I think I have figured out my grandma’s secret philosophy of life. Live every moment not as if it were your last, but as if you were about to become trapped—perhaps under the wreckage of your house after a hurricane, or just by an everyday occurrence like bathtub electrocution or getting your hand stuck in a garbage disposal—immobilized in whatever state your everyday life happened to be in, ready to become a permanent frieze for all the West Hawaii Today-reading world to see.
- Both photos (the cover and the inside one) featured a Jack Russell hybrid in the foreground with captions saying first something like, “The Kanaka family dog, Jesse, sniffs the wreckage of yesterday’s storm, as the Kanakas try to tow their Bronco out of three feet of mud” then, “Wreckage. Surveyed by Jesse, the Kanaka family dog.”
- The other family profiled had their roof cave in. The photo displaying the Wreckage was of their bathroom, whose messy state could in no way be attributed solely to the storm. I mean, what was all that crap doing in the bathroom in the first place? It wasn’t a tornado.
So, here are Grandma’s rules:
- Never be wearing dirty or embarrassing clothes. (I decided to leave the Ebonics in; they must’ve occurred to me for a reason.) While the logic of saving your dry-clean-onlies for a special occasion may seem irrefutable, they won’t matter much when you’re dead.
- Start cooking your rice by 3:00. If you have to ask, “What rice?” or “Why is it my rice? What about the other people involved? Shouldn’t they cook rice?”, you shouldn’t even be reading this.
- While you’re at it, take your bath before then, too. This brings up an important side note: only men shower, preferably in the room attached the garage to prevent their sullying of the house with their work-day filth. Women bathe. Or bocha, I suppose, though I’ve never liked the word, evoking as it does the image of soaking oneself in a flavorful broth to create a delectable, starchy soup.
- Whatever you do, clean as you go. Whether it’s cooking or wrapping a re-gift in layers of paper, plastic, and tinfoil packaging, you must make sure there is never a backlog of dirtiness or messiness long enough to suggest that you were stopped in the tracks of life (by lightning, flash flooding, etc.) doing anything but trying to rid the world of its inherent filthiness and depravity.
The depravity was purely my inference. The rest is, I promise, objective fact journalistically observed. My grandmother has taught me well. It’s too bad that it takes an impending disaster to make visible the importance of her lessons.
1 comment:
I'm still laughing at, "What rice? Why is it my rice?" --molly@fist city.
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