if you don't have anything nice to say
...come sit next to me and say it
This is ivana tinkle. Is that my real name? God, what if it was.
No, I grew up with a fabulous community of “bonus moms”, mothers of our friends and neighborhood ladies who wouldn’t hesitate to scold us, hug us, or pick up the phone and *gasp* call our parents. Most of them were textbook 80s-era parents: they loved us desperately but knew we were better off refining our own internal system of risk assessments and situational responses than we were with them hovering over us to instruct us on how to respond to each situation.
Also, they just wanted us out of the house.
For example, when my best friend went ass-over-teakettle off her bike one day, I knew to put down my kickstand before checking her vitals or else my own bike would fall over and the chain might fall off and then anyone driving by would see me struggling to get it back on. That’s self-preservation, folks.
My best friend was fine. I think.
Anyway.
We spent most of our summers at our grandparents’ lake cabin because there was only so much trouble we kids could get into surrounded by hundreds of acres of pines on one side and a lake small enough to see across on the other. The four or five neighboring families along the shore all had children the same age as us, give or take five years, which was both a blessing and a curse. The blessing? We were all fast friends, and we entertained ourselves from dawn to way past dusk. The curse?
We were all fast friends, and we entertained ourselves from dawn to way past dusk.
My parents were some of the stricter amongst the group, making us check in and giving us a curfew. Other parents along the shore were more lenient, ringing a bell at dinnertime and otherwise allowing complete ferality. One set of parents in particular allowed total freedom, and encouraged a certain level of mischief.
I referred to this set of parents as my “other parents”, and while I adored both of them, my “second mom” especially was a true partner-in-adolescent-crime. She adored gags and pranks and was notorious for her antics, which ranged from benign to would-now-constitute-a-felony.
One of her favorite tricks was adding wooden nameplates to the directional roadsigns along the winding dirt drive that leads to our cabins. At every fork in the road, cabin owners have nailed wooden arrows, painted with their last name, to nearby trees in order for visitors to choose the right path (this started well before GPS and even before the road had an official name). Second Mom loved adding imaginary neighbors to the trees and as we got older, we joined her. A lot of the cabin folks were pious and prim, and GOD if Second Mom didn’t love to blow smoke up their choir robes.
Louis St. Ools, Seymour Butz, Oliver Klozoff, and Harry P. Ness were some of our favorite neighbors she created - but the best was Ivana Tinkle. For the last thirty years, “Ivana Tinkle” has reigned supreme amongst the pines and the birches, and though we lost Second Mom a few years ago, we always keep Ivana up on one of the signposts. We can hear her laughter clearly weaving through the trees every time we pass it.
Hence - Ivana Tinkle was born. She stands for everything irreverent and all those things you always wanted to say but, for the grace of god and your parents, you kept to yourself. Well, as Second Mom always said, if you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit next to me and say it.