Freddie and Johnnie: And Other Colorful Characters

By Terry Shannon Escobar

Falling through bathroom windows and into trash cans, keeping your mother out of dumpsters and trash bins … When everything offends your sensibilities, relaxing makes you nervous, and you hate camping but your spouse loves it… When a carpool member is SO annoying but makes you laugh like you’ve never laughed before. It’s all here, in the “Colorful Characters” of this book. Plus, where to pee, the mama of Princess and the Pea, how to know if you’re having fun, how to write love notes for lunch pails, methods for naked frog hunting, and good reasons to marry a brown man!

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781663200501

Terry Shannon Escobar

Terry Shannon Escobar has been writing stories for about thirty years, and finally decided it was time to consolidate them into “Freddie and Johnnie and Other Colorful Characters.” This is a very humorous account of the hard times and the love between her parents, and the trials and laughs of ‘raising’ her aging mother. She remains childless in spite of having three husbands, but has acquired close to forty children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

Book preview

Freddie

and

Johnnie

and Other Colorful Characters

Terry Shannon Escobar

38426.png

FREDDIE AND JOHNNIE

AND OTHER COLORFUL CHARACTERS

Copyright © 2020 Terry Shannon Escobar.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-0049-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-0050-1 (e)

iUniverse rev. date:   05/14/2020

Contents

One Colorful Character

Are We Having Fun Yet?

The Entertainer

The Sophisticate

Freddie and Johnnie

Love Notes

Tim, the Hunting Accident

Bull

The Grands!

Spirit of Freddie

My Dumpster Divin’ Mama

When Did She Get So Old?

When Did *I* Get So Old?!

World Champion Piddler

Rufino and Terry

My Brown Man

Don’t call me Pancho!

All Chicanos Have Nicknames

Kids Say the Darndest Things

Dog People

Extended Honeymoon

There’s a Fine Line Between a Hobby and Insanity…

Peeing wherever…

Back to the Desert!

Dedication

One Colorful Character

One of the joys of working is getting to be in a carpool with colorful characters. I was in such a carpool for years, and Earl was one of those characters.

Earl was in his early fifties, a portly fellow who avoided exercise like the plague, and always wore his pants about four inches too short – the better to show off his white socks. He had been bald on top for many years, but it was estimated that the length of his hair on the right side was about two feet long – the better to achieve the perfect, classic comb over.

He watered his lawn while waiting for the carpool, and would then deposit wet grass and dog droppings on car floor mats and office carpets. Most mornings he brought the distinct aroma of fried bacon into the car with him, making us want waffles, too. Earl was a sprawler, taking up more space than necessary. He also jingled his keys incessantly or made his Styrofoam cup squeak or rattled his paper lunch sack.

Earl was a thrifty guy, and I like that in a man. He boasted that he had not turned on the heat in his house for years – the better to save a lot of money on heating bills. He was annoyed when he had to buy electric blankets because his wife and children complained of being cold.

His wife insisted they take a vacation overseas one year. He informed us, It certainly wasn’t my idea – costs too much money! For several months we listened to him complain about what it was going to cost. As the time grew nearer, he dwelled on how much all the film and picture developing were going to cost. When he FINALLY left, we rejoiced, and enjoyed his vacation more than he did.

Earl loved to chat – the kind where he did all the talking and you listened. The rest of us always tried to read or nap. In all those years, I never saw Earl read anything, and only rarely did he do us a favor and fall asleep. He would think of a story he wanted to tell. Then he’d start laughing.

Ha, ha, ha! Last night … ha, ha, ha … I got a phone call … ha, ha … it was my aunt … ha, ha, ha … she had just talked to my cousin … ha, ha … In short order we all wanted to slap him and say, Tell the story or shut the hell up!

Sure enough, by the time he finally finished his narrative, it wasn’t even funny, let alone of any interest. Earl was a jolly soul and had a habit of laughing boisterously; there didn’t particularly have to be anything humorous happening at the time.

His favorite stories to tell were long, drawn-out, detailed descriptions of the work he did under the hood of a car, or installing a water heater, or some other such thing especially fascinating to the two women in our carpool. It didn’t matter to him if we were snoring, passed out, or had our noses buried in a book – he would just say our names over and over, louder and louder, until he had a captive audience. Apparently, he felt he must voice every single thing that popped into his head; giving us a running commentary of all his thoughts.

Earl was so thrifty that he had been driving the same car to and from work for many, many years. When it turned over 500,000 miles, we got a dissertation on how many engines and fuel pumps and other innards it had had, the years they were installed, and the cost.

Occasionally, the horn would malfunction and honk continuously, while we were all cringing on the floorboard. It was hard to be inconspicuous in Earl’s bright yellow old car, even when the horn wasn’t honking.

He liked his country and western music and hummed or sang along to every song in an off-key voice that was unrecognizable as the song he was accompanying. Sometimes his old radio wouldn’t cooperate and he would pound on the dashboard to try to get it to work. He would usually start his pounding when all of us were fast asleep, causing us to sit straight up with our hearts in our throats. He quit his pounding when he broke two small bones in his hand.

One day when I was the last person to be dropped off by Earl, I realized I didn’t have my house keys, and my husband wouldn’t be home for a couple of hours. Earl was properly concerned, but I assured him I could get in through the bathroom window. I wasn’t sure how – since it was a small window four and a half feet off the ground, I was wearing a fitted skirt and high heels, and it was pouring rain – but this was my problem and I didn’t want to trouble him. But Earl was a helpful fellow, and insisted.

We proceeded into the back yard. We were soaking wet in no time, as neither of us had an umbrella. I tried to stop my dog from doing the crotch-sniffing greeting routine dogs want to go through with newcomers. I dragged a lawn chair over to the window, Earl got up on it, removed the screen, opened the window, and we were greeted by the sight of a bright yellow douche bag hanging on the shower rod. I was embarrassed, but Earl stayed cool.

I don’t know if he ever really had a plan established as to how to get from the chair up into the house, but the next thing I knew, I was watching his portly body disappear through the