Thanks, Mom: Hot, Orange Carrots
My mother’s family is wonderfully crazy.
By Rachel Gmach | Royal Report
If a stranger were to ever walk in on any of my mother’s family gatherings, it’s quite possible they would double back, and reconsider entering at all, for fear that they had stumbled upon a psych ward. For there is nothing more amusing, joyous, or frightening than hearing my mother Cindy and her sisters laughing at a good, or often horrible, joke. My mother’s face will scrunch up really small and she’ll start releasing noises usually reserved for geese and goblins as she keels over and makes a futile effort to relay to everyone what exactly she’s found so funny that it’s rendered her unable to breathe.
In my eighth grade year, my class was taking a coach bus down to Chicago. My mother, chaperoning, had taken a seat with the other moms who had been shooed to the back of the bus by their children who feared nothing more than being embarrassed by them. I nearly jumped out of my seat up front at the sound of startled laughter coming from the back of the bus — my mother. Between the squawks and shrieks I heard “Hot, orange carrots.”
The bus was bursting with the laughter of mothers and the package-deal awkwardness. “:”Hot orange carrots!,” the befuddling phrase was yelled out over and over again as the moms rolled in their seats and their children looked on in mortification.
“She told me to look at the horse-drawn carriage,” my mom, Cindy, said, gesturing to her friend and fellow chaperone, Lisa, who was wiping the tears from her cheeks.
“But I thought she said ‘Hot, orange carrots!’ ” She was barely able to squeeze the words out between her fits.
My Mom was a hit. For the duration of the trip the moms threw around the phrase “Hot, orange carrots“” like “Mazel tov” at a Bar Mitzvah, never failing to evoke bushels of laughter from my mother, who now considered herself a female Kevin Hart. They hid baby carrots everywhere — in each others’ beds, purses and food – and found each time more humorous than the last.
To their children, these women seemed crazy. Third party observers would surely dub them outlandish and silly. I can’t help but wonder, however, how much more pleasurable the world would be, should we all find joy as Cindy does — in such insignificant things as hot orange carrots.
