Medela

Medela (me-de’-la): When you can’t deny or defend friends’ faults and seek to heal them with good words.

Here we go again! I’m such a sucker, especially when it comes to Teddy. It seems like we’ve been friends since birth. Our mothers were friends and they would dump us in a crib together while they sat by the pool. Teddy would make noises, wave his hands around, shake his head and then stop and point his finger. Today he was pointing at the tube of suntan lotion my mother had dropped by the crib.

I reached for it and grabbed it. The cap fell off and the lotion started oozing out. I squirted some in my mouth and handed it to Teddy. He took a slug too. It started to burn our mouths and we both started howling. My mother came running, saw the tube in the crib and the white cream on my lips and called 911. An ambulance quickly arrived and took us to the hospital. Our stomachs were pumped and we had to stay overnight for “observation.”

Now, it’s 15 years later and Jacky has a plan. He wants charge a fee to scrape gum off of movie theatre floors. Then he wants to recycle the gum, repackage it and sell it as “Jacky’s Blended Gum.” I let my guard down again for the hundredth time. Although he was insane, he was harmless. He had saved my life twice and I owed him. Once, I had put a couple of wires in a wall outlet and put the wires in my mouth to see what electricity tastes like. Just when my tongue started to smoke, he pulled out the wires and saved my life. The other time we were hiking and we saw a bear. I ran up to it to pet it and Jacky threw a rock at it and chased it away. That bear could’ve eaten me. Enough said.

Now, I was ready to make gum with Jacky. We collected five garbage bags of scraped gum. It was hard work, but it was time to blend the gum. We filled my bathtub with piping hot water and dumped in the gum. We figured the hot water would melt/blend the gum together. When we drained the tub, we had a giant lump of gum. It was so big we couldn’t lift it out of the tub. Then, I got my hand stuck in the gum when I was trying to pick it up. So did Jacky. He was able to get ahold of his cellphone with his free hand. He called the police. Almost immediately, we heard sirens. The police broke down our front door and scaled the stairs to the upstairs bathroom. The three police officers started laughing when they saw what had happened. They cut us out of the gum with their tactical knives.

The five of us couldn’t lift the gum. Part of it had gone down the drain and that was what had gotten stuck. My parents had to pay a plumber and an excavator to get the gum out of the tub. The plumber freed the tub and it was carried to the front lawn and a gas-powered ditch-digger pulled the gum out of the tub. The plumber reinstalled the tub, and all was well, except for my life.

Having gotten sucked in by Teddy cost me $2,500 that I have to repay my parents with monthly installments. With my job at “Golden Burgers” it’ll take at least a year. Jacky is an idiot, but so am I.

Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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