The Florida Solomander

Montage: the technique of producing a new composite whole from fragments of pictures, text, or music

Solomontage:  a piece of non-replicable artwork made from fragments of undesirable mediums to produce a new composite whole in the most unwholesome of ways and found by the most unsuspecting spectators

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Our FL trip this year can really be summed up by two stories, both starring the one and only Solomander. My parents house is not what I would call "Solomonster Proof" and while it holds true that not many houses, baby-proofed or otherwise, would fit that bill, letting the Solomander loose in their house was like throwing fuel on an already all-consuming fire. He was in his own sort of slithery, slimy heaven, which made for quite the opposite effect for the rest of us.

At one point, I walked in to find Solomon wielding the fire poker with both hands, his face, arms, legs and feet covered in soot as he waved the poker side to side, a maniacal smirk across his innocent face. He happened to be standing in the living room.....and anyone from the south, (or perhaps it's just my folks' house?) knows that the living room is the "nice" room, the whitest room in the house.....white sheepskin rugs; fine, light-colored, furniture; white walls, glass, crystal, collectibles.....it was almost a heart stopping moment.

Fortunately, disaster was averted. Nothing broke, he washed up quite well and after a swim or two in the pool, the fireplace was forgotten, at least for that day.

Fast forward a few days. We had been having a hard time keeping Solly out of the bathrooms and specifically out of the tubs and showers. (You know how those Solomanders like moist environments!) He had already been found "cleaning" my parents' shower tiles with scrub brushes, sponges and enough chemicals to kill a small herd of elephants as well as having been snagged from the side of a tub which had been left full of water by another child. Both times, no harm had been done but either could have been disastrous. Well, one day, my mom all of a sudden questioned: Where's Solomon? None of us knew and she headed straight back to the bathroom. Sure enough he was headed out, down the hall when she found him, hands held high, ready to be picked up and cleaned off. According to the account, he smelled terrible and when asked what smelled, he sniffed his hands and gave a putrid look of disgust. She simply closed the bathroom door, not bothering to peek in, and took him to clean him off in the kitchen sink.

After a little while, Aidan went to use the bathroom. He came running back out, tears in his eyes, obviously shaken, and told me that he couldn't use that bathroom because it was a HUGE mess.

"Well, Aidan, could you please just clean it up and then use it?" I asked, thinking he was talking about discard nightclothes on the floor or some other benign issue.

"MOOOOM! I can't clean up THAT mess! There is poop ALL OVER THE BATHROOM!" he explained.

I immediately ran back there and sure enough, one of the girls had failed to flush the toilet. And Solomon....(sigh)....Solomon, being rather fond of the toilet brush, had apparently taken great delight in swirling the brush in the toilet bowl and then creating a great Solomontage using the entire bathroom as his canvass and the least desirable "stuff" as his medium.

That is about how the trip was this year: cleaning up behind Solly wherever he went, us adults not quite getting caught up from the previous casualty before he was already on with the next and the next and the next. There he was, skipping along, singing his own Solly-Wally-Doodle-all-the-day while we chose other, more choice words.....

My father summed it up toward the end of our stay when he mentioned: "You know, I thought your stories were, maybe not contrived but at least quite embellished. Now I can see you pretty much tell it like it is."

Yup. This is just like it is folks.

Stay tuned for more.....