Subbing’s Not for Sissies

By Emily Parke Chase –

“Oh, why didn’t I listen to my teachers?  Why didn’t I pay attention to those who gave me instruction?” Proverbs 5:13 (NLT)
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Recline in Peace

By Emily Chase

Crack!

My husband plunks down on our recliner and breaks the mechanism.  The chair now has a severe cant to one side.  After years of warning our children not to abuse the chair, my husband has broken it himself.

“Don’t worry, Gene,” I assure him.  “The chair came with a lifetime warranty.”

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Football Highlights

By Emily Chase

Every New Year’s Day, my father and my three older brothers SuperGlued themselves to the couch in order to watch football for eight or ten hours straight.  They’d tune in to the Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, Gator Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, one after another all through the afternoon and into the evening with only brief time-outs to reach for the chips bowl.  I didn’t share their passion for pigskin but I could get excited about the occasional touchdown.

My mother had even less interest in football yet she always looked forward to this sports marathon.  An hour before game time, she would retrieve all the family silver and pile it at one end of the couch.  Serving dishes, flatware, vases, teapots and trays were all about to get their annual polishing.  On the coffee table in front of the couch, she’d set out the polish, a plastic basin filled with warm soapy water, and a pile of soft rags.

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Trimming Traditions

By Emily Chase

Celebration of Christmas demands that we maintain certain family traditions year after year. Some traditions satisfy the desires of eager children, while others protect exhausted parents. Here are five easy suggestions for trimming those traditions to fit the current season.

Decorating the house is the first challenge of the season. Stores begin decorating their shelves before Halloween so why not follow their example and get an early start? Combine Halloween costumes with Christmas themes and have your kids dress up as a Christmas wreath or an oversized Christmas stocking. When they come home, just have them hang the costume on the front door or over the fireplace mantel. Your neighbors have helpfully filled the stocking with candy treats so you can cross that chore off your list too.

Have you accumulated a mountain of cardboard cutouts covered with macaroni and glitter that your kids made in preschool? Your children are now in high school, and your family tree is beginning to look like more a bulletin board covered with post it notes. Start a new tradition. Recycle those ornaments! Have your children write notes on the back and send them to their former teachers as greeting cards. Think of the joy the teachers will experience knowing the child that emptied the entire bottle of glitter into the fruit punch still remembers them.

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Demise of a Salesman

By Emily Parke Chase

The salesman appeared at my home ten minutes before the hour and parked his car behind my own vehicle, preventing any possibility of my escape.  From his trunk, Jim (not his real name) pulled a week’s worth of luggage. The biggest box held a vacuum cleaner. Three other boxes contained miraculous attachments that would turn this machine into the Harry Houdini of housecleaning. As he entered my home, I mentioned that I already owned a Kirby.

“Really? How long have you had it?”   “About ten years.”  “Well, we’ve spent two million dollars improving the machine.”  Jim displays the new attachments, all duplicates of mine which are stored downstairs under a tidy layer of dust.  “Ah, but have you seen this?” He picks up a hard rubber attachment and wrestles it inside out. He works hard to make this process look easy. “Of course, this is new. It becomes softer after a few times. With the blower feature, this attachment can clean out a drain.”  Have I been negligent? Do people vacuum their kitchen drains weekly?  “Can I use it to plunge a clogged toilet?”  “No, if you turned the machine on, water would splash all over you.”  The picture of filth spewing all over me is unpleasant, but wouldn’t a plugged kitchen drain do the same? That drain gums up only when the sink is full of tepid greasy water. This device cost two million dollars and I still have to bail out the sink first?

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