Scrabbled Eggs

I grew up in a small southwestern Ohio town where my dad owned a gas station. The cool thing about having a dad who owned a gas station was that back at the house, he never made us clean our bathrooms either.

While never having to clean our bathrooms was a nice perk, there were downsides. Drying off our hands was an impossibility since the industrial paper towel dispenser was always empty. More flies and gnats buzzed around than at a Fourth of July town picnic. And we were constantly exposed to walls covered with some rather inappropriate sexual graffiti and gross offensive comments especially for a kindergartner such as “I screwed a taco” and “Dicks Sporting Goods is full of Dicks.”

And while the lack of anything to dry our hands with, annoying gnats, and graphic graffiti were bothersome, by far the worst thing about having a dad that owned a gas station was that every time I had to use the bathroom, I had to find him and ask him for the damn key, which was always connected to a rusty hubcap or an oversized soup ladle, and I’d say, “Dad, I’m not gonna steal the key for two fairly obvious reasons – first, same last name, second, I live here!”

At that same time, my mom was an English teacher at our local grade school, and she was really into proper grammar and perfect spelling, so for breakfast, she only let us eat Alpha-Bits cereal so we could eat and spell at the same time. I remember mom always trying to motivate us to eat Alpha-Bits with her catchy jingle, “C’mon honey, they’re A-B-C-D-licious.” At which point I’d mutter under my breath “And eating these grainy little letters every damn day is A-B-C-D-pressing.”

I mean, look, limiting our choices to Alpha-Bits wasn’t horrible, but after a few years of eating nothing but Alpha-Bits, I started spelling comments in the bowl like “Mom this cereal sucks, how ‘bout some Apple Jacks?” Which was a pretty amazing sentence to fit in a little cereal bowl. So, to keep the letters from moving and jostling around constantly in the milk, I devised this incredible anchoring system using about three inches of Grapenuts mixed in with whole milk to make this cement mortar base and I placed the letters in one fortified sugary nugget at a time.

Only problem with the anchoring system was that after a few minutes, the Grapenuts hardened to the bowl and once those babies were locked on, you couldn’t scrape the letters off with a pickax or a jackhammer, so we just threw the bowls away.

And not sure if you’re aware but Alpha-Bits has a grammatical defect, because the cereal comes with no punctuation. So, as a young boy, I spelled these incredibly long run-on sentences in the bowl until my stickler mom, Gracie Grammar, no relation to Kelsey Grammar said, “Hey, hey, hey, where’s the comma?” So, I bit Os in half and stuck them in, which wasn’t that big a deal, but sometimes I left a question in the bowl like “Hey mom, what’s for dinner?” and you had to have teeth like a New York City rat to carve out a question mark.

Well, after years of eating and spelling with Alpha-Bits at every breakfast, I tried to devise a way to get out of this Alpha-Bits lexicon-job nightmare. One morning, I was down to half a box, so I poured out all the letters and counted how many of each letter I had left. There were only five Os, so I looked up the word containing the most letter Os and the word was a forty-five-letter word for a lung disease called pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. I started spelling it out and said, “Uh oh mom, looks like I’m running outta Os so guess I’ll go out and play until we get a new box of Alpha-Bits.” I got up from the table when mom said, “Hold on sweetie,” as she calmly strolled into the pantry and after a few secs, came back and handed me a box of Cheerios. “Here ya go sweetie, now you have all the cheeriest of Os you need to spell out that awful lung disease,” she said exiting the kitchen whistling a happy tune and as she turned the corner I angrily muttered to myself, “Cheeri-O My F-ing God!”

And mom was relentless as she’d carry this eating and spelling food-based combo project into every meal. For lunch, our choices were Alphabet Soup or Spaghetti O’s, and I chose Spaghetti O’s ‘cause my options were limited to spelling the words “ooo” or “O”. Of course my wordsmithing drill sergeant mom pointed out the words “ooo” and “O” end in the letter “H.” Now faced with adding an H to end of both words, I had to place the Spaghetti Os in two columns with a row of Os between them like I was diagraming the Watson and Crick double stranded DNA helix model to form the letter “H” spelling the words “ooo”– O-O-H, and “O” – O-H, correctly.

And mom took her eating and spelling mandate on the road as my maniacal Marm of a mom made us eat and spell on vacation. When I was nine, we went to Hawaii, and in lieu of a Luau, we stayed back in the condo where mom pulled out a box of Alpha-bits, Hawaiian style. Mom quickly and excitedly explained that unlike the English alphabet with twenty-six letters, the Hawaiian alphabet, and Hawaiian Alpha-Bits cereal, had a mere thirteen letters, eight consonants and five vowels. So efficient. So tight. And beyond having only thirteen letters, what really impressed me about the Hawaiian alphabet, was the fact that unlike English, no letter “Y,” so no “A-E-I-O-U Sometimes Y” wishy washy on the fence is it a vowel or is it a consonant BS.

The Hawaiian alphabet contained the letters “A-E-I-O-U,” the real vowels, so Hawaiian’s had the requisite vowels for “A-E-I-O-U” jingle and let’s face it, that’s the meat of the jingle, that’s all you need. “Y’s” a throw in, an add on, an afterthought, a two for one, a letter to be named later as part of a trade. You know the other alphabet letters gotta think “Y’s” a real douche bag. If I’m an “A” or a “J,” I’m confronting the indecisive, vacillating, wavering “Y” and telling it to, “Make up your mind already with this neutral “sometimes” crap. Whatta you, Switzerland for Christ’s sake!”

We returned from our Hawaiian vacation and back in Ohio and things were going well until that fateful day when I got in trouble in mom’s class. She’d warned me on a couple of occasions to stop chit-chatting with my best friend, Danny Rothenberger, and today was the final straw. She marched me down to the principal’s office and made me write “I will not talk in class” one thousand times using Alpha-Bits cereal in individual Tupperware bowls. And mom must have known this fateful day would arrive as she had contacted the CW Post company, the makers of Grapenuts, and had them ship two-hundred-fifty boxes of bite size barnacles to our school and stored the cement making sugary nuggets in an office closet so I could complete the punishment anchoring every single sentence into the plastic repositories.

And if you think run-on sentences drove mom crazy, that was a drop in the bucket compared to misspelling. She was so adamant about proper spelling that we couldn’t set foot in the Toys R Us store because the spelling was incorrect. Every time we drove by the store she’d launch into a cantankerous rant about how “this is just another example of what’s wrong in this country and how if we don’t fix it, we’re goin’ to H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks in a hand basket.”

We did go into Toys R Us one time, not to shop, but so mom could demand that the manager get rid of the backwards letter “R” which ticked her off but paled in comparison to using a grammatically incorrect backwards letter “R” to spell the word “are.” All my friends were shopping for the coolest toys at Toys R Us and we’d be at some lame ass local toy store like Tanya’s Treasure Trove of Toys which trust me, was no barrel of monkeys. I was so angry after mom’s embarrassing Toys R Us tirade that as soon as we got home, I immediately grabbed a bowl of Alpha-Bits and angrily spelled out “U R Nutz, Momm!” with a backwards facing R just to spite her.

And the glory of grammar kept going and going. I remember mom and dad taking us to a San Francisco Giant’s baseball game and during a big late-inning rally the fans started chanting “Let’s Go Giants, Let’s Go Giants” at which point mom stood, turned and politely yelled to the crowd, “Excuse me, but the grammatically chant is “Let Us Go Giants, Let Us Go Giants not Let’s Go Giants which at a stadium where we don’t everyone is too informal a usage for the contraction Let’s.” I was only eight at the time, but after watching his bride chide the fans, dad glanced over at me, shook his head, handed me his beer, and said, “Suck the suds down bud, it’s the only way to get through your mother’s spectacle of spelling.”

And the grandeur and gravitas of grammar never ends. It continues to this very day. Last week, I bought a new car and feeling charitable, I decided to donate my old car to the non-profit Kars 4 Kids, and probably could’ve done it, accept that on way to the drop off, mom heard their catchy jingle on the radio, “1-877-Kars for Kids, K-A-R-S Kars for Kids, 1-877-Kars for Kids, Donate your Kar today.” Hearing the repeated misspelling of the word car with a K, well, mom flipped and vehemently said, “Sweetie, only way you’re donating your car with a “c” to that misspelled malfeasance of an organization with a “k” is over my dead body young man.” That little educational episode resulted in a six-pack of suds suck down as soon as I dropped mom off and got home – dad was so right!

And while I make fun of that time and mom’s hairbrained method, it did help me learn to spell, although it did lead to one of my more embarrassing moments ‘cause a few years later, my girlfriend had me over to her house and she brought out that game Scrabble, and I ate all the letters. Seconds after swallowing the last letter, I turned to her and said, “Hate to say anything, hun, but you might want to check the expiration date, I think the letters were a little stale.” Well, my girlfriend didn’t find that too amusing, so she stormed upstairs and moments after she left, I was hit with this intense urge to go number two.

I guess after eating all those stale wooden tiles, I was a little backed up, so I started pushing and clenching using my ass like some bizarre X-rated Pez dispenser until I finally squeezed out the word “Constipation” one wooden letter tile square at a time. Unbelievably, I looked down and the word “Constipation” turned out to be a triple word score worth three hundred points, my highest one-word total ever! And after those three excruciating minutes of squeezing out the twelve-letter word CONSTIPATION from my painful pinch hole, I wish’d I’d had a box of Alpha-Bits handy, so I could’ve carved out and added at the end of the word a well-justified and grammatically correct exclamation point, the proper punctuation which would’ve made mom proud!

Well, not wanting to lose my triple word score, I snuck down to the kitchen, grabbed three boxes of Grapenuts, jammed back upstairs, poured every box into the toilet, mixed up the cereal cement and placed the “pre-owned” Scrabble tiles in one wooden letter square at a time.

And wouldn’t ya know it, just like with the cereal bowls, the Grapenuts hardened, and the gravelly nuggets clogged the damn toilet. Well, already in hot water with my girlfriend for the stale letter comment, now she’s gonna be really pissed having to throw her toilet bowl away. Not wanting to incur her wrath, I snuck out the back, pretty sure my relationship was in the dumper, literally and figuratively, and all I could think about on the walk home was why couldn’t my best ever Scrabble 300-point triple word score have happened back at my house where I could have left it in the bowl forever as my gas station owning dad woulda never made me clean it. Of course, that’s assuming I woulda been able to find ‘em to get the damn key. For the umpteenth time dad, I’m not gonna steal the key, remember, same last name and again, I live here!