fuzzbean.net

I went home to visit my family in New Jersey a few weeks ago. I took a Thursday and Friday off and took the train down and had a really nice time. I got a massage and made a pie and put together some boxes of books to put on the shelves of the all! new! condo! that is in the middle of being fixed up and that we will maybe be able to move into by Thanksgiving. *snort*

And on Friday, my mother and little sister drove down to Princeton to visit my wee brother (who is 6 something and who could kick my ass) at Princeton U. (PU! HAH! William, you stink!)

So I finally got to see what one of the other Ivies looks like and my god. Hogwarts has nothing on this place. Cobblestones and arches and so many Gothic thingies you'd think the vampires would be having a field day on the quad come midnight.

We all drove off campus at wee brother's insistence (no! No more Princeton campus food! NO!) and went to dinner at the ever so classy Macaroni Grill.

Don't get me wrong. The Macaroni Grill is a very good default place to have dinner, and the food actually doesn't suck, so I'm fairly pro that. But (sorry) living in Boston has sensitized me to the relative quality of Italian food--and Macaroni Grill is pretty low on the scale.

Enough backstory! We are eating dinner at the Grill. And in the middle of this, the little sis lets drop that Mr. Owens is dead.

Blink. Blink blink blink.

Mr. Owens. Good old James P. Finally kicked the bucket. Bought a worm farm. Conked out.

See, James P. had a bum ticker. Just couldn't keep pounding out the beats. And he and I had a bit of a falling out round about eighth grade, when due in no small part to his intervention in what was none of his goddamn business, I decided that the whole Catholicism thing just couldn't cut the mustard for me anymore.

James P. was my religion teacher, and so a falling out with him meant a falling out with God, the Roman Catholic Church, religion in general, and--well, pretty much everything I'd ever been taught to believe. Nobody ever said I did things by halves, and this was a pretty spectacular falling out.

And, being the perfect student, I always gave my teachers presents at Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, etc. Name the holiday, and chances were I was forking something over to maintain my average. Not like I needed it, but a little extra sucking up never hurt anyone. (Except for that one guy. The one Trump fired. Dude, that was awesome.)

The default gift was fudge. The night before a holiday filled the kitchen with the smell of melted chocolate and marshmallow fluff as Mom and I would make huge bricks of fudge, filling the whole kitchen table with the assembly line of fudge production. 4 kids, 2 to 7 teachers apiece, plus music teachers and gym teachers and drama teachers and French horn teachers and everybody else--we made a lot of fudge.

James P., due to the bum ticker, always got something else. A nice candle or a tie or something a tiny bit healthier than fudge.

And post-falling-out, pre-start-of-Easter-vacation for eighth grade, Mom asks me if I'm still giving presents to teachers.

"Sure. I guess so."

"And will you be making something special for Mr. Owens this year?"

An awful, wicked, evil thought enters my mind. A thought that is clearly dredged up from the blackest part of the deepest marsh in my wicked, wicked, wicked soul.

"Give him fudge."

Deep black fudge, with two sticks of butter and a whole can of marshmallow fluff. Fudge with chocolate and nuts. UltraChocolate Fudge of Doom!

I picked out the biggest two pieces to give to him.

Seven and a half years later, he dies of a heart attack.

I need to find faster ways of doing people in.