A couple of weeks ago, I received a phone call from Thor.
“Jimmie, I was thinking it’s time to take better care of myself, and I remember someone saying that they cook once a week for the whole week. Is that you?”
“It is me,” I said, “and if you like I can tell you about it or you could just come over and cook with me one Sunday afternoon. I’ll send you home with lots of food.”
“That’d be great,” Thor said, and we made a plan.
A week later, Thor relegated a group of his friends with the story of how he recently melted his microwave.
“I had a pan of oil on the stove, see, and I had it pretty hot. I left the room for just a minute and when I wandered back into the kitchen I saw the fire in the pan. I panicked, of course, and vaguely remembered my mom telling me that grease fires need to be smothered. With flour.”
At this point in the story everyone in the room sucked in a collective horrified gasp.
“Yep,” he nodded, “exactly. Turns out flour is one of the most flammable materials out there, and I’ve since learned that the amount of flour I used to put out my fire is pretty much the equivalent to two sticks of dynamite. So I melted the microwave and had an entire weekend of grease fire/smoke clean up. Want to see the pictures?” And then he passed around his phone with the evidence of his handiwork.
For the record, Thor has been de-invited from my house for a mass cooking lesson, and you put out grease fires with baking soda.
A few days later, I went for a walk on my Greenway, and when I was going around the last bend, almost at the end of the path, I ran across a gigantic, enormous, humongous snake. I’m not one to freak out about a snake really, but this snake was hogging almost the whole path. That snake and I stared each other down for a while and I conceded by waiting for another person to step over the snake before I attempted it. Once I was across it, I congratulated myself. “At least it wasn’t a giant spider,” I said in a soothing manner to myself. “I can handle a snake, but no giant spiders.”
That night as I checked my social media, I ran across this post from one of my friends, Chelsea.
I think everybody has that moment in life when they see a spider so big that they’re in disbelief that they’re seeing it in real life and not in a picture or through a TV screen. I just had that moment. I doused it in bug spray. That didn’t work. It just kept standing still and waited as I sprayed it. Like, “Are you done?” . . . . and then started crawling again. This happened a few times. So finally I grabbed a wooden chair and did the inevitable . . . I went to work. After breaking the chair and a fingernail in the process . . . I believe it is finished. Unrecognizable by even its own mother. Sorry, dear arachnids. I guess I don’t love you.
I shrieked, threw my phone, then retrieved it to tentatively tap out a message to Chelsea telling her what a brave, brave soul she is.
And finally, I received this text from Roxanne yesterday:
I’ve been at work for two hours and JUST realized I’m wearing two different shoes.
I seriously have like, the best friends.
Love, Jimmie 