People’s personal rituals and habits can be funny things. For example, I was watching a rerun of the TV show, “Everybody Loves Raymond,” the other night and the people on the show were making fun of Robert, Raymond’s brother, because of the strange way he ate potato chips. For some reason, Robert had to touch each chip to his chin before he popped it into his mouth.
I thought it was pretty funny, too…until I started thinking about some of my own crazy rituals over the years.
Even when I was a little kid, I had them. The one that nearly drove my parents to their early graves, however, was what my mother always referred to as “the incredibly annoying door ritual.” You see, when I went to bed at night, my bedroom door had to be left open at a precise angle. If it was even a millimeter off, I would whine.
I can remember my poor mother, standing there for ages, moving my door a fraction of an inch at a time as I cried, “No! Too wide!” or “No! Not wide enough!” till the poor woman’s arms began to go numb. To this day, I still think my door ritual may have been the reason why she eventually needed carpal-tunnel surgery.
But for some reason, whenever my father tried his hand at the door ritual, it was always perfect. To my mother’s frustration, he wouldn’t even have to touch the door and I would tell him it was fine; probably because I knew he wasn’t patient enough to stand there half the night, creaking it back and forth the way my mother did.
To be honest, if I had been my parents, I would have taken my door off its hinges and stored it in the basement, just to teach me a lesson.
Another childhood ritual of mine that ended up getting out of hand was my bedtime prayer. Every night, I would kneel beside my bed and recite it before climbing under the covers. It didn’t take me long to realize, however, that the longer I prayed, the longer I could stall having to go to sleep. So pretty soon, my prayers graduated from “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” to “Our Father” (because it was longer), and I then would top it off with enough “God bless” requests to keep me up till midnight.
When I started asking God to bless each of Snow White’s seven dwarfs (by name), and each of the Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketeers, my mother finally put her foot down. From then on, I had to use the Cliff’s Notes (abbreviated) version of my prayers.
As I got older, however, I noticed that other people had strange rituals, too. My friend Diane always made pyramids out of her mashed potatoes. And then she'd eat only one item on her plate at time. First, she would eat all of the chicken, then all of the potatoes, and finally, because she liked them the least, the vegetables. She never mixed any foods together.
Strangely, my late husband’s eating rituals were similar to Diane’s, except he carefully sculpted his potatoes into the shape of a watering trough, so they could hold plenty of gravy. And the potatoes always had to be placed on the left side of his plate, with none of the food items touching each other. If I, heaven forbid, handed his plate to him with the potatoes on the right, he’d give me such a look, you’d think I’d opened a can of Alpo and plopped it onto his plate for dinner.
“Well, just turn the plate around until the potatoes are on the left!” I’d say to him, “No big deal!”
“I know,” he’d answer, “but it’s just the principle of the thing,”
One of my rituals that my mother and husband always loved to tease me about probably will rear its head soon, seeing that the holiday season rapidly is approaching. You see, for some reason (which even I can’t explain, and I’m the one who invented it), I won’t wrap any Christmas gifts unless it is snowing outside. I’m serious. No snowstorm, no wrapping.
There have been a couple holiday seasons when not a flake of snow fell, so all of the Christmas gifts I bought just sat there, naked. One year, on the day before Christmas, my husband, fearing that his family would be handed their gifts in the wrinkled Walmart bags I kept under the kitchen sink, finally took it upon himself to do the wrapping. It didn’t matter that the gifts ended up looking as if they had been wrapped at a supermarket deli; at least they were wrapped.
Every December, whenever snow was predicted, my mother would call and say, “You’d better go finish all of your Christmas shopping tonight, because it’s going to snow tomorrow! This might be your only chance to wrap your gifts!”
My husband was less kind, however, when he teased me about my wrapping-only-when-it-snows ritual. I’ll never forget the day he said, “I might not be able to buy you any Christmas gifts this year. You see, the wind has to be blowing in a northwesterly direction and Saturn has to be aligned with Mars before I can go shopping.”
The next night, when I served him his mashed potatoes, I plunked them dead-center on his plate with the rest of the food surrounding them.
# # #
Sally Breslin is an
award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for
newspapers and magazines for over 45 years. She is the author of “There’s a
Tick in my Underwear!” “Heed the Predictor,” “The Common-Sense Approach to
Dream Interpretation" and “Christmas, a Cabin and a Stranger.” Contact her
at: sillysally@att.net.
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