'Honey, where do you want me to put this paper?' People got them all the time.' She looked toward the kitchen, where Hugh was doing something to a goose. The gifts had been opened, and she was collecting the used wrapping paper and ironing it flat with her hands. She'd come to Paris for Christmas, as had Lisa and her husband, Bob. 'Well, that's sort of chauvinistic of you, don't you think?' Maw Hamrick said. A dad can be crawling with parasites and somehow it's OK, but on a mom, or any woman, really, it's unforgivable. I would burn all pictures of her, destroy anything she had ever given me, and start all over because that is simply disgusting. If I was a child and saw something creeping out of a hole in my mother's leg, I would march to the nearest orphanage and put myself up for adoption. Her worm was a bit shorter than her son's, not that the size really matters. The following day, the spot became more painful, and the day after that he looked down and saw a worm poking out.Ī few weeks later, the same thing happened to Maw Hamrick, which is what I call Hugh's mother, Joan. Nothing huge - a mosquito bite, he figured. He was eight years old and living in the Congo when he noticed a red spot on his leg. They're minor, though, compared with what Hugh had. I guess they're what Patsy imagines when she looks at a theater seat, what Lisa sees lurking on the handle of a grocery cart. After applying it, I raked through my pubic hair with a special nit comb, and what I came away with was a real eye-opener: these little monsters who'd been feasting for weeks on my flesh. I was in my midtwenties at the time and probably would have itched myself all the way to the bone had a friend not taken me to a drugstore, where I got a bottle of something called Quell. The only preventive thing I do is wash clothes after buying them in a thrift shop - this after catching crabs from a pair of used pants.

A lifetime of shopping, and this was the first exotic bird I'd ever seen browsing the meat counter.

I told this to Lisa, and she said, 'See! There's no telling what foot diseases that bird might have.' She had a point, but it's not like everyone takes a cockatiel to the grocery store. Is it just Americans, or does everyone think this way? In Paris once, I went to my neighborhood supermarket and saw a man shopping with his cockatiel, which was the size of a teenage eagle and stood perched on the handle of his cart. 'Oh,' she said, 'you don't ever want to touch the handle of a grocery cart with your bare hands. In a similar vein, I was at the grocery store with my sister Lisa and I noticed her pushing the cart with her forearms.

When you were engulfed in flames