Karen Lumos: ReVERSE

Approximately once a month, my father had a epiphany so profound -- so crucial to our fundamental way of life (usually on the topic of what is wrong with America) that he just had to share it with the world.

He usually started at gas stations, progressing to strangers standing in line at the hardware store and the poor homeless guys hanging out at McDonald's for the 49 cent cup of coffee, with free refills.

Then, once enough perfect strangers had validated his intellect, he'd bring that epiphany home to his adoring family--complete with "The Plan."

Now his ideas about what's wrong with America were never political buzz-word generalizations like "no family values anymore." I have to admit that his ideas were truly original and obviously invested with plenty of time and intellectual energy. I will stop short of calling them genius; they were too close to freakishly eccentric for that.

Like the time he decided that what was wrong with America was refrigeration. His logic went like this: refrigeration was something of a government/big business conspiracy to convince the public/working man that fruits or meats wouldn't rot or spoil so that the consumer would buy more than what was needed, to save for later--but--my father had finally realized that the food was still rotting, that refrigeration only kept the food from looking or tasting obviously rotten, but the essence of that food (everything from the vitamins to that pure, fresh-from-the-farm taste) was still rotting at the same rate as without refrigeration.

And that's what's wrong with America. We no longer even remembered the pure taste of food, nor did we expect vitamins when we had our Flintstones. So we all just let the food rot and paid inflated prices to our enemies for the privilege of eating that rot.

And it didn't stop with food, radio rotted into television, and "work" rotted through regulations and unions, which represented appearance but was without substance. America was rotting alive without even noticing.

But we didn't have to worry--The Schierhoff Family wouldn't rot -- because Dad had figured it out--Dad had "The Plan."

For the insidious Refrigeration Conspiracy, the plan was simple, in theory. Mom would just go to the store every morning and buy only what she needed to make breakfast, dinner, and supper that day.

But Mom was pretty mad about having to go to the store every morning, while still being expected to have father's soft boiled eggs, bacon, grapefruit, and coffee on the breakfast table at 5:00AM so that Dad could get to work by 6:00. But even a fight-a-day with the wife was a worthwhile sacrifice to SAVE HIS FAMILY FROM ROTTING! Or at least it was until he saw the grocery bill that month. He hadn't quite figured the extent of savings that could be had by buying bulk groceries at the Base Commissary once a month into his plan.

So, a few days later, Dad announced that what was really wrong with America was glass, but Mom said he was wrong. This time, Mom had figured it all out, and what was wrong with America was Cheapskate Sexist Pigs like Dad, and she was quite confident that this time, she had "The Plan." Of course we children never heard this plan in Mom's own words, because we were sent to our rooms. But I figured out that Mom's plan had something to do with throwing spaghetti at Dad and then refusing to clean it up, since the spaghetti was still there on the wall, with broken plate pieces on the floor, when Dad woke me in the morning to ask if I knew how to soft boil eggs.