Ordinary Me: G

G: Great Salt Lake Desert When I was three, my father moved the family cross-country. He had moved to San Diego to take a sales job, but didn't like it. By the time my mother, sister, and I joined him, he had moved up to San Francisco where we lived in a motel. One of my first memories was drawing on a naugahyde chair with pen in that room, and my sister sleeping in her car carrier, this sort of giant 60s picnic basket for babies. Eventually, my parents decided it was time to go home to New Hampshire. On the drive home, we passed through the Great Salt Lake Desert. My mom, always thinking, made my dad stop the car so she could scoop up some desert "for the kids to take to show and tell*." She grabbed one of her Avon powder puff boxes, discarded the powder, and ran into the salt flats to scoop up salt. Upon her return, my father said, "It's a good thing I didn't tell you about the rattlesnakes." My mother's response--as is typical--"Jesus, Dick."

This long apocryphal story--I have no idea whether the Salt Lake Desert has snakes or not--leads to the next important "G"--grammar. Consider the horror of Christians everywhere at the lapse of one little comma. My mother's swear directed at my father, Richard, becomes something entirely different.

Praise be to the comma; blessed are they who use punctuation correctly.

* That salt did end up in some classrooms in Thorton's Ferry School, and a good thing too.