Tmesis (tmee’-sis): Interjecting a word or phrase between parts of a compound word or between syllables of a word.
“Oat-shit-meal.” That’s what I called it as soon as I learned to swear. Every morning, oatmeal. Every morning prepared the same way: plain. No sugar. No Half & Half. No fruit. No nothing. Just the steaming brown glop in a small metal dog dish. Yes, dog dish! My mother got it at the Salvation Army Thrift Store. It was imprinted with bones around the rim and I could annoy my mother by tapping my spoon on it.
It was like having hot ground boiled watery cardboard for breakfast every morning. And then there was lunch.
My mother put the leftover oatmeal in small shallow Tupperware containers and refrigerated them. The oatmeal would take on the consistency of refrigerated meatloaf. Mom would slice the refrigerated oatmeal into 1/4 inch thick squares. These were our special cold cuts. She would put one on a slice of bread, top it with a slice of American cheese, and slap another slice of bread on top. Unsurprisingly, she called them “Oatmeal Sandwiches.” She had submitted her “recipe” for her sandwiches to numerous food-oriented magazines and was rejected every time. That did not deter her—we had Oatmeal Sandwiches every day for lunch.
Mom saved Quaker Oats containers. She decorated them and sold them as tom-toms on the web. She would dip them in different-colored paint and decorate them with painted macaroni, seashells, pumpkin seeds, leaves and scraps of different-colored cloth.
Her web-shop was called “Dead Drummer Girl.” We thought she would never sell a single tom-tom, especially with the name of the shop. But we were wrong.
Punk Rock was making its debut. The first band to buy one of her tom-tom’s was the highly innovative punk band “Santa’s Wanker.” Mom’s tom-toms became ragingly popular. After Johnny Balls puked on the stage he would roll around in it playing the tom-tom in a ten-minute solo that was characterized as “shocking.” Santa’s Wanker was killed in a dumpster fire, but that did not slow things down. If anything, it caused a surge in sales. All the great punk bands had to have a tom-tom from Dead Drummer Girl.
Mom started selling the tom-toms for $2,000 each. She made millions before she quit. She quit when Iggy Stool did “something too weird” with one of her tom-tom’s. It didn’t happen on stage. We’ll never know. Mom disavowed any relationship to oatmeal. Our lives changed considerably, and we started going to IHOP for breakfast and Shogun Sushi for dinner,
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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