EYE!, or, What I Like about Hallowe'en
The word eye has to be one of the funniest words in the English language. Especially when it's said all by itself: "EYE!"
I love stuffed Spanish olives. Piquant, salty, pimento-stuffed-what’s there not to enjoy? Even as a little kid, I adored them, and green olives are not the kind of thing you’d expect to tempt a rugrat, let alone a famously fussy-eating one. For obvious reasons, I called them “eyes.”
My childhood just barely overlapped the Golden Age of Social Alcohol, when pressing a mixed drink into every guest’s hand was the officially sanctioned greeting while receiving “company” for dinner. My parents’ drink of choice was the standard martini. (These were the days when martinis had only one dimension. You could either have a “dry” or “wet” one, with a number of gradations in between, but these fancy-schmancy flavored martinis we have today were as unthinkable then as using a cell phone to find directions in a foreign city.) And of course, no all-American family martini would be complete without a cocktail olive. In those baroque times, we had three standard types of cocktail olives. The ones stuffed with pearl onions or almond slivers seem to have gone extinct; and only their pimento-filled cousins have survived.
Mom and Dad used to tell this story about me when I was three years old. They’d invited one of their doctor friends to dinner, and naturally, during the opening ceremonies the ethanol flowed in the socially approved manner. I was never comfortable around strangers while I was growing up. In fact, when I was really little I viewed them with abject terror, usually from behind a reassuringly large couch. But even my borderline pathological shyness was no match for the lure of the olive. I toddled up to Dr. So-and-so and jammed my grubby fingers directly into his martini. I triumphantly held up the olive I’d grabbed from it, proclaimed, “EYE!”, and thrust it into my barely-toothed maw.
I certainly don’t remember the incident, but Dad swears it happened.
In high school, the brother and I resurrected the term “EYE!” for a completely different circumstance. We’d gotten addicted to watching old cartoons in the afternoons after school-especially “The Tom & Jerry Show,” an amalgam of classic T & J and an assortment of random Warner Bros. and Lantz cartoons from the movie-and-newsreel age, with a few budjo1 1970s Hanna-Barbaric slide shows thrown in just so we’d properly appreciate the good stuff. There’s a fairly common situation in which a main character is trying to sneak past, or up on, a fearsome adversary, and the latter is secretly aware of it (i.e., the sneaking up). Just as the hero, tiptoeing along, reaches the second character, the adversary suddenly turns around and they meet, eye-to-eye-literally. Their eyeballs, comically magnified, touch for just a moment, and the hero (usually) tries to retreat, all friendly and nonchalant. At the point that their eyes are pressed together, we used to exclaim, “EYE!”
The canonical “EYE!” occurs in a Tom & Jerry in which Jerry hides out in a hen’s nest. Tom gets wing-buffeted and pecked away from the nest once by the incensed chicken (who thinks he’s after her eggs), and on his second, more stealthy approach, he gets the EYE.
Let’s skip ahead once again, to the weekend before last. For the last year or so I’ve been working 60- to 70-hour weeks, by necessity, but there are occasions-such as late Saturday evening-when, even though I’m not falling-down tired, my brain calls it quits. At these times I know better than to even try to be productive, since I’ll just wind up playing on the ’Net anyway, so I abandoned the computer and slouched downstairs to watch the best of The Fellowship of the Ring.2,3 At some point I could hear Kathy come down and fetch something from the kitchen, but she barely registered on my attentional radar. A couple minutes later I felt something pressing on my shoulder, and I reckoned it was a cat walking across the top of the couch to say howdy. I twisted around to pet the cat and found Kathy’s staring face about a millimeter from mine. “AAAAAAAAAH! Don’t do that!”, I admonished, once my heart had vacated my throat and I could breathe again.
I got her back, though. Last Saturday, on my weekendly grocery shopping trip, I noticed within the store’s usual supply of mylar balloons a couple of giant, floating eyeballs. Perhaps 18 inches (45 cm) across, they were beautifully rendered. They even had the retinal blood vessels sprawling across the back. And an evil plan was hatched. It was nearly reflexive: I saw the eye balloon and my plans for it almost simultaneously. After purchasing the weirdest combination of items imaginable (bananas, Liquid Plumr and an eye balloon), I rushed home and prepared to cause trouble. A weight tied to the balloon string in just the right place made the eyeball float at exactly face height. I positioned the eye just behind the door to the garage, closed the door oh so carefully and waited. A few minutes later Kathy came downstairs, since we were already planning to go out. I just sort of lounged about and dragged my feet while she got ready to go, and I graciously let her lead the way to the garage.
It was perfect. When she pulled the door open, the eyeball leaned in with the draft, right in her face. Again triumphant after so many years, I yelled, “EYE!”
Amazingly, she was less badly startled by my huge floating eyeball than I was when she snuck up on me watching a movie. I couldn’t be too disappointed, though: I’d achieved the ultimate EYE.
_______________________
1Low-budget.
2The approximate drill: Bilbo’s party-fast forward-Weathertop-Bree-fast forward-drown the Nazgul-faaaaast forward-the grim Mount Badass Caradhras and Mines of Moria-“You Shall Not Pass!”-lose interest.
3The most guttural syllable in English-language film history occurs in Fellowship of the Ring while all the heavy-duty heroes in Rivendell are casting their lots with Frodo and joining the Fellowship. Legolas says to Frodo, “You have my bow,” to which Gimli adds, “And my axe.” That word, axe, is almost unvoiced in its growliness. The Lord of the Rings pinball machine has “And my axe” as a sound effect, and after playing it one evening, I couldn’t stop saying “axe” like Gimli, with the guttural a really drawn out: aaaaxe. “Well, I, for one, am sure glad I have your aaaaxe! What would we do without your aaaaxe? I need to chop some firewood; could I borrow your aaaaxe?”-and so on, until Kathy hit me.
I love stuffed Spanish olives. Piquant, salty, pimento-stuffed-what’s there not to enjoy? Even as a little kid, I adored them, and green olives are not the kind of thing you’d expect to tempt a rugrat, let alone a famously fussy-eating one. For obvious reasons, I called them “eyes.”
My childhood just barely overlapped the Golden Age of Social Alcohol, when pressing a mixed drink into every guest’s hand was the officially sanctioned greeting while receiving “company” for dinner. My parents’ drink of choice was the standard martini. (These were the days when martinis had only one dimension. You could either have a “dry” or “wet” one, with a number of gradations in between, but these fancy-schmancy flavored martinis we have today were as unthinkable then as using a cell phone to find directions in a foreign city.) And of course, no all-American family martini would be complete without a cocktail olive. In those baroque times, we had three standard types of cocktail olives. The ones stuffed with pearl onions or almond slivers seem to have gone extinct; and only their pimento-filled cousins have survived.
Mom and Dad used to tell this story about me when I was three years old. They’d invited one of their doctor friends to dinner, and naturally, during the opening ceremonies the ethanol flowed in the socially approved manner. I was never comfortable around strangers while I was growing up. In fact, when I was really little I viewed them with abject terror, usually from behind a reassuringly large couch. But even my borderline pathological shyness was no match for the lure of the olive. I toddled up to Dr. So-and-so and jammed my grubby fingers directly into his martini. I triumphantly held up the olive I’d grabbed from it, proclaimed, “EYE!”, and thrust it into my barely-toothed maw.
I certainly don’t remember the incident, but Dad swears it happened.
In high school, the brother and I resurrected the term “EYE!” for a completely different circumstance. We’d gotten addicted to watching old cartoons in the afternoons after school-especially “The Tom & Jerry Show,” an amalgam of classic T & J and an assortment of random Warner Bros. and Lantz cartoons from the movie-and-newsreel age, with a few budjo1 1970s Hanna-Barbaric slide shows thrown in just so we’d properly appreciate the good stuff. There’s a fairly common situation in which a main character is trying to sneak past, or up on, a fearsome adversary, and the latter is secretly aware of it (i.e., the sneaking up). Just as the hero, tiptoeing along, reaches the second character, the adversary suddenly turns around and they meet, eye-to-eye-literally. Their eyeballs, comically magnified, touch for just a moment, and the hero (usually) tries to retreat, all friendly and nonchalant. At the point that their eyes are pressed together, we used to exclaim, “EYE!”
The canonical “EYE!” occurs in a Tom & Jerry in which Jerry hides out in a hen’s nest. Tom gets wing-buffeted and pecked away from the nest once by the incensed chicken (who thinks he’s after her eggs), and on his second, more stealthy approach, he gets the EYE.
Let’s skip ahead once again, to the weekend before last. For the last year or so I’ve been working 60- to 70-hour weeks, by necessity, but there are occasions-such as late Saturday evening-when, even though I’m not falling-down tired, my brain calls it quits. At these times I know better than to even try to be productive, since I’ll just wind up playing on the ’Net anyway, so I abandoned the computer and slouched downstairs to watch the best of The Fellowship of the Ring.2,3 At some point I could hear Kathy come down and fetch something from the kitchen, but she barely registered on my attentional radar. A couple minutes later I felt something pressing on my shoulder, and I reckoned it was a cat walking across the top of the couch to say howdy. I twisted around to pet the cat and found Kathy’s staring face about a millimeter from mine. “AAAAAAAAAH! Don’t do that!”, I admonished, once my heart had vacated my throat and I could breathe again.
I got her back, though. Last Saturday, on my weekendly grocery shopping trip, I noticed within the store’s usual supply of mylar balloons a couple of giant, floating eyeballs. Perhaps 18 inches (45 cm) across, they were beautifully rendered. They even had the retinal blood vessels sprawling across the back. And an evil plan was hatched. It was nearly reflexive: I saw the eye balloon and my plans for it almost simultaneously. After purchasing the weirdest combination of items imaginable (bananas, Liquid Plumr and an eye balloon), I rushed home and prepared to cause trouble. A weight tied to the balloon string in just the right place made the eyeball float at exactly face height. I positioned the eye just behind the door to the garage, closed the door oh so carefully and waited. A few minutes later Kathy came downstairs, since we were already planning to go out. I just sort of lounged about and dragged my feet while she got ready to go, and I graciously let her lead the way to the garage.
It was perfect. When she pulled the door open, the eyeball leaned in with the draft, right in her face. Again triumphant after so many years, I yelled, “EYE!”
Amazingly, she was less badly startled by my huge floating eyeball than I was when she snuck up on me watching a movie. I couldn’t be too disappointed, though: I’d achieved the ultimate EYE.
_______________________
1Low-budget.
2The approximate drill: Bilbo’s party-fast forward-Weathertop-Bree-fast forward-drown the Nazgul-faaaaast forward-the grim Mount Badass Caradhras and Mines of Moria-“You Shall Not Pass!”-lose interest.
3The most guttural syllable in English-language film history occurs in Fellowship of the Ring while all the heavy-duty heroes in Rivendell are casting their lots with Frodo and joining the Fellowship. Legolas says to Frodo, “You have my bow,” to which Gimli adds, “And my axe.” That word, axe, is almost unvoiced in its growliness. The Lord of the Rings pinball machine has “And my axe” as a sound effect, and after playing it one evening, I couldn’t stop saying “axe” like Gimli, with the guttural a really drawn out: aaaaxe. “Well, I, for one, am sure glad I have your aaaaxe! What would we do without your aaaaxe? I need to chop some firewood; could I borrow your aaaaxe?”-and so on, until Kathy hit me.