Holiday on Ice

My brother, Kirk, a friend of his, and I were all home to spend the Holidays with my Mother, by then well into her 60's. Despite a ferocious ice storm on Christmas Day, our celebration had been merry, indeed, and we'd decided to continue the festivities by seeing a Holiday movie the following day.

We took Mother's 1970, Chevrolet Impala 4-door that Kirk sardonically referred to as "The Boat", due to the gargantuan size of its deep-floored, roomy interior, and massive exterior proportions, as well. My 6'2" brother and his 5'11" buddy, Chuck, occupied the driver's and front passenger's seats, which they'd scooted as far back as possible to accommodate their long, lanky legs. My diminutive mother and I occupied the back seat, situated behind Chuck and Kirk, respectively. The streets were fairly well salted and cleared of the perilous layer of ice the storm had dumped on us, but the Movie-Plex parking lot was an entirely different story...

On arrival, Kirk parked the "The Boat", and all four car doors opened simultaneously as we disembarked. The air bitterly cold and the roof of the car so high, Chuck quipped that he could see only my frosty breath as my vertically-challenged little body exited the back seat on the opposite side of the vehicle while he, Kirk, and I palavered like magpies over-top the car roof, gaily expounding upon whatever we'd been yacking about on the way to the Movie-plex and waiting for Mom's head to pop up and make it a foursome.

Eventually, it dawned on us that the fourth head seemed somewhat tardy in so 'popping', and Kirk inquired over the car roof of no one in particular, "where's Mom?". I looked at Kirk, a big, dumb void on my countenance, and he in turn looked across the roof at Chuck, who ducked down to peer through his open door into the back seat Mother had occupied just moments before. Rising again, he announced, "I don't know WHERE she went."

"Whaddaya mean you don't know where she went ?", Kirk barked over the rooftop, "Her door's still open... she has to be over there somewhere." (We were in the middle of a huge parking lot, devoid of all but a few, sparsely parked cars, their occupants apparently also attending the movie.)

Like some insanely skewered melding of episodes of "All in the Family" with "The Three Stooges Take a Holiday", all three of we young adults simultaneously bent down again, scrutinizing the utterly empty interior of the Impala. "No Mother", we wordlessly agreed with facial expressions, now gawking stupidly at one another through the open doors of the car instead over its roof.

We'd all arisen and were staring at each other over the roof again when we heard a wee small, distant voice say....

"I'm down here, you dumb-bells."

The three of us once again bent down, and this time we found her.... UNDER the car. With only her left foot wedged beneath the back of the front passenger's seat.

I sprint-skittered over to Mother's side of the car to help Chuck extricate her stuck foot, then slide her torso out from beneath the undercarriage of the car. Her facial expression was priceless... and, as Elton John is fond of warbling about sad songs... said sooooooo much. Mostly, I think, it conveyed a rich blend of I can't believe I fell on my butt in the middle of the Movie-Plex parking lot.... shaken, not stirred, with a robust splash of I can't believe three full-grown schmucks, two of whom are the fruit of my own womb, LET me fall under the car without noticing in the FIRST flippin' place! (I was the eldest of the two fruit-of-her-loin schmucks in question, just in case you're lost by now and/or happen to care...)

Chuck and I frantically endeavored to restore my bedraggled, semi-frozen Mother to something at least resembling standing on her own steam, slipping on the ice and twice falling down ourselves, clumsily dropping her hapless, frost-covered-limbs-all-askew body in the process. Given that we were parked on an incline, each time she was dropped, Mother swiftly slid right back under the car. Frustrated, she finally bellowed from somewhere beneath the Impala's manifold, "Oh, for GAWD's sake, don't HELP me anymore!" As was my habit in youth, I shrunk back like testicles in cold water when she bellowed thus, prompting Kirk to immediately step into the fray. I must say, though, his initial remark to Mother didn't exactly soothe her...

"How the hell did you get down here in the first place?"

Still flat on her back, thoroughly winded and sporting a worriesomely harried color upon her frosty cheeks... and staring unblinkingly at the grey-clouded sky... she retorted, "I got my foot caught under the seat, the foot I did have out of the car skidded on the ice, and I fell and slipped right under the car... HOW DO YOU THINK I GOT DOWN HERE??? !!! ???" I timidly asked her if she was injured at all, and she rotated her slush-capped head slowly toward me, bestowing me with an icy stare...

"Noooooo... I am NOT hurt. I've just fallen and I can't get up."

* T-I-L-T ! *

Kirk, Chuck, and I burst into gales of laughter because of the correlation of Mother's utterance with a television commercial of that era ~ which, of course, ticked my still supine Mother off ALL to hell and gone. The more she indignantly flapped, squawked, and sputtered, the harder we laughed, despite innumerable valiant albeit failed attempts to get ourselves under control.

Somehow we managed to get her back on her pins, all of us skidding, slipping, skittering, and falling through tear-spurting gales of uncontrollable giggling, and hustled her into the theater. I can't remember much about the film we saw... it was far too often distractingly punctuated by spontaneous, insane giggling anonymously materializing in the darkness ~ immediately met by two chorusing sources of muffled guffawing ~ followed closely by a harsh, hissed-through-clenched teeth, exclamatory remark of "SHADDUP, you three!!!"


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