Featured Author / Article(s):

FEARS OF A CLOWN
By Bob Schwartz

There are certain words spoken by a child that can send a shiver of panic through every parental nerve ending. I’ve discovered that the words causing the greatest consternation were not "Don't worry, the tattoos can always be removed with a laser" or "Can you believe putting in six eyebrow rings barely hurt?"

Rather, the words which sent me quickly into a panic attack were, "My Gymbo's gone!"

Most children, sometime in their early bedtime careers, take a liking to sleeping with a stuffed animal, cuddly clown, small blanket or even something out of the ordinary like one of my children’s predilection for nightly embracing a deck of Rugrats Uno cards. Don’t ask.

Our son fell into the clown category, and while putting him to bed one night during a family vacation in Canada, we discovered the terrifying experience of finding that his Gymbo the clown was gone. Vanished. Without even a trace of stuffing left behind or a crayon scribbled note.

After ransacking the room and coming up Gymboless, it was clear that he was most likely the victim of an involuntary dollnapping. We concluded he must have been inadvertently scooped up with the sheets that day by the hotel staff. Poor little Gymbo was lying innocently on the bed one minute and then, suddenly, his world was torn asunder with the disengagement of a fitted sheet.

Apparently, he was abruptly wrapped up in the bed linen and tossed down that dark and seemingly never-ending chute to the basement laundry facility. He went from his sheltered suburban upbringing, to being quickly exposed to the giant underbelly of a hotel building. He was naively left to wonder what he'd done to be cast aside and jettisoned into the dungeon of the sheet and pillow case world he was then forced to call home.

The immediate focus was damage control by one parent and Gymbo retrieval by the other. As our son broke out into hysterics, he made it painfully clear that no Gymbo for him meant no sleep. For everyone. And after a long day of nonstop vacationing movement, no sleep was simply an untenable concept for me.

My wife quickly got connected to the hotel laundry room and explained the dire circumstances. She was advised that they'd not seen him yet, but amazingly, they requested she provide them a description of the victim.

This caused us to immediately wonder just how many stuffed dolls they had lying in that basement. Was there some international black market for stuffed cuddly things going on down there? I grabbed the phone and interjected that we'd be able to pick him out of a lineup, so please just let us know how many cotton clowns they’d seen recently. Or perhaps they'd like us to come down and do a composite watercolor painting for them.

I handed the phone back to my wife who patiently provided the laundry staff the unmistakable physical characteristics of a stuffed blue and yellow clown — a missing button on his body-hugging suspenders, frizzy red hair, a frayed right leg, about twelve inches long, a bow tie, and with an unwavering cat that ate the canary smile on his face. I felt very confident they wouldn't confuse him with a mattress pad.

As we anxiously paced back and forth, the phone finally rang. In a thick French Canadian accent, the unemotional voice said, "Vee have located your clown."

The words, spoken so solemnly yet somewhat muffled, forced me to become fearful they would next demand a ransom? Or, worse yet, advise us that after a violent fifty-minute foray in the tumble dryer his arm was hanging by a thread?

My wife and I were so thankful that Gymbo was soon delivered to our door in one piece and wearing that same cockeyed grin, but to me, he had a little shell-shocked look. I could only think of the horrors he must have seen down below, tossed in amongst the giant spinning washer along with stained tablecloths and thrown about in the whirling dryers with a bath towel pressed against his face.

We could only hope that the familiar rhythmic breathing of his sleeping owner in the footed pajamas would soon erase the memories of his emotionally charged excursion into the outside world.

We did learn to avoid any unchaperoned Gymbo excursions in the future by tying one end of a shoelace around his waist and the other end around the bedpost each morning. I know that doesn’t necessarily look all that loving, but hey, he never stops smiling. And it does eliminate one potential for bedtime parental panic.

Once was enough — for all of us.

Bob Schwartz is a syndicated humor writer whose essays have appeared in over 150 magazines and newspapers. His latest book is a hysterical look at parenting, Would Somebody Please Send Me to My Room! Bob authored the popular humorous book on running, I Run, Therefore I Am – Nuts!. He can be reached at bob@schwartzhumor.com and www.schwartzhumor.com.

SOME ARE SEMI-SWEET AND SOME ARE SEMI-NOT
By Bob Schwartz

With three small words from our two-year-old, my wife and I began to question the entire validity of genetics. Having been introduced to chocolate for the first time, our daughter exclaimed the most inconceivable reaction by any child born into our Willie Wonka Biosphere.

She truly shook the very fabric of our bonbon world.  Upon tasting a chocolate brownie, she provided a very animated facial expression, which seemed to indicate that she was chewing lukewarm and hot pepper flavored sawdust.  She then quite matter-of-factly said, "No like.”

My wife and I stared at each other stupefied. Her older brothers reacted with jaw dropping disbelief as their Ding-Dongs fell from their hands and landed in their Cocoa Puffs.

Now we certainly do monitor the nutritional intake of our children’s food consumption, but the fact was that our daughter had been born into a family of chocoholics.  It seemed beyond comprehension that given her present aversion we'd have to work on her taste buds for a little choco-conversion.  Otherwise, we ultimately might be required to integrate our dessert table with the blasphemous flavors of vanilla and dare I even say it, butterscotch!

A little background regarding my Hershey’s history might be in order.  My confectionery confession is that I really didn't give much thought to chocolate until I met my wife.  Up to that point, I think my lack of full commitment stemmed from a monumental event I'd had as a nine-year-old.  It was then that my stomach had a mind-altering rendezvous with a breakfast plate of chocolate chip pancakes, laden with chocolate syrup and doused with chocolate whipped cream. My grandfather had treated me to this ambrosial delicacy at 7:00 a.m. at the International House of Sugar Overload. I was pretty much in a hyperactive hallucinogenic state the remainder of that year. To this day, I have only an extremely vague recollection of fourth grade.

My wife, on the other hand, grew up on Rocky Road in Loompaland.  I didn't initially realize her chocolate dependence, since I had no idea of the truffles she'd seen.  I slowly learned that her idea of a balanced diet was equal amounts of dark and white chocolate.  She followed the twelve-step chocoholic program, which required that a person be no more than twelve steps from chocolate at any given time.

She slowly introduced me to cocoa butter and the decadent underworld of dark chocolate mousse. And now, one of our children was rebuking everything we believed in ¾ the very framework of our bumpy cake home!   The next thing we knew our daughter might actually do the unthinkable. That's right, request green Jell-O for dessert.

We looked on the bright side and figured this was simply a toddler stage that she'd grow out of. We had preferred she'd instead exhibit the more familiar two-year-old acts of temper tantrums or extreme defiance.  We could handle that.  But a chocolate revulsion?  The little radical.  Perhaps this was the beginning of renegade behavior.  Were we destined for demands for nose rings by age three, and a pink Mohawk haircut by age four from our little double fudge dessert dissenter?

Maybe we could sneak some crushed Oreos into her applesauce or mix some pieces of 3 Musketeer candy bars into her Cheerios to have her satisfy our Recommended Daily Allowance of chocolate.

Then again, we knew the right thing was just to let her go in her own sugar direction.  She obviously marched to the sound of her own candy wrapper.

Perhaps she'd ultimately convert us a little.  But I'm not sure I could ever look those jovial M & M fellas in the eye if I defected over to strawberry licorice.

Bob Schwartz is a syndicated humor writer whose essays have appeared in over 150 magazines and newspapers.  Bob authored the popular humorous book on running, I Run, Therefore I Am – Nuts!   His latest book is a hysterical look at parenting (Would Somebody Please Send Me to My Room!).  He can be reached at bob@schwartzhumor.com and www.schwartzhumor.com.

Would Somebody Please Send ME to MY Room!

I Run, Therefore I Am - NUTS! 

Office Toys: How To Waste Your Day