The saga of the snake in the piano: Sept. 7, 2003

You just can't make this stuff up. And when you are part of my family, you don't even have to.

A snake in the piano is no match for Momo

    My parents live in a house on five wooded acres, so sometimes there is a snake in the piano. 

    Well, not sometimes. It happened just the one time, while I was visiting on a recent Friday. Mom called Dad downstairs to show him the snake just as it slid out of sight. My father moved the piano away from the wall, studied the situation and announced that he should probably shoot the snake.

    "How are you going to do that without shooting the piano?" I asked.

    

    I was standing on a chair, holding my 3-year-old son, Jack, on my hip. The snake was coiled, its body resting half in and half out of the back of the piano. Jack watched intently as my dad directed a beam of light at the snake. 

    "Can I have the flashlight please?" Jack asked, reaching.

    "I’ll just wait for it to poke its head out and then shoot the head," my father explained. 

    "But won’t that make a hole in the floor?" I asked. 

    "It would be a terrible mess," my mother agreed, glancing back and forth between my father and the snake.

    I squinted at the back of the piano, trying to see the snake from my perch. "It’s got a pattern on it," I said.

    "I don’t think it’s a dangerous snake," my mom said, drawing closer to the piano.

    "How do you know?" my father demanded. 

    "I’ll go get the snake book," she said.

    "We have a snake book?" I asked.

    "Now can I have the flashlight please?" Jack pleaded.

Mom went and got a book full of snake pictures and leafed through it looking for a photo of one of the snake’s relatives. Dad shrugged and went upstairs to fetch a gun. 

"Can I have the flashlight NOW?" Jack asked impatiently. I stood in the chair and waited to see what would happen.

    My father is a city boy who grew up in apartments in New Jersey. He’s most comfortable inhabiting small spaces where other people come and fix things when they break. He likes guns, though, which is more the result of his military career than any affinity for the Southern tradition of firearm culture.

    My mom grew up in rural Florida when rural Florida was still the very deep South. She’s the reason they live on five wooded acres. She was raised around both guns and snakes, but she’s not crazy about either of them.

    After a few minutes of flipping fruitlessly through the snake book, my mom trotted upstairs, then reappeared with kitchen tongs. Just ordinary tongs, the kind I use to pluck ears of corn out of boiling water.

    "I’ll just grab its head with these," she said, clicking the tongs in the air. 

    "Mom, those are kind of short for catching a 4-foot-long snake," I said.

    She considered that for a moment, then went in search of bigger tongs.

    Jack and I stood on the chair. "Can I have the flashlight now?" he asked meekly. 

    "Maybe later," I said.

    The snake poked its tiny black head out from behind the piano. "You’re lucky my dad didn’t see you do that," I told the snake. 

    Mom came back in with a scythe. "I found this in the garage," she said.

   

    "What are you going to do with that? Cut off its head?" She shrugged, putting the scythe down on the carpet. "I don’t really want to do that. I think I’ll just grab it with the tongs." 

    I could hear my dad rambling around upstairs, getting his .22 out of the closet, hunting for bullets.

   

    Mom picked up the tongs, walked over to the piano and waited for the snake to stick its head out. It obliged her. She quickly clamped the tongs around its neck, right behind the head. 

    "Wow," I said. "I didn’t know you could do that."

    Jack, still perched on my hip, giggled as my mom lifted the writhing snake and walked outdoors with it. I hopped down off the chair and followed her into the back yard.

    "What if your dad still wants to shoot it?" she said, holding the furious, twisting snake aloft.

    "Throw it way out into the woods so he can’t find it," I said. She did. The snake vanished into the vinca. We trotted upstairs to tell my dad to put away his gun and found him searching for a stray bullet on the bedroom floor.

    "I dropped one and I can’t find it," he said. "It’s the same color as the rug."

    

    Later, as I strapped Jack into his car seat, I told him to try to make a mental record of the day his Momo caught the snake in the piano with kitchen tongs.  

    "You’re probably old enough to start remembering stuff now," I said, leaning over him to buckle his seat belt. "This is one you’ll want to tell later."

    He watched me with his blue, blue eyes.

"Please," he said, "now can I have the flashlight?"     

Well, that was just ridiculous: Aug. 10, 2003

One of the most consistently bewildering experiences of family life is the fun-idea-turned-disaster. Everything from art projects and playground outings to cooking and shopping for shoes has the potential to devolve, with dizzying speed, into chaos.

So yeah, definitely plan to go camping with the children. That's a great idea.

Do we know how to have fun,or what?

  

    Hey, you know what’s fun? Camping. Sleeping in a little tent in the dirt, eating hot dogs that are burned on the outside and raw on the inside, searching for a place to pee in the dark in the woods in the middle of the night. Yep, camping is fun.

    You know what else is fun? Storms. I love the way they send rain horizontally against the house and knock down trees and take out power lines and provide helpful hints about where those leaks in the roof are. Storms are terrific in every way.

    You know what’s the most fun of all? Why, camping in a storm, of course! There is nothing like it. You should try it. We did, and, boy oh boy, was it fun!     

    It started with a simple, yet fun, idea. "Hey, let’s go camping," I said. "Camping is fun! We could take Jack and our friends, and they could bring their sons, and we could all camp together. Wouldn’t that be fun?"

    My husband, who is a lunatic, thought that was a super idea. Our friends, also lunatics, agreed.

    "Yes," we all cheered. "Let’s take our 3-year-old sons camping in the woods and sleep in tents in the dirt and eat hot dogs that are burned on the outside and raw on the inside. FUN!"

    I picked a weekend for this fun activity. The weekend I picked, according to the weather-predicting people, would be hot with a chance of scattered rain. That is what the weather predicting people have been saying every day since 1947.

    "Good news!" I told my lunatic husband and our lunatic friends. "There is a chance of scattered rain. Scattered is not very much. Let’s go camping!"     

    "Yea!" they all said. "FUN!"     

    So we packed our large, family-type vehicles all full of every single thing we own, wedged our children and ourselves inside and headed for the Hiwassee River in Polk County (county motto: Your Cell Phone Won’t Work Here.)     

    The campground I chose is one with beautiful old trees towering above and a lovely little creek meandering behind and a picturesque collection of bathrooms with hot and cold running water and flush toilets nearby.

    "I love this campground," I told my husband. "It has such pretty trees and such a nice creek and such close potties."

    "Yes," he agreed. "This will be fun."

    We all unloaded everything we own from our large, family-type vehicles, set up a big old tarp to stand under in case it rained, and fired up the grill so we could burn some food that would nevertheless remain raw in the middle.

    The three boys found a pile of dirt and sand and immediately crawled into it and began applying it directly to their faces and hair. We set up our tents, tossed the kids some juice boxes and parked our large, family-type behinds in folding chairs.

    "This sure is fun!" we all said.

    A helpful stranger-person wandered through our campsite and remarked that he’d heard a storm was passing to the north but was unlikely to do much but sprinkle us.

    "Did you hear that?" we all said. "We’ll get sprinkled. That will be fun!"

    It did, indeed, start to sprinkle, so we got under the tarp. Then the wind started to blow, and we all laughed and said how camping sure was fun. Then the rain got sideways, and the wind blasted us with flying sticks and leaves and rocks. We grabbed our kids and dove for our family-type cars.

    We sat in our family-type cars for quite a while — at least 17 hours, it seemed to me at the time. We drew pictures in the condensation that formed on the windows. I crammed a towel into a leak I hadn’t known existed in the passenger-side door seal. Raindrops the size of peach pits battered the car. Then the hail started.

    You’d think it wouldn’t hail in July, but you’d be wrong.

    "Honey, you sure can pick a weekend," my husband said.

    When the storm let up a little, we put on our raincoats and peeked outside. All around us, the lovely old trees had crashed to the ground, missing our tents by inches. The meandering little creek had flooded, leaving half the campground under water. And the power and water were out, so the helpful managers of the campground locked up the potties for the night. And all the local roads were blocked by downed trees, so we couldn’t leave.

    Not that we would have left. No way! Camping is fun!

    We cleaned up our flattened campsite and started a fire. Our friend Bill ripped branches off a tree that had fallen approximately 1 centimeter from his tent. "At least there’s plenty of firewood," he said.

    We had a giant campfire and sat in our wet folding chairs and ate marshmallows. The boys discovered that their sand and dirt pit had become a mud pit. Even better!

    Then an ambulance came to get a guy who had been under a tree when it fell. Our sons got to see fire trucks, flashing lights and actual emergency people in full gear, which they enjoyed immensely.

    I felt kind of guilty about how much fun they were having at the expense of the poor, under-a-fallen-tree guy until someone informed me that his injuries were "serious but not life-threatening."

    Well! In that case! Here’s to camping!

    Yep, camping is fun.

My name kicks ass: July 13, 2003

I was only four years married when I wrote this column, and I was still downright giddy about my new name. You'll understand why if you read this and see my old name.

The Fortune in my future was not what I expected

    When I got married I never considered, even for a second, hyphenating. I didn’t even keep my maiden name as a middle name. I am Mary Katherine Fortune, that’s it and that’s all.

    I have absolutely no quarrel with those who marry and keep their names, hyphenate their names, use their unmarried names as middle names, even invent brand new names for their union.

    My mom uses her maiden name as her middle name, and publishes under it as a tribute to her father. Lots of my married friends figured they already had perfectly good names and saw no reason to change them. Some have family history they want to preserve, a sense of identity connected to their names that they don’t want to lose. I think that’s great. It’s just not me.

    Until I married, I spent large chunks of my time explaining, pronouncing and spelling my last name. People would ask me "What kind of a name is that?" And I would say "Eastern European" or "Hungarian," which was my best guess.     

    I would write it down, and people would say, "How do you pronounce that?"

    I would say it, and people would say, "How do you spell that? And what kind of a name is that, anyway?"

    Truth is, no one is 100 percent sure where my old name came from. I am a mongrel, descended from mongrels and the former bearer of a name that was at least partly invented by my immigrant great-grandfather who came, we think, from Hungary. No one is really sure.

    My younger brother, Tom, has a wife and 4-year-old son, and I can’t help but cringe when I imagine what it will be like for little Evan Rehyansky, explaining, spelling and pronouncing his name for the rest of his life.

    I remember every school year on the first day of class, I always knew when the teacher had reached my name on the roll.

    "Mary...uh...."

    "Rehyansky."

    "Yes, thank you."

    Handing out my business card as a reporter: "Mary....uh..."

    "Rehyansky."

    "OK. What kind of name is that?"

    Leaving phone messages: "Can I have him call you back?"

    "Yes, please. This is Mary Rehyansky."

    "Mary...uh...what? Can you spell that for me?"

    On one memorable day several years ago, the name appeared twice on a page of this newspaper — once in my byline (spelled correctly) and once in a story in which my father was quoted (spelled incorrectly, as is the custom when your name is Rehyansky.)     

    When I met my husband I liked him a lot right away. The fact that his last name was Fortune really didn’t have much do with it at the time. But as our relationship became more serious, I began to daydream like a seventh-grader about becoming Mary Fortune.

    "It sounds like advice," my mother quipped. "Marry fortune."     

    I decided it was even better than Jones or Smith, names I had long used when making restaurant reservations. Fortune was an unusual name, but an easy word. Some people stumble over it a little bit, but it’s easy enough to clear up.

    "Fortune," I explain. "Like ‘Wheel of.’ Like the cookie."

    It even has sort of a fictional sound to it; it’s kind of a comic book name.

    Mary Fortune, super-literate superhero: Mommy by day/ corruption-fighting journalist by night, Mary Fortune roots out injustice wherever she finds it using her powerful English major skills.

    Anyway.

    My name has the added attraction of confirming what a phony psychic on the boardwalk at Daytona Beach told me the summer I was 12. She took my $5, waved her purple Lee Press-On Nails at me and said "I see a fortune in your future, child."

    Maybe she wasn’t a phony — I just misunderstood and assumed she meant money. I’ve never been very interested in money. I’d rather have the name.

    Fortune fits so much better on a cape than Rehyansky.