Mrs. Hillbilly Mom Loses Her Head. Again.

Perhaps you remember how I was completing a little project with cutouts of my own head. Surely you remember. It was only yesterday! Try to keep up!

I had found those two errant heads on the floor of my classroom, under my desk, and The Pony scooped them up lest Cus snatch them for voodoo purposes. I put them in a manilla envelope with the finished project. This morning I took out the finished project, and went looking for my heads.

ONLY ONE HEAD WAS IN THE ENVELOPE!

Great. That meant I had left a head behind. No good could come of this body part faux pas. I was near panic. "Pony! I lost my head! I only have one head! I think the other one is at school!"

The Pony ran to my aid. He's a good son, even though he refuses to get a tattoo of a heart with "MOM" inside. And to ride in the front seat with me. But for pretty much everything else, he's a reliable workhorse.

"It's not here?" The Pony squeezed the sides of the manilla envelope and peered inside. "You're right. There's only one. Huh."

I turned from the kitchen counter to comb his hair. The Pony is maturing, but he still has certain grooming issues.

"Hey! I found your head! Right there! Now you don't have to worry about making the wrong impression." He grabbed my head from the floor, right beside the metal leg of the cutting block. We both sighed with relief.

I went on about my business of the day. My project was a rousing success, considering it was constructed by ME, on work time, with limited resources. I propped it in my glasses case in the control center of T-Hoe, just under the temperature control buttons. My face was facing the shotgun seat, where my mom would be riding to accompany me on my bill-paying session.

SWEET GUMMI MARY! Mom spent an hour and a half riding around with me, and didn't blink an eye. There my head was, scant inches from her leg, and she did not even notice! If my head had been a snake, and if my mom had been wearing her gray sweatpants with the hole in them, I could have bit her. Don't get me wrong. My mom WAS wearing pants. Just not the gray holey ones. She had on shorts. So even more skin was exposed to my virtual venom.

When we got home, Mom gathered up her Rally's sandwiches, brushed the ice cream cone crumbs from her purse, and started up the driveway to get her newspaper. She almost got away into the house before I said, "Wait a minute! Didn't you notice THIS while we were riding?" I thrust my head taped to two drinking straws out the window into Mom's face.

"Well...I didn't. I thought there was something there, but I didn't really look at it."

"What do you think?"

"It's good. Why did you make this?"

"You don't need to know. But don't you think I did a good job coloring it in? See the flush of my cheeks? Doesn't it look like me?"

"Yesss...."

"Does it look more like me than my driver's license photo?"

"Oh, YES! That is terrible! I'm so sorry for that! I wish you could get a new one."

Uh huh. The true horror of my driver's license photo rears its ugly head again. A cutout of my face, filled in with colored pencil, looks more like me than the actual license. Which is, perhaps, a good thing, and speaks well of my artistic talents, and the incompetency of the local license bureau.