Legend of the Ham Room

As I slide into the end of my 30s and head towards middle age, I begin to appreciate the stories that make up my family’s ridiculous history.  As a kid, you really don’t comprehend the great tales that make their way around the dinner table at Thanksgiving or over beers and dogs at a BBQ on the Fourth of July.    If you’re lucky though, the stories get told enough times while you age.  

This latest and greatest comes from the master yarn spinner himself, my father.  Growing up in Layton, PA…

Trust me, you won't know where that is unless you are from the area. 

Seriously…

OK, do you remember Silence of the Lambs?  

That house at the end?   Layton.

The tunnel that Clarice Starling and Jack Crawford go through on their way to the funeral home to inspect the body of the first girl killed?   Layton.

Can I continue?

OK, so, growing up on the farm in Layton, PA, my father’s bedroom was basically an icebox.   Before he came along, it was used to hang meat, usually pig, from the closet.  It had exterior walls on three sides of the room, so it kept quite cold in winter.    On January mornings, he would wake up, put on winter clothes and a coat and play in his room.   His room was a modern day nerd’s wet dream; a room that smelt of bacon.

My uncle, around 10 years my father’s junior, moved into my father’s room and it became his.  In 1980, when HE married, they renovated they the house to accommodate the styling of the latter quarter of the 20^th century.  This included redoing what had become known as The Ham Room.   My uncle’s belongings from his youth still resided in the room.  Odd ends and bits adorned the tops of dressers; a marble here, an interesting rock there, all frozen in time. 

It was summer and the room’s lack of insulation made it as cold blooded as a reptile.     Shirtless while he worked, combating the heat, he and my uncle increased the depth of the shelving in the closet, where pig carcasses once hung.  My father, not as svelte as he was in his youth, had the makings of a belly that passed onto his youngest, me.  After finishing, he spied a black marble, which he originally mistook for a cow’s eye due to its size.     The wheels began to turn in his mischievous mind.  He instructed his younger brother, now in his 30s, to go fetch my mother.    He often sent his brother on errands, as older brothers do, usually with devilish intentions.

He came down to the kitchen, where my mother was working on cleaning up from lunch or dinner, not sure which, and made up some reason to bring her upstairs to the ham room.  She obliged and climbed the rickety old steps up to the second floor.  She opened the door to the empty room where various tools and remains of carpentry sat.   My uncle said she needed to look in the closet, for whatever reason he invented.

My mother walked to the closet, and slowly opened the door.

There, in the top of the closet, was a large, stark white mass of something, with an eye fixated on her.  If filled the entire space in the doorway and actually crept out an inch after being freed from captivity of the closed door.   A scant of hair adorned the top and bottom right sides.  By definition, it could be a large scale, actual, hairy eyeball.  The blobulous eye-thing stared at her and for a moment, there was thought to be a blood curdling scream forthcoming.   Instead there was simply a sigh and “Oh, George!” that escaped her lips.   She turned and went back to her work, shaking her head in disgust.

This fleshy beast was simply my father, propped up on the shelf in the closet, shirtless, with his stomach hanging out.  His arms and his feet hidden on in either side of the door frame.  That onyx marble he found was positioned square in his navel like some kind of side show belly dancer from East Germany. 

How my father managed to wedge himself, shirtless, in the closet is a mystery.  How he managed to not succumb to the intense heat of a Cool Hand Luke style imprisonment is an amazing testament to his fortitude.   How the shelving managed to not crack and disintegrate from his weight is simply a nod to his carpentry skills.  Go dad!

And so it was the legend of the ham room was born.

Honestly, It's Not My Bag, Baby!

Last Fall, I had an unfortunate infestation of ants in my home. They poured out of the wall, underneath the baseboards and marched across the hardwood floors of my living and made a condo out of my laptop bag. I immediately took said bag and tossed it on our enclosed back porch. Then, I attended to the source of the problem, setting traps and spraying the gap between the baseboard and floor. Unfortunately, since I am a lazy f**k, I never got around to fumigating my bag, which had now become a retirement community for stinkbugs as well.

In the meantime I had begun taking my wife’s laptop bag to work. She never used it for anything, but it wasn’t exactly the most manly thing in the world. It was a Vera Bradley, solid color, quilted laptop bag. I didn’t have a lot of options. I knew my work was not going to replace my bag and I didn’t feel like buying a new one for a work laptop. I simply just kept using my wife’s and stowed it out of sight for the duration of my stay with my former employer.

Flash forward to this week. I get up and proceed to get for work at my current job, which is an hour drive away. I go out into our living room and see that one of my cats has knocked over my new, company issued laptop bag, possibly to lay on it, as they always do. Then, I realized the horror. One of my other cats has decided to piss all over it, leaving a puddle of urine laying there.

I cleaned it off best I could, using Lysol wipes and hot water. I simply did not have time to tear apart the entire house, waking my wife and daughter at 6:00 AM in order to find a replacement. Besides, after I used the wipes on the bag, it seemed to be OK. That was, until I was driving home and the smell really hit me. I couldn’t take it back to work in that condition.

That night, my wife suggested taking her bag to work, like I had before. I was a little leery. When you’ve worked at the same company for nearly ten years and you do something like bringing a purse to work. They kind of give you the benefit of the doubt if you’ve never done it before. When you’ve been at a company for only six months and do something like that, your coworkers don’t understand your life the same way. Everyone at my old job knew the tale of my cat causing us to have to replace the floor in our basement so this was simply par for the course. At the new job, they don’t know this and will generate their own opinions.

Needless to say, I took my wife’s bag. I knew it was probably a bad move and I should have really considered, putting it in my desk drawer, out of sight. Unfortunately, I had an all day meeting and simply did not have the opportunity to do this.

About ten minutes into the meeting, of which I am sharing my laptop screen on the projector, I receive an IM.

“Where did you get the pretty laptop bag?”

Fortunately, I had moved all of my email and IM screens to my laptop and only extended my windows desktop to the projector. This message was only visible to me. Well, me and the three other people with which my coworker decided to share. Suddenly, the incident took on a life of its own as more people, including my boss and my boss’ boss, were chiming in about my lovely bag.

During a break, I was able to come out and try some damage control, to no avail. People were laughing. I wasn’t sure why. Then I found out. We have nine large flat screen monitors hanging throughout the cube farm which displays stats and various other bits of information for the department. The slide show rotates through different screens and eventually, I noticed what everyone was laughing about. Tucked in between two of the slides was a picture of two or my coworkers modeling the bag in rather funny poses with the title of “The Companion Bag” above the words “MyLastName & CO.”, essentially making this an advertisement.

I couldn’t help but laugh because while it was making fun of me for bringing my wife’s bag, it also put their manhood on the line to have been photographed modeling it. Needless to say, it was all in good fun and if I can’t laugh at myself, I shouldn’t laugh at others. I gave them a “Well Played” and then went back into my meeting. Of course, I had to share and explain the incident, reiterating that my cat caused the situation.

I made sure that I found a suitable replacement for the next day, while I wait until my regular bad dries after being washed. It just goes to show that if I had ever expressed doubts about coming here, they made me feel welcome, even at my own expense.

Bravo, crew.
Now, I must disown my cat.