You're Doing Great!

by Tom Papa

  “That’s not a word,” Cynthia says as she smiles.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I’m going to challenge.”

  “Fine.”

  Out comes the dictionary.

  “I’m going to bed,” my father says as he knocks the hourglass over.

  “Me too,” follows my mother.

  My niece is asleep with her face in her gummy worms.

  My wife flips through the dictionary like it’s evidence.

  “Aha!” she screams.

  Jerry bolts up, terrified, and knocks the entire Scrabble board in the air. Tiles go flying everywhere. Hours of intense game play has been diminished to a meaningless pile.

  “No!” she screams.

  “I win!” says Jerry.

  “You don’t win.”

  “Yes, I do. If anything happens to the board, you go by whoever has the highest score. House rules.”

  My wife punches him right in the chest, grabs a gummy worm, and storms off.

  I think Jerry made that up. As far as I can tell, everybody loses. Not just today but any time we play. It always ends this way. Until next time when we play dominoes, and that’s a game where my mother turns into a beast from hell.

  TIME FOR DINNER

  We—meaning my wife and two daughters—eat dinner together at the kitchen table every night. I didn’t realize this was an unusual thing until my children went to school, became friends with other kids, and came back with stories about what goes on in their households.

  There are reports of everyone in the family doing “their own thing.” Grabbing food by themselves, going off to their own rooms, eating whatever they can find, and going to bed without seeing each other for days at a time.

  So, why exactly are you living together?

  The main reason we demand that everyone show up at the kitchen table is because I want to see their faces.

  “I want to see your face” is my response to most questions my kids ask: “Why do we have to watch TV together?” “Why do we have to come with you to the barbecue?” “Why are you in my room?”

  “Because I want to see your face.”

  And I do. I understand that everyone needs alone time, when they need to be by themselves, away from the family so they can do whatever it is they want to do without their parents or siblings bothering them. I get it. But if I want to see your face, I don’t care what you want.

  How are you going to know if your kid is acting like a weirdo? How are you going to know if they’re drinking? Or sad? Or dyed their hair purple?

  By sitting down to dinner.

  You want to know what mood your kids are in? Eat dinner with them.

  Want to see how healthy they are? Watch them eat. If they are poking around at the peas with bloodshot eyes, you’ve got a problem.

  Why would you not eat together? Because the kids think it’s weird and it’s uncomfortable being looked at? Yeah, exactly. What do you think the rest of life is going to be? Weird and uncomfortable. Where else are you going to learn how to pretend to be engaged in a dinner with people you don’t feel like talking to? At home with your family.

  Eating dinner together is when we take care of the family business. We sit around the table like we’re board members of this giant corporation we are running. We discuss how things are going in the company. We get reports about lightbulbs that are out, toilets that need fixing. We bring up our schedule for the year. That’s when we plan out where we’re spending the holidays, who’s coming over, and who has to sit next to Uncle Ken.

  We share reports from the satellite offices, what’s going on at cousins’ homes, we tell jokes about Grandpa. We hear about boyfriends and girlfriends and rumors, and through this the children learn who they’re allowed to dump on.

  Sometimes there’s a complete breakdown and we will laugh harder than we can remember as one of the kids gets up and decides to share her new dance or her imitation of Mom when she takes a photo on her smartphone.

  Sometimes we don’t talk at all, when the only sounds are the fork hitting the plate and unusually loud swallowing. That’s okay. I just want to look up and see them and have them see me and realize we’re family.

  That’s why we eat together.

  How are your kids going to know you love them when you don’t feed them their favorite dinner? If you don’t make homemade sourdough waffles for them on Sunday? If they don’t help you when you’re about to flip the frittata from the pan to the plate? Pancakes aren’t just a breakfast item, they’re a greeting card to your children that say you care.

  If you don’t cook for them and sit with them and give them someone to talk to, you cease being their parent and turn into a strange roommate they share a refrigerator with.

  There are rules, like no getting up early and leaving the table. There are no phones at the table. Everyone helps clean up. But mainly it’s fun. We have “Waffle Week,” when we have to eat a waffle every day, in a new way, all week long. We have breakfast for dinner. Sometimes we make it simple and eat plain pasta with peas.

  Sometimes we don’t make it at all.

  And of course there’s bread. There’s always bread.

  I’m sure it’s easier telling kids to fend for themselves and not seeing them. But it’s also easy to lose track of each other, and before you know it they’ve gotten their own apartment and moved out with no memory of you at all.

  If this sounds old-fashioned, that’s great. Some other weird things we do from another era: We make them come with us to the food store. We make them keep their bedroom doors open. We make them come with us on vacation. Sundays are family day, with very few exceptions. And they’re never allowed to fall in love, get married, and leave us. I’m not sure how long that one is going to last.

  DON’T OPEN THE MAIL

  Nothing good ever comes in the mail anymore. Gone are the days when you’d get a friendly letter from that old college buddy. There are no more love letters showing up with lips imprinted on an envelope scented with perfume. Now, there’s nothing but terror shipped in an envelope by strangers plotting your financial ruin.

  They say the mail is slow. Yeah, slow like a sneak attack. While you’re going about your life, making margaritas with friends and shopping for a pet hermit crab, thinking everything is fine, you have no idea that someone out there is crafting a letter for your demise. Some insurance company, bank, or credit card company that you had no idea existed is gunning for you by the U.S. Postal Service.

  My fear of the mail really picked up as soon as I bought my first house. Before that I had only brushed up against the system; now I was all in and I wasn’t ready. I truly couldn’t believe that a bank had given me a loan in the first place. It was during the housing boom when they were giving away money to anyone with a face. I applied for a big fat mortgage over the phone and they gave it to me. This didn’t seem right. This didn’t seem like it should happen. And the world soon found out that it was all kinds of wrong.

  We celebrated our first night in our new home among the boxes eating supermarket cake and drinking affordable wine. After everyone went to sleep, I lay on the couch and was overcome with panic. How was I going to pay for all this? I hadn’t thought this through. There was a whole list of expenses I hadn’t anticipated. Furniture costs, water bills, taxes. I had no idea that once a year the state collects a mountain of money all at once. And how would they let you know? Through the mail, of course.

  I was suddenly involved in a very real and terrifying game of Monopoly, but instead of a roll of the dice, every day I went to the mailbox and picked a Chance card. Every day I was being told that I had to pay a fine to a utility or that I owed money to someone but that I should be grateful because at least I didn’t have to go straight to jail.

  I used to love the mail. When I was young and poor and didn’t own anything, the mail was fun. Anything that came was more than I had. A card from my grandmother with a five-dollar bill in it. A Christmas card from a family we didn’t even remember
.

  Maybe even a toy from the good people at the Cheerios company.

  Not anymore. Now I get death threats from the city that if I don’t pay a fine by a date that has already passed, they’re going to put a lien on my house.

  Now I get notices about jury duty. DMV renewal notices that are always twice as expensive as I think they should be. And how about bank statements? I have a stack of unopened bank statements because they seem to show up three times a day, and if anyone is being that aggressive, I don’t want to look. It’s gotten to the point where I can sense how bad the news is by the thickness of the envelope.

  I dread the credit card bills. It has all the mystery of the Oscars, only you are guaranteed not to win. You will instead be shocked by how much you spent.

  Every time I open my credit card statement I’m perplexed and think, “If I really spent all this money, where’s all the stuff and why don’t I feel better?”

  Certified mail is the worst. Certified mail is mail that’s so nasty that when they send it they want to make sure, in writing, that you received the bad news, just for fun.

  As the expression goes, “Don’t shoot the messenger,” but seriously, screw the mailman. That’s like saying we shouldn’t be annoyed with the lady who writes you a parking ticket. He knows what he’s doing.

  To be honest, the mailman was never a great guy. Apparently for years the mailman was creeping around having sex with everyone in the neighborhood. We thought he was delivering packages and all the while he was looking out for husbands who were at work or fighting overseas. The mailman is a real creep. He’s like the milkman who gets more action. Not that I’m giving the milkman a pass. I’m sure the dirty milkman was just as perverted but only had worse hours.

  The home phone is quickly becoming as frightening as the mail. Who calls on the home phone? No one friendly, no one nice, no one looking to chat. Bill collectors, telemarketers, and your mom with news that someone just died.

  The smartphone hangs in your pocket like a friend who’s always looking out for you. The home phone stands at its post like a prison guard. When the smartphone rings it sounds like you won something. When the home phone rings you know it’s time to get back to your cell.

  An email isn’t half as scary as the regular mail. It’s hard to be afraid of something that you can toss in the trash with the tip of your finger. And there’s no way I’m going to have any fear of mail that can’t be certified.

  Junk mail finds its way into your home by any means necessary. I keep an alternate email account that receives nothing but junk, but there’s no way to create an alternate real-life mailbox. Archaic mailing lists left over from that one time you had a magazine subscription creates a direct flow of junk mail that never stops.

  For some reason, my thirteen-year-old daughter ended up on a senior citizens’ mailing list. She gets offers every day for hearing aids, colostomy bags, and updates on her AARP membership. While her sister is opening birthday cards from her grandmother, she’s trying to make sense of a flyer explaining that it’s never too early to pick out a mausoleum.

  My wife made the mistake of donating to an animal rights cause once and now the National Park Foundation, the ASPCA, and Jane Goodall send her something every week begging for more. I secretly throw it all away. I got caught once, but she wasn’t that angry. The only one she really gets mad about is if she catches me throwing out a Bed Bath & Beyond coupon. In her mind that’s grounds for divorce.

  The only way to not fear the mail is not to care. If you don’t care that you owe people money and you don’t care that the bill collectors will send harshly worded letters and the energy people will send disconnection notices, then the mail is nothing to be afraid of.

  A large portion of America is built on people who don’t care. Millions live beyond their means and drive cars they can’t afford and no one seems to care. Once in a while someone will go to jail or end up broke, but that seems to take a really long time.

  I don’t know how you can live that way. If I owe anybody anything, I can’t sleep at night. Donald Trump lived for years owing millions of dollars and didn’t flinch. He owed thousands of people money and just didn’t pay them. I know a bunch of them from living in Jersey. They hated him and screamed and yelled about him and that didn’t bother him in the least. He just went to another bank and borrowed more and more money. Can you imagine what was showing up in his mailbox?

  But for the rest of us the bills have to be paid, the forms filled out, and we have to sign for the certified mail.

  What a bunch of suckers.

  HAVE YOU EVER BEEN WATCHING TV, HEARD A SCARY NOISE IN YOUR PLACE, AND RATHER THAN INVESTIGATE JUST RAISED THE VOLUME? I HAVE …

  THERE’S A GHOST IN YOUR HOUSE

  If you don’t have any friends, I recommend you get a ghost.

  There’s a ghost in my house. He wears a trench coat and carries what looks like a machine gun from World War II. He may have returned to my house after the war and had a hard time or maybe he was killed on duty, but either way he lives with me now.

  And I have a photo of him for proof.

  That’s right. It’s on my phone right now and it’s clear as day. This isn’t one of those smudges that may or may not be something. This is absolutely something. My security camera snapped a picture of him walking in my office. This was on the very first day that I had installed it and the ghost and I were both caught off guard.

  The camera is a simple device that you plug in and aim into the room or out your window or wherever you think there’s foul play or something interesting to catch. My friend introduced it to me after he had caught an acquaintance in his apartment having sex with someone who was not his wife.

  Apparently the guy had been running around complaining about his marriage and was trying to win their mutual friends onto his side. He went to great lengths spreading a rumor that his wife was cheating on him and despite all his best, faithful efforts they may break up. While my friend was out of town he thought he’d help out by giving his poor buddy a place to stay. What the guy didn’t know was that there were security cameras throughout the apartment and as soon as one of these cameras sensed movement it sent out an email alert.

  My friend got a ping on his phone, checked his email, and there was a naked man scampering around his kitchen. Two seconds later another ping, and now there were two naked people looking through the refrigerator for a snack, giggling and hugging like a happy couple, and one of those people was not the guy’s wife. Busted.

  Naturally, I bought the same camera immediately.

  I installed it in my office at home, plugged it in, and headed out on the road for a show in Denver, fairly confident that I wouldn’t catch anyone naked but maybe I’d get to see my dog once in a while. I was sitting backstage waiting to go on when I got my first alert. I opened the email, checked the feed, and there was my dog, scampering around my office, looking for snacks, totally naked! It wasn’t very scandalous but still very exciting. Here I was in a totally different state and I could see real-time activity in my office. What a world.

  I instantly thought what a cool beginning to a horror movie this would be. I pitched it to my opening act. “A guy is away, he gets a ping, checks his feed, expecting to see his dog, and there’s a man, staring directly back into the camera. An ugly man, with a scar across his face, unshaven, chewing on beef jerky. He’s in the house. His family is in that house! The murderer just smiles.” That’s a good story. Just then I got another ping.

  I opened the feed again, wondering what my dog was doing now, and I swear to you, I received the image of a ghost. A shadowy yet very clear image of a man, wearing a trench coat and carrying his weapon. It looked like a ghost. A real, honest-to-goodness ghost. Spirit-like, shadowy, and somewhat menacing. I showed my friend and he nearly passed out.

  I called home immediately. It was ten o’clock at night. I was in the horror movie that I just pitched. My wife answered the phone. I yelled, “Get out of the house. It’
s in the house.” She was annoyed and hung up.

  I called back. This time she humored me and answered my questions. The family was home, but no one had been in my office. There’s nothing in the office that would cast a shadow of a soldier. It’s on the second floor, no reflections from the street or passersby possible. This left me with only one explanation. There’s a ghost in the house! She hung up again.

  When I show people this picture they freak out. Grown men shudder. Children run. One woman screamed and threw my phone across the room.

  There are skeptics; there always are. People who don’t believe in ghosts always believe in explanations. They sit back, eating peanuts, nonchalantly tossing out ideas of other things it could be.

  “It was probably the wind, maybe a raccoon, you were probably drunk.” They could be right on all of those counts, but none of it could explain away this ghost.

  And to be clear, this is an amazing photo. This isn’t a blur. This isn’t a light that needs to be highlighted and conjured into an image of some sort. This is a photo of a man. Clearly defined and creepy as hell.

  Naturally I began trying to find out more about this intruder. Or was I the intruder? The house is fairly new, around twelve years old, so why would a ghost from 1944 be walking around in it? Well, if you saw Poltergeist, then you know that it’s not the building, it’s the land: “You removed the headstones but you left the bodies, didn’t you?!”

  Sure, the land has always been here, and there must have been other homes on the property before this place. I figure it was probably a modest home, and as we live in Southern California, it was owned by a struggling actor. He gets a couple of bit parts, his career is starting to gain momentum, and then Hitler ruins the whole thing. He has to give up his dream while he enlists in the army to stop the destruction of the planet, something that men back then didn’t think twice about.

  He’s out there fighting the good fight, killing Nazis, drinking coffee out of a tin cup, maybe writing a letter home to his wife, and a bomb hits his foxhole and he’s killed. He’s confused, upset, doesn’t want to hang around in Germany, so he makes his way back home so he can call his agent and get back out there auditioning for parts. He doesn’t realize that he’s dead, and he just walks around the house every day wondering why his agent doesn’t call. It’s very similar to what I’m doing in that very same office right now.