A Little Southeast of Gnome

Here is a game should you choose to try it.

One day, my friend, Erin Tagan, gathered a group of Wild Women on Zoom and started out what sounded like a Mad Libs game. “Give me a place. Give me an article of apparel. Give my a kind of drink. Give me an emotion. Give me a Covid vaccine…”

With each request, we wrote our selection in the chat. Then she said, “Now use those word in a story.”

Here is my result. I wish I had kept the list, but I bet you can guess some of them. Sometimes you just have to be silly.

A Little Southeast of Gnome           

            Some things bring joy, others heartache, but to me silliness is the name of the game.  If I am at the beach, I may sculpt a statue of a bottle of cough syrup or perhaps a pig.  Then there was the day in Ensenada, sitting in a coffee shop when I found a gnome in the back of the shop, sitting in one of those little tents you buy for kids to set up in the living room.  I liked him immediately because he offered me the choice of red wine, a margarita, or Wild Turkey.  I took the wine but kept my other options open.  After that we were inseparable.  He took me sailing and then we went to the boardwalk and skated.  When we hiked to the top of Cowles Mountain, he taught me to yodel.  

            Now some of you might think it was a pain to pal around with a gnome, especially one who wore Hawaiian shirts, but I loved his sense of humor, and we could travel because I’d had the Moderna shots, and he had had both Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson.

            Then came the night when he poured out his stale beer into my night-blooming jasmine.  I loved that plant. That night we asked Alexa to play three songs—My Blue Heaven, Here Comes the Sun, Bohemian Rhapsody. I whirled around him with my Wild Turkey, and sang at the top of my lungs

            It felt as crazy as crowd surfing at a concert, I was as high as a sky diver, and felt I could run through the traffic naked on the 5 freeway in LA.  

            The gnome looked so elegant in his purple tights, but he ditched them when we went to Black’s Beach.  Later that night, we threw popcorn at the screen in a movie theatre and finally ended up in a casino bar.  The floor was covered with sawdust that rubbed against my bare feet like oatmeal. Oh, we sang, we howled, as we rolled on the floor and brushed sawdust from our clothes. All night we sang and danced back on the beach, and he was most forgiving the next morning when I tripped over him on the way to find a bathroom.