Today’s topic is: “SLAMMERS.” Slammers are individuals who slam every door (cabinets, refrigerator, broom closet, toilet seat, etc) hard enough to register on the Richter Scale by using the same amount of slamming power normally associate with someone attempting to squish a tarantula they suddenly found walking on their shoulder.
I know this because we have a slammer living our in home: my daughter, Sara. Now, you would never suspect someone so sweet, so cute, and so lovable to be SO STRONG! Bulls in china shops should be so rough and tough. And believe me, when she is rummaging for an after-school snack, she slams our cabinets so firmly it sounds like a reenactment of the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre is taking place in our kitchen.
Sara routinely slams doors so violently we have a bulldozer drop by once a month to push the house back onto its foundation. And just last week a representative from the Department of Defense showed up to investigate a report about an explosion slightly louder than the Mount Saint Helens’ eruption originating from our bathroom, only to find out it was just Sara closing the shower’s sliding glass door.
But as good as she is at slamming stuff during the day, she is even better at nighttime slamming, especially when you are curled up on the sofa, three winks away from forty winks when, suddenly - SLAM! - forcing you to leap out of your skin, pound on your chest like a gorilla to get your heart started, realize the LOUD noise was nothing, recompose yourself on the sofa, start to fall asleep when, suddenly - “SLAM!” And once AGAIN you’re back out of your skin AGAIN and attempting to give yourself mouth-to-mouth in order to get your heart started AGAIN!
What’s really interesting, by which I mean scary, is that slammers are also usually loud talkers. And when a talker talks to you, if you find yourself too close to them (“too close” described here as on the same planet) their LOUD talking creates such a shockwave that your facial skin, much like that of a NASA astronaut training on one of those high-speed centrifuge flight simulator thingamajigs, will begin stretching off of your skull until the corners of your mouth touches your earlobes.
This loud talking is also a huge cause for concern for the people in Japan who keep calling my house and complaining about loud talking.
“A, yes, please, a, Mr. Drury, yes, so sorry but someone in your house talk real loud. Godzilla movies keep being drowned out, thank you please. We cannot hear village being destroyed, thank you. So sorry but could you have them lower voice, thank you, so much. Saranair.”
The plot thickens because slammers and talkers are also stompers,
whereby they LOUDLY stomp around the house, even while perched atop their tiptoes. And if you did not know any better you would swear a group of elephants, wearing steel toed boots, had broken into your house and were currently line-dancing next to the microwave.
Slamming, talking, stomping, these people have this whole noise thing going on. But short of permanently puttying up your ears with spackle, what are you?
Anyway, the school bus just stopped at our driveway, and Sara just slammed the school bus door and ripped it off of its hinges. I better get my pith helmet and dive behind the sandbag bunker I built in the living room. I’m confident enough in its durability to handle incoming mortar rounds, but if she starts searching for an after-school fudge sicle snack, well, I’m not so sure my foxhole can withstand a flying freezer door.
Dear Ethel from Kingston:
Thanks for the great letter. Glad that my February 18th column made you laugh. And I hope your daughter in Florida laughs, too.
And thanks for getting me in the spirit in which my columns are written: for people to NOT take themselves and/or life too seriously, because as my motto goes: it is a good feeling to laugh, but a much better feeling to have made someone laugh.
Your local friendly humor columnist, Bill Drury. :-).
