The shopping is done, the presents wrapped and
under the tree, and the cookies and bourbon for Santa placed carefully on the
fireplace hearth. All that’s left now
are the looks of disappointment on the children’s faces when they awake to realize
their Christmas dreams were over-anticipated and undercapitalized.
Having survived the longest winter on record,
it’s hard to believe we’re right back where we started last year, raking snow
along with leaves and playing pond hockey before Thanksgiving.
Living in Illinois is a challenge ill-suited
for most. Not so much because our state
is run by corrupt politicians with no moral compass who are bereft of any shred
of integrity and would gladly drive the state into financial ruin for their own
selfish gain, but because this is where our children live.
The teen years are without question the most
vulgar stage of human development save zygote, and why the wealthy send their
children to boarding school. To wit,
Amanda is determined to find the dark cloud in every silver lining, and Ally
wants to fight with anything that looks at her funny, including furniture. It’s gotten so bad K & M would have moved
if not for the likelihood that the girls might track them down and press
charges.
Given the daily melodrama, K & M have
learned to appreciate Taffy all the more.
Unburdened by human sentimentality, dogs have a litter, eat the
stillborn and infirm, and then forget about the rest as soon as they’re weaned. No wonder dogs are so carefree.
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Speaking of Taffy, unfazed by her eight inch,
eleven pound stature, she has taken to stalking and attacking the herd of deer
that empty our bird feeders at night.
Apparently convinced she’s a fully grown timber wolf, we last saw her
disappearing into the night attached to the leg of an unaware buck.
Just when K & M thought parenthood couldn’t
get more thankless, Amanda began high school, much to her dismay as a lowly
freshman. Nowadays, high schools exist
mainly as a place for society to store its teenagers until they’re old enough
to be tried as adults. Disappointed over
the discontinuation of her nightly turn-down service, Amanda posted a scathing
one-star review of her domestic accommodations on Yelp, rating the guest
services as poor, the housekeeping and laundry inefficient and slow, and the
concierge subpar. She has threatened to
take her business to the Four Seasons if service doesn’t drastically
improve. Against her better judgment,
Karen routinely caves in to Amanda’s demands out of sympathy over her honors
and AP teachers working her like a Chinese coal miner on seven day shifts.
Middle school has appealed to Ally so far. How she has again managed to earn straight
A’s in spite of belonging to concert and honor band, yearbook, chorus, earning
a spot on the 6th/7th grade basketball team, and continuing to play travel
softball is a puzzle. K & M are
pretty sure she’s using her lunch money to buy performance enhancing
drugs. Given her hectic schedule, she
enjoys taking time to “chill” which she usually does on the toilet – iPod in
one hand and iPad on her lap – like a technologically adept 60 year old
man. K & M have considered
installing a fax line and Wi-Fi hotspot in the bathroom so she can be more
productive on the job. 
As the girls get older and more informed of
politics, family rule has sadly evolved from a dictatorship to a democracy
whereby each person has a voice. Because
we are a two party system with equal membership in each, important family
decisions are often deadlocked in an unbreakable stalemate with neither side
willing to yield or compromise. Such was
the fate of Karen’s carefully planned summer vacation to Gettysburg which
devolved into four days at Cedar Point in Ohio where Karen and Amanda ate
funnel cakes and shopped while Ally and Mark rode every coaster in the
park. Mark still can’t turn his head to
the left and Karen throws up just looking at the photo album.
In April, Mark dove back into self-employment
with all the familial support of a Middle East military campaign. Freed from the shackles of servitude, Mark
now spends most of his time driving the girls places, walking Taffy, and
unclogging toilets. In a case of
ultimate irony, Mark spent as much money restoring the lawn in September as he
saved in weekly maintenance fees by killing it with Roundup in June.
In other football news, after a promising
preseason, the Bears were decimated by injuries and forced to field a team
consisting of a mediocre punter, three high school soccer players, the guy who
drives the injury cart, and Jay Cutler’s mom.
The Illini proved once and for all why they deserve to be counted among
the elite D-3 schools, winning just enough games to save their incompetent
coach his job and get invited to an April 17 bowl game.
Though oft overshadowed by materialism and greed,
it would seem the true purpose of Christmas is to remind mankind of what it
means to be Christian, which according to American satirist Ambrose Bierce is
“One who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent
with a life of sin.” Amen to that.
Merry
Christmas to All, and to All Good Grief,
Karen,
Mark, Amanda, Ally, and Taffy
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