it took me a while to fully absorb the blow. It’s difficult to discern, even now, whether it was ...