Ooooh! A Penny!

I am a direct descendant to penny-pinching parents. And by “penny-pinching” I mean “penny-picking-off-the-ground.”

As long as I can remember, my parents have been in a constant competition for who can find more money on the ground. ON. THE. GROUND. So we’ll be walking through a parking lot and you’ll hear my dad yell, “HEY! (thinking it’s a heartache, I’ll whip around) It’s a quarter!” As if he just found a 50-dollar-bill on the ground.

And it’s not like they pick up the coins and forget about it. No, no, my mom will find a nickel and dangle it in front of my dad to show him her prize only for him to say in return, “Yeah, well last week outside of the TGI Fridays I found 2 dimes, remember?”

With all this work, you’d think maybe there’s a “Found on Road” giant jar with all this roadway coinage. But no, they just put them in their wallets and pretend to be normal people again.

There are two reasons I haven’t adopted their penny-picking lifestyle.

1. I live in a city. With homeless people. They should be all over that shit. On my parents’ recent visit, my mom spotted a homeless woman scouring the ground for what had to be a treasure of change. As my mom walked by the same spot, she bent down to see what the woman had been eying. When she fell in step with my dad and I again, she said dejectedly, “Just cigarettes.”
2. I dread following in my mom’s footsteps. When I was in high school, I swung between two places: completely embarrassed and completely confident of my lunacy. On one particular day, I was deeply entrenched in the world of embarrassment when my mom and I decided to take a trip to the mall. Walking past the food court, my mom shrieked, “HEIDI! LOOK!” At her feet was a smattering of pennies, nickels, dimes, and even a few quarters. A veritable cornucopia of booty. As she bent down to pluck said coins off the mall floor tiles, I glanced a few high school boys laughing their asses off that my crazy mother was going apeshit over the change they had SUPERGLUED to the ground. I was yelling in a stage-whisper, “MA! STOP IT! THEY’RE GLUED!” But she couldn’t hear me over the roar of adrenaline and went from coin to coin, thinking that at least one of them could be freed.

I think the crowning moment of my mom’s scavenging came when all three of us were on a historical tour of Boston and had stopped in one of the oldest cemeteries in the country.

As my dad and I were in the front of the group, trying to absorb historical facts, I glanced back to see my mom bent over at the waist in front of a gravestone. When I beelined over to her, she offered up her palms full of change, her eyes twinkling at her good fortune.

Yet again, “MA! What are you doing?!” Apparently she had no knowledge that people left coins on graves as tributes, or to bring luck, or to even be used as passage into the underworld. So I forced her to return the coins to their rightful homes, much to her disappointment.

Maybe the next time I’m home, I’ll throw some pennies down in front of their house so they can feel like Scrooge McDuck.

Not Your Average Piercing Pagoda

In college, my friends and I decided to “get pierced.” Where on our bodies? It didn’t matter. Why? Because it was a bargain.

Someone got word of there being a BOGO (Buy One, Get One) sale at the local tattoo/piercing place, so naturally, we paired up and set off to get our bodies’ adorned.

Even before I started drinking beer heavily, I had a little Buddha belly, so a belly-button ring was out of the question. Lip ring? Nah, because I reasoned, “when I apply my Chapstick, I’d have to do half a lip at a time.”

People with nose piercings always looked like they were picking their nose, so I opted instead to keep the focus where I wanted it — at eye level. And that’s how it was that Esco, Kara, and I all ended up with eyebrow rings (since Spank already had one and we needed a 4th to get the BOGO discount, Homer got her belly button pierced).

Part I
The day we went, fate decided my friends needed a life experience.

As I lay face-up on the piercing table, I could hear a fellow patron chatting my friends up about the tattoo she just got and then I heard her ask if they wanted to see it. Not thinking anything unusual, I bore down and had my eyebrow pierced, paid my half and we all walked out.

Only to realize later, when she said “it” she meant her clit piercing she ALSO just had done recently.

My friends, too curious to look away, couldn’t just “Say No.” So they got an eyeful of her vaginal piercing. Sidenote: I was pissed I missed it. Let’s be serious, how often does that kind of opportunity present itself? Once in a lifetime, I tell you. Because it’s never happened to any of us again.

Part II
Now my parents…are like the mom and dad from “The Wonder Years”. A gruff, blue-collar father, and a sweet, cookie-baking, ”Let’s keep our voices down because Dad’s had a hard day” mom. So I knew neither of them would take kindly to my fashionable act of rebellion. Nor would my brother, who later remarked, “You get into a fight with a tacklebox and lose?”

Which is why I withheld information until the day my mom came to visit.

As she crested the hill and came toward me, her Crest Toothpaste smile slowly dissolved into a puzzled grimace, akin to the Christmas Grinch.

All she could say was, “Heidi…Your beautiful eyes…What did you do to your beautiful eyes?! (as if I had lost an eye from a hot poker)” And all I could reply was, “Mom, but look I chose a blue ball in the eyebrow ring to match my eyes!” The grimace held fast, her eyes suddenly steely.

We went out for a tight-lipped brunch, all the while she stared me down disappointedly.

As I waited for her outside the diner, a giant wasp flew by and stung me in the thigh, swelling to the size of a peanut butter lid. When she arrived later with some ice in a cup, I thought, “Oh good, the tension is broken…she’s still the tender caretaker. Here to help her baby heal.” But I was wrong. Because when I said, “Why? Why did this happen to me?”

She replied merely, “THAT’s what you get.”

As if Mother Nature were on her side and they were both in agreement about my stupidity.

The eyebrow ring lasted less than a year because of my summer waitressing gig at the Cracker Barrel. My options were either to put a Band-Aid on it (personally, the last thing I want to see when I’m about to order food is facial gauze) or to take it out due to it not aligning with the corporate motto of ”Country Fresh.”

I still have the little blue ball. And when I see it, I smile at its power to unleash fury in Mom Z.

My Mom, The Punisher

For those who have had the pleasure of meeting Mom Z., they know how sweet and good-natured she is. How kind and creative, even a little cheeky. Less known, is her effectiveness as one of the world’s best punishers.

Link Sausage
One summer morning, my mom made my siblings and I pancakes and sausages. Only problem was, I had a hang-up about eating link sausage. Patty sausage? Done deal. Link sausage is a different story. I dunno, maybe it was the gray color. Maybe it was the little balloon knot ends. Maybe it was the little slippery casings.

Whatever the reason, I adamantly refused to eat the sausage she spent minutes out of her day cooking over the stove for us. And that pissed her off.

So much that she figured the only way to get me to eat my link sausage would be to threaten canceling my playdate with Sharon C. that afternoon.

The funny thing is that my mom and I had played the game of wills before and she always lost. I remember many nights sitting at the dining room table refusing to eat my green beans/baked potato/peas/broccoli/spinach only to hear “You will sit here all night until you eat your green beans/baked potato/peas/broccoli/spinach (not all at one meal, mind you). You’re not going to play or go watch TV. You will sit here, at this table, until you eat your vegetables.”

And so I’d sit.

And sit.

And sit.

Until finally at 9 pm (keep in mind, we’d eat dinner between 5:00 and 5:30 pm every night), she’d be completely disgusted and say, “FINE! GO TO YOUR ROOM!” And I’d consider it another willpower win.

But I digress, back to Sharon C.

My mom assumed she was calling my bluff because of my sincere love of Barbies.

But 30 minutes later, after wailing and pleading [to do anything BUT eat link sausage], I called Sharon and told her through choked sobs that “I can’t come and play today because I didn’t eat my sausage.”

Today, at the age of 31, I still refuse to eat link sausage. But nice try, Mom.


Three-O’clock-Brock
The real test of wills was the never-ending battle between Mom Z and my sister, Gretchen. To this day, when I question why she never beat the living hell out of my sister, my mom simply replies, “I didn’t want to crush her spirit. I wanted to tame her a little, but I always admired her spirit.”

My sister is the oldest, and notoriously, the trouble-maker out of the three of us. In high school, she hit her stride of rebellion.

I think it was the summer before her junior year that was the most memorable. The legend is:
While tending to her flowerbeds, my mom noticed clumps of newly mowed grass up the siding of our white house. When she looked closer, she saw a hole the diameter of a finger in Gretchen’s bedroom window screen. That night, she slept in the living room recliner and at 3 am heard a car outside our house.

Now, my parents’ house is backed up next to a cornfield, so needless to say, they don’t see a lot of late-night traffic. When she peeked out the front door, she saw my 16-year-old sister scamper across the lawn and into a black Camaro. About 30-45 minutes later, my sister scampered back across the lawn, through her bedroom window, and into her room, where my mother was waiting for her.

The next day, the wrath of Mom Z electrified the air around the breakfast table. At the ripe age of 8, I had no idea what was going on. But I could sense something bad was about to happen.

My mom interrogated me, asking if I had known about Gretchen’s late-night rendezvous’ with (who would later be named) Three-O’Clock-Brock. Again, at 16, my sister never shared secrets with me, an 8-year-old.

Her punishment? For the foreseeable future, my mom wouldn’t trust my sister by leaving her alone. Ever.

For the rest of the summer (and fall) (and winter), Gretchen escorted my mom everywhere she went. My soccer games, my brother’s soccer games, my brother’s Boy Scout meetings, grocery shopping, visits to my mom’s friends’ houses, doctor’s appointments, etc. Nor was she allowed to talk to friends over the phone or hang out with friends.

She finally lifted the ban in January, so my sister could attend a friend’s birthday party.

Now THAT is how you give a punishment. And possibly why I was so well-behaved in high school.