Of the impossible things, possibly the most impossible.
My cousin Lonnie–she was a couple of years older than me–told me that it was scientifically impossible to whistle with crackers in your mouth. This was right after my aunt Helen–her moms’–hysterectomy. Don’t ask me why, but all the ladies got hysterectomies, and there was always a thing afterwards, when they got home from the hospital. Somewhere between a wake and a Thursday night potluck, in terms of festiveness.
Your mom, I told Lonnie, she got her history wrecked.
Five kids is enough for anybody, Lonnie said back. I’m getting my history wrecked before I have any snotnoses.
Then things went slightly awry. I told Lonnie that of course she would want kids someday, just that right then she didn’t think she wanted kids because she had two brothers still in diapers, and that one of those brothers, Devon, was eight years old.
I’m never going to have kids, she said, crossing her arms over her chest, which was only just then budding with womanliness as my aunt Caroline would say, until years later when Lonnie was twenty five and still mostly only in the budding stage.
How about this, I said. If I do manage to whistle with a mouthful of crackers, you have to have a kid. Fair?
Okay, she said, although she sounded doubtful.
I took a small stack of saltines (we finally decided between us that five was a fair number) and placed them in my mouth one at a time.
All at once, Lonnie said. If you get them wet, it doesn’t count.
The thing about a mouthful of saltines is not only that they are incredibly dry (which sucks all the moisture right out of your mouth), but that they are incredibly potentially-airway-obstructing. Which is what they did. Luckily, Lonnie had learned the Heimlich Maneuver (and a few other things, I found out later) at 4-H camp, and the saltines sailed and landed in a glop on Aunt Helen’s half-completed needlepoint.
No whistling, no babies, Lonnie said. She sounded pretty relieved, as if the crackers-while-whistling bet had taken on more weight than I’d intended.
Call me a jerk, but last year, when Lonnie and her life partner Julie decided to get one of them artificially inseminated, I wrote something about it on her Facebook wall, something like: I guess it won’t be you, since you won the bet.
Lonnie always was a good sport though. She posted back on my Facebook wall: haa-haa, STFU.
