He Can't Face It

Ah, Zachary....he's always been the most expressive of my children, by FAR. When he wants you to know how he's feeling or what he's thinking, he can do it without speaking. His face can speak volumes.

I took him for his bi-weekly allergy shot yesterday. When Zach goes to the doctor he gets very serious. His brow furrows, he nods or shakes his head solemnly in response to the nurse's questions, he raises one eyebrow when the nurse asks him to do something out of the ordinary. It's just a lot of facial drama.

He couldn't get his allergy shots yesterday because when the nurse listened to his lungs she heard a lot of wheezing. So the doctor came in and checked him out, told me to take him home and spend the next few hours trying to get the wheezing under control, and call back in the next day or two. Zach was listening and doing his dramatic serious faces.

As we walked out, the doctor says to one of the nurses, "Wow, that kid is WAY too expressive in his face to be a 6 year old. With expressions like that, you'd think he was a 70 year old man who'd lived a really long and hard life!"

It reminded me of another Melissa story, because Zachary is Melissa reincarnated. One night Melissa and I went out to dinner at Red Robin. We ordered, and before our food came Melissa got very involved in telling me a story. I don't remember what the story was now, but I do remember that it was VERY IMPORTANT to her. The waitress brought our food and I started eating, but Melissa was too engrossed in the world-shattering details of her story to eat yet. So she continued with the extreme eyebrow raising, the dramatic hand actions, the half-raised out of her seat forward chin thrusting movements....

This went on for a good 10 minutes. As I recall, she was so into this story that she even let loose a couple of forehead self-smacks. If you've never seen Melissa smack herself in the forehead, you've obviously never seen her in her natural state. When she's particularly amped up about a topic, her forehead turns beat red...from the repeated blows she inflicts upon herself while saying words with hard consonants using extreme enunciation.

Anyway, a few minutes later, the waitress returned. She had a very concerned look on her face, and she looked at Melissa and said:

"Is your food okay? My manager has been watching you, and he just told me I needed to come ask you how your food was, because he thought you looked really upset about something..."

I reassured her that the food was lovely, my friend was just overly excited about her recent release from the Norristown State Hospital.

(Speaking of that hospital, if you're ever in Norristown you HAVE to drive through the grounds. It is INSANE [pun intended]. It literally looks like the scene for every scary movie you're ever seen. Old brick buildings with broken window panes and ivy growing so thick it covers up doors....and when you drive in through the gates it's hard to find the exit, so you're just driving deeper and deeper into an Alfred Hitchcock nightmare.)