Time to slip into some comfortable overalls
Tomorrow is Halloween, but I start every day in fear. It’s when I open my Gmail account. I shake and peek through my fingers and hope I don’t see that ghoulish, horrifying subject line …
“Your Amazon order of ...”
Some days I don’t see those frightening words. I refer to those days as “days I don’t check my email.” Unfortunately, that’s not really an option during the work week.
Increasingly over the past couple of years — and especially since my wife welcomed some lady named Alexa into our house — my email account has been clogged with updates about what my wife has ordered on Amazon, shipping updates about what she’s ordered from Amazon and requests to rate her purchases from Amazon.
It’s a little known fact that just a couple of years ago Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was worth just $56.73. Today he is worth an estimated $156 billion — at least $155 billion of that coming just in orders from my home.
Recently I noticed an Amazon order come through that was unusual even by our standards — overalls. I asked my wife why she wanted overalls and was informed they were for me and that I would be dressing as a farmer for Halloween.
I haven’t worn overalls since Ernest Taterman launched that male revue in the back of the Possum Holler Feed & Seed. I lasted only one night stripping to “Cotton-Eye Joe” before I was injured when Ethel Swampus forcibly tipped me with a Susan B. Anthony dollar coin while I wasn’t looking. I’m reminded of that night every time I set off the alarm at airport security.
I know plenty of farmers, but I don’t think any of them wear overalls. If my wife wanted me to look like the farmers around here, she’d buy me a BMW with a Farmers for Kemp bumper sticker on the back. I guess she didn’t want me to have a heart attack if I opened an email from Amazon that began “Your Amazon order of BMW ...”
When the overalls arrived, they looked far too neat and pressed and clean to pass me off as an actual farmer. So, my wife took them outside, roughed them up and laid them out in the elements for a few days. When she brought them back inside, she almost had a heart attack because even though she had shaken the little frogs out of the pockets, she apparently missed a little lizard. The next time she saw the lizard, he had been washed and dried along with my overalls. When I heard her scream, I rushed to the laundry room and comforted her by explaining that it was better than finding a dirty lizard in the dryer, and that dried lizards are easy to fold once you get over that crackling sound.
I’m no longer a big fan of Halloween, though I do like to see other folks’ kids having a good time and pumped full of sugar and occasional speed-laced Sweet Tarts. I certainly don’t like dressing up for Halloween, and if I were the man of my household, I’d lay down the law and refuse.
Of course, the trick will be on my wife if I find out I like wearing the overalls. They appear rather comfortable and compared to my usual work attire of shorts and t-shirts, they are practically formal wear.
I suspect they will be extremely comfortable because it looks like Halloween will be much warmer than usual. She said that I had to wear the overalls, but she didn’t say I had to wear anything else. So, I plan to walk around Halloween night as Farmer Commando, same as I did in the back of the Feed & Seed.
I just hope Ethel Swampus still ain’t around. I’m probably safe because she was 78 years old back then. To be on the safe side, though, if I see any kids drop good candy on the ground, I’ll probably just leave it there. It’s ain’t worth a dollar. Trust me.