Acting Out and Walking the Bobs

  OK, I went to Rochester to visit D. for a few days.  A couple of days before I left I had to pick up the grandson at daycare. That place is a freakin’ petri dish! Every time I go there I end up sick a few days later and this was no exception.

 I arrived on Wednesday and by Friday night I woke up feeling as though someone had come along, heated up a chimney brush, and shoved it down my throat while I slept. My body felt as if I had been running with the bulls in Pamplona and lost the race to some testosterone-driven longhorn with an irrational hatred for 50-something blonds.

 D. was sweet and took good care of me…. that is until he came down with it a day and a half later. We spent the next five or six days wrapped up in blankets, watching movies, and passing the tissue box while trying to out-moan and out-whine the other.  (He won. Duh.)

  By the following Saturday night, a week later, we finally felt like human beings again and ate a good dinner then opened a couple of bottles of Valpolicella. …….OK, we had THREE bottles of red. One was a Chilean Shiraz. Very nice.  By midnight we were feeling no pain whatsoever for the first time in over a week.

  Now here’s the part you want to read about: I am an artist and several years ago I did a series of papier mache sculptures I named Bob. Yep, all of them. They had wild, woolly hair, bulging eyes, long, sharp pointy teeth, and did things only bad creatures do. The ate, and smoked, and leered, and made you understand they had carnal desires! They were the me I would be if there were no restraints!

 Well, Saturday night, after downing those bottles of red wine, D. and I decided, at around midnight, to go for a walk. I was in in my P.J.s  but with a jacket over them I figured “what the heck”. Now here’s where our “Bobs” came out. He put a collar on my neck, tied a length of rope to it and proceeded to “walk” me.  (We have soo much fun playing!)

 If anyone was driving around the Park Ave. section that night and saw a wild, handsome, mature man walking his “puppy”, a petite, cute (hey, he thinks so!), mature, blond woman then that was us. We walked for about a half hour and covered many blocks.

  The best part was when we got home. D.’s next door neighbor was in his driveway taking a suitcase out of the car as he had just returned home from a business trip. This guy is younger than us by at least ten years but is kind of a stick-up-his-ass kind of guy. You know the type: slightly pretentious, pompous at times, but not a really bad sort. D. couldn’t get to him fast enough. He walked a bee-line up the guy’s driveway and said “Hi, neighbor! How ya been?” 

 The guy didn’t know where to look ! Really! If he’d said “what the hell are you two doing?” and laughed, it would have been simply funny but he looked like a deer caught in the proverbial headlights. He blathered on about his plans for his weekend with the wife , meanwhile pretending he didn’t see the collar and leash!  Ah, man … tooo funny!  I know D. thoroughly enjoyed putting him on the spot for once.

 We both wished we’d had a camera so we could have asked him to take our picture. We decided we need to keep a scrapbook for the “Bobs”. This page would have been entitled “Taking the Bobs for a Walk”.

 It felt good to shake the cobwebs out and just play and laugh and be normal again.

What? Doesn’t everybody have a “Bob” in their lives? No?  Well, you should!