Wally's World

If you look up the word "lazy" in the dictionary, you may come across a picture of me and Brian. In an effort to improve our image we have committed to picking a project every Saturday and getting it done. So far, so good.

Last Saturday we cleaned out the shelves under the cellar stairs. There was all manner of stuff, mostly from our original move here 12 years ago. (I did admit we are lazy.) The goal was to make room for our Christmas decorations which had previously crammed the spare room closet. That closet is a project for another day.

This was a trip down memory lane. Among the new found treasures were games and memorabilia from our life before Mitchell. We sorted items as in an episode of "Clean House" or "Clean Sweep" into piles of KEEP, SELL and TOSS. A lot of the keepers we handed down to our son.

One of theses treasures was Toss Across. This was not your ordinary game of Toss Across, but a special version that had been customized for us by our dear friend, Wally.

Uncle Wally was Brian's roommate at Brown and our good friend. He passed away in 1994 and we miss him, a lot. We would spend weekends with Wally and his partner, Gary, in their Rumford, RI apartment.

We watched "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" together a few times and Wally loved to quote the cutting barbs that flew between Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. He decided these would only enhance the fun of Toss Across and added them with a Sharpie marker. Each square had a different quip: "Clink, Clink, Clink"; "Plowing a few pertinent wives"; and let's not forget Wally's very favorite: "Bog".

To Mitchell's dismay, it also included phrases like "monkey nipples" and "angel boobs". We did not expect these to upset him as much as they did, but he made it quite clear that as much as he would like to have that Toss Across game, he would have nothing to do with it so long as it bore these slogans.

I love the internet. I plugged "remove permanent marker" into my Yahoo search drive and learned that Mr. Clean's Magic Eraser would remove same. A little elbow grease and the Toss Across met Mitchell standards. As best as Brian and I can figure, Mitch was just mortified that his friends would know how really twisted his parents and their friends can be.

And still, if you look at the yellow squares in just the right light, you can see the ghost of the phrases our dear friend left behind.