Duck, Duck, Me

Unk tagged me with this randomness thing where you have to tell eight things about yourself and yeah, I did this not too long ago but maybe somebody will need these additional flaky (but ever so boring) facts one day for trivia about famous screenwriters. Or, you know, not-so-famous ones who tried really hard ---

I'm addicted to antique books. I collect readers, novels, and children's books from the early 1900's but I have a few music and history books too. It's like reading a museum artifact every time I open one. I still have a few of my own childhood books. When I'm gone, I hope whoever winds up with my books treats them like treasures a little girl loved and cherished her whole life.

While we're on books, some of my favorite authors are Alexandre Dumas, Raphael Sabatini, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Victor Hugo. Oh, and I got hooked on those Lemony Snicket books, too.

I am a musophobic - no joke. Outdoors, if a mouse is being batted around by my cat, I'm cool. Kill it, kitty. No biggie. But indoors, I see a rodent and get chest pains like a heart attack and I actually believe I'll die if the vile thing touches me. No, I'm not talking about the lady standing in a chair kind of scared. I'm talking flashbacks to rats crawling in my hair when I was a kid and biting my arms and legs while I collected eggs in the wrecked out cars my great grandmother used as chicken coops. It's an illness. I almost lost my mind a few months ago when Norway rats invaded my office and took up residence in my printer.

My mother's father wrote Wasted Days and Wasted Nights for Freddy Fender on a cocktail napkin in a bar. My mother still has the napkin. But Freddy Fender now has sole credit for most of the music written with or by Wayne Duncan. If you get into any music business, make sure you have an entertainment attorney and don't' marry a sixteen year old girl in Honduras when you're a seventy year old man about to die of cirrhosis of the liver.

My other grandfather would make trips to Canada and type all his postcards to me. I still have every card. I also have his typewriter. His name for me was Bluebell. My brother was Tadpole. My sister was Daisy. He never used our given names. That was just his way. So was telling stories. I'm embarrassed to admit how old I was before I figured out miniature monkeys do not sit inside traffic signals changing the lights. Sorry to spoil it for you if you didn't know. He also rolled his own cigarettes, blew smoke rings, did a strange alternating rhythmic thing with his pectoral muscles, and could suck a radish up his nose from across the table. Good times.

My mother was a teenage beauty queen in Harlingen but was disqualified for lying about her age. She wasn't old enough to enter. She got married and began having babies shortly after that so she never entered again. She had three children before she was twenty. We now look the same age.

Sunday is chocolate covered cherries day. Or Snickers day. And, Big Red. Big Red is God's soda, you know. At least, that's what I always believed as a little girl in San Antonio. God probably also eats chocolate covered cherries and Snickers although I doubt He only eats them on Sunday. He also doesn't have to work out at the gym the rest of the week to burn off His excess calories.

If you ever send me flowers, make them white daisies. I love roses but I have a yard full of my own and cut roses don't live very long. White daisies are just so darn happy! Oh, and I like bluebells but tadpoles don't make a very nice bouquet. They do, however, show up by the thousands when your backyard is flooded and they conjure up fond memories of a radish sniffing grandfather.