Jack Sprat and the Mrs.

Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat, Weekend Edition on 3/9/12

Do you remember Jack Sprat and his wife?  No, they haven’t been in the news for espionage or for embezzling funds or for blatant infidelity.  These are the characters from the old nursery rhyme.  Surely, you remember Jack Sprat, the man who could eat no fat?  Remember his wife?  How could you?  She didn’t even get a name.  I suppose we are supposed to be satisfied with calling her Mrs. Jack Sprat.  Regardless of her appellation, we do get the picture that she was the rounder one because she simply could eat no lean.

To me, it’s an ideal relationship.  The Sprats could go out to dinner, and after the Mrs. had wedged herself into the booth, and Mr. Sprat had planted his knobby knees under the other side of the booth, they could order just one meal.  He would guzzle down the water and chomp on a few ice chips while the Mrs. went to work on the creamy mashed potatoes and the slab of beef.  I’m sure she would need a milkshake, and if you’re going to splurge on a milkshake, why would you deny yourself the whipped topping and that single Maraschino cherry?  Jack is going to indulge in none of that.

What about the blooming onion with the sauce?  It has its basis in a vegetable.  Forget that. Jack might have to settle for only a whiff of that calorie-laden decadence, and even that might be too much for him.  The aroma alone would probably bowl him over.  He would probably just eat the green beans, even though that would seem somewhat cannibalistic.  If the man has any fat on him, it’s going to be in the form of his wallet. 

When the dessert rolls around, she might let him have a bit of the fruit filling from her pie – if he behaves himself and doesn’t make rude comments regarding her calorie intake.

I feel something like that couple.  My husband possesses much better will power than I do.  If he decides he will or won’t do something, you may as well throw in the towel.  You might feel like throwing the towel at him, but he is fairly firm in his convictions. 

He has a very strict dietary regimen.  Lots of tomatoes and fish – oatmeal and green tea, almonds and walnuts, blueberries, and spinach salads, and the occasional sugar-free cookie.  I, on the other hand, will everything else.  By choice.

The other day, our nine-year-old daughter complained that he hadn’t even tasted the birthday cake that she had dutifully made for her brother, even though she had removed the frosting from his tiny portion.  (I might have helped save the planet by making sure the frosting did not go to waste.)

When I conveyed his latest affront, he decided to be a good sport and made a big show of eating that one morsel of cake.  One.  It put the biggest smile on our little girl, because Betty Crocker isn’t always a piece of cake, you know.  It takes so little to make some people happy.  For a smile like that, I could have eaten the whole cake.  In fact, I might have…in small portions, of course.

So, what is the secret to the happy marriage of Jack and his nameless wife with the shameless eating habits?  We’re never told if Mrs. Sprat is a marathon runner.  You never know.  At least she might have been assigned a number for us to remember her by.  From the illustrations that accompany these rhymes, though, I’m going to take a wild guess and say that she was not.

You may recall that my wedding and engagement rings had to be cut off of my finger in the summer, just a few months before our 25^th anniversary.  That was because the 25 extra pounds I have added over the years had decided to aggregate right around that ring finger.

My husband, however, has lost 45 pounds over the last year.  A couple of months ago, as he was changing a filter in the car (at night), his wedding band slipped right off and went clinking into the abyss.  It hasn’t turned up anywhere in the car, and we still haven’t found it in the driveway or the grass. 

So, as a result, 25 years into our marriage, neither of us has our original wedding band on.  It’s a good thing I don’t believe in omens.

In the meantime, if someone wants to lend me a metal detector, don’t be shy. Mrs. Sprat will be happy to take you on a tour of the driveway.

The Prong and the Stone, and the Boy who Found it

Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat Weekend July 29, 2011

To continue last week’s tale: My engagement ring had to be cut off because my ring had refused to cooperate and expand along with the rest of my being. The ring, although snuggly packed onto my finger, had to be removed because the diamond had fallen out, and the exposed prongs which made my every gesticulation dangerous to clothing, furniture, and small children.

My 16-year-old son Sergio found the dearly departed diamond. With a boy like mine around, I should have known not to worry. He’s been training for this task all his life. When he was two, every time we went to a park, he would dart off and immediately begin picking up shards of glass. It was a disturbing and distressing behavior; I did not see him as a future park ranger.


Other moms would look at me suspiciously. It was going to be a hard sell to say he was community conscious, and just doing this out of respect for nature, even in California. After all, he was two years old and looked entirely too excited. Also, I had to coax and cajole him to gently deposit his treasures into the trashcan, much as you might do when convincing someone to back away from a window ledge. He never failed to look back at me before releasing the shard. When you are that young, you are ever hopeful that, this time, Mom might let you keep your treasure.


Before he was born, I had produced two relatively civilized daughters. They liked shiny things, undoubtedly, but they never acted like this. Whether he was attracted to the glinting of glass in the light, or to the glass’ power to cut, I do not know. Nothing I could do would hinder his dangerous delight until the day he finally sliced his finger. I suppose even experts are fallible. He had been picking up glass for about six months then.


We have established the boy’s attraction to shiny things that can cut. In fact, Sergio’s first words (after the standard “dada” and “mama”) were “sharp knife.” His first sentence was “poke eye.” Most parents might have feared these early indicators of criminal behavior, but being of Indian origin, we knew better. Clearly, these actions pointed to a future in medicine. Laser eye surgery, perhaps.


Sergio spent practically the first ten months of his life glued to my hip. Any photos I took of him tended to show him screaming, because of course, it involved two seconds of separation from his mom. It’s good to remember these things when your son is sixteen and too manly to have much to do with you. It might be embarrassing for him to hear this now, so I’ll only tell you.


The first time that I could disconnect the child from my body was when my mother-in-law traveled all the way to America to come see him. Frail, diabetic, and 72 years old, she traveled by herself. I believe it was her first trip abroad. But she came to see her first, and at that time, her only, grandson. He was her tenth grandchild, but the first grandson from any of her six children. It’s not that she didn’t adore the nine granddaughters: It gave her inordinate pleasure to know that the family name would be carried on.


My mother-in-law, Lyra Maria Artemisia Ribeiro was a tall and elegant lady. She died in Mumbai, India on December 28th, 2008. I miss her. Throughout her 23 years of widowhood, she remained devoted to her husband and her home, rarely allowing herself to leave it or her memories of him. So for her to say, “I am coming to America to see my grandson” was extraordinary. When she began her four-month visit, the nine-month-old baby was practically an appendage of mine. She would peel him away from me, and would totter about with the protesting “Baba.” She sat and fed him bites of food, and played games with him. He learned to tolerate the separation. At ten months, we finally got him to crawl. I set down the little rice-cooker power cord as a lure. For that, and that alone, he was willing to crawl.


I may have been an accomplice, but I don’t think I programmed these bizarre behaviors into him. Our pediatrician said that Sergio was the only patient who had ever asked about the fire sprinklers in the ceiling above the medical examination table. Most of the other three-year-olds concentrated on the cartoon characters plastered overhead. But then again, not many other three-year-olds had a light bulb collection: dead and alive, curly and colored. Normally uncommunicative, he became quite chatty with any stranger if he happened to see a fused bulb. He would give them his winning grin and ask for the bulb.


So, when you see your child engaged in odd behaviors, don’t despair. Everyone is made in God’s image. I think He knows what He is doing – not that He needed my approval. Besides, you never know when your child’s bizarre interests will come in really, really, handy.

Requiem for a Ring

Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat Weekend edition, July 22, 2011

For two days I wore what had to be the world’s ugliest engagement ring. Then, we cut it off. The ring, that is, not the engagement. I had been wearing that engagement ring for more than 25 years. In all those years it remained intact and beautiful, but this week I had to resign myself to fate and weight.

Fate: on Monday, the diamond fell out. Why? The prongs, the trusted backup singers and bodyguards of the precious gem, went on strike. Perhaps they became weak or disgruntled. Most likely, they grew jealous of the attention bestowed upon the glamorous girl in the center, the one that lived for the limelight, snatching up all the light and firing it back, winking and twinkling for all the world to see her wit and warmth, while the prongs were relegated to the subterranean world, doomed to a pedestrian life of functionality, their dim world filled with dullness and drudgery. Twenty-five years of this, and the upstart prongs had had enough. Sure, Miss Diamond could have been useful like her industrial cousins, the ones employed to cut glass and other lesser materials. But no, for 25 years she sat on her behind, pretending to be delicate, with never a word of thanks to the prongs who showcased her to the world. On Monday, the prongs simply refused to do their duty and effectively evicted Miss Diamond.  Fortunately, we (being my sixteen-year-old son) found the diamond. Thanks, Sergio.


Weight: when you augment your frame, which has not increased in height, with thirty pounds, some of that weight will choose to distribute itself on your finger. Fat is very democratic in that way. While it may have its favored spots where it tends to do the most campaigning, it does eventually reach the whole populace.


I noticed my ring when my hand brushed and scraped my face. I looked in horror at the prongs, pointing upward with beckoning arms. What did they want from me? Praise? There, where the diamond once sat, was a dark pit, a crater - an ugly pock.


The ring would have to come off. Not only was it now hideous, it had also become a hazard, scraping and snagging angrily at things. Whether the prongs were looking for revenge or attention, I could not be sure, but they were going about it the wrong way. (I’m so tempted to say, “the prong way,” but then I’m afraid that one of my children will read this and will groan at my stupid pun.)


I struggled to remove the ring, first with soap, then with oil, and finally with some specialty spray offered to me at our local jewelry store. I think I expended their whole bottle, desperately spraying at my finger and all around the ring, hoping that the wedged ring would miraculously slip off. Sure, I could get it to do a few pirouettes around the ring finger, and if I didn’t concentrate too much on it, or try too hard, I could get the ring to rise about a centimeter in the course of these revolutions. But then it always met with insurmountable odds: the Knuckle of Death. The knuckle was wide and engorged in angry colors. At this point, the ring and I always declared defeat.


Later that night, my husband convinced me that cutting was the only option. From there, it took just a few minutes. It’s a good thing this man has invested thousands of dollars in tools. That way, when he is ready to do a delicate task like snip off his wife’s rings, all he has to do is to ask to borrow the six-year-old’s tools. Could he go bring the diagonal cutters from his little birthday toolbox to his father?

The youngest was off in a flash, because by definition, young children must run in the house, no matter how mundane or urgent their business. Never mind the lessons they have learned when skating through the kitchen on an unwanted apple core or the time they whacked their heads on furniture or a sibling. The only time they will not run is when they feel the urge to throw up, in which case they will turn to you for moral support and a landing spot for their vomitus.

Snip and spread, and both rings went off. It will cost over $ 200 to repair the engagement ring, which is half of what it originally cost. My husband says forget the whole thing, and he will just get me another one. After all, isn’t our 25th anniversary coming up in a few months?


Hmm. Should I be greedy or sentimental? Either way, don’t tell the prongs what we decide. I’m a little afraid of those girls.