Peas in a pod

Talking to Laura and just made a peas in pod joke (about moving PODs, but anyway) and it made me flash to something I had to stop and write about.

When I was a kid, I got these stuffed peas.

And I remember once, being in school and being sick. I went to a Catholic school and the nuns were a wee bit strict. They assumed if you ever said you were sick that you had to be telling lies. Had to be. So they called my dad. Now, you need to understand my father wrote for a living, and did his writing in the middle of the night. His bedtime was while I was at school.

He would wake up, supposedly, in time to get my from school. Some days that worked with a margin or error less than two hours. But anyway! They called him. Which woke him up. And they told him I was supposedly sick and they weren’t sure if they believed me, but they had to call him to let him know.

He grumbled something at them and said he’d come get me.

I had bronchitis, I used to get it a bunch, so it’s a pretty sure bet that’s what it was. But I remember I felt so bad, so so bad. And as we walked home, I felt worse. We only lived a few blocks, like a 1/4 mile from the school, so we walked and I thought I would die.

So my father stopped because there was a new (doomed to be short-lived) toy store on the way home. He thought he could distract my death with a present. In reality he just thought it would shut me the hell up, of course, but hey.

The store had a bunch of things, stuffed toys and robots and space ships and I just wanted to curl up and die and then I saw these peas. I had to have them. I don’t know why but my love for them was simply immense. Truly immense. My father looked at me like I had a fever… oh wait I did have a fever, but he got me the peas:

And I loved them. So much. For years I kept them around because, hey, stuffed peas! There have been stuffed peas since but they aren’t as cool so to hell with them. Of course the stuffed peas I had go for hundreds of dollars or some shit on eBay now so… I guess I should’ve held onto my peas. But no, I lost them at some point I think. Or someone threw them out. What ever. Doesn’t matter.

What matters is, for a while there, I deeply loved a set of 5 stuffed peas in a tiny zipped pod.