Rock In Ear

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• January 8, 2017

My Mother was looking into my kid brother’s ear with an Otoscope.  Mitch had been complaining about ear pain.  He was in elementary school at the time.  Much to my Mother’s surprise, there was a rock wedged in his ear canal.

“How did a rock get in your ear?!” Though, the answer was obvious.

“Someone threw a rock in my ear.”

“Someone threw a rock in your ear?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure you didn’t put the rock in your ear.”

“No.  Someone threw it.  It went into my ear.”

No one believed that a rock was thrown, and somehow, magically got lodged in my brother’s ear canal.  And then the story changed.  Several times.

“I was throwing the rock, and when I had my hand by my ear, ready to throw, it fell out of my hand and into my ear.”

“I was on the monkey bars and fell, and a rock got stuck in my ear.”

“It happened on the slide.”

“Just admit you put a rock in your ear, Mitch,” we urged, knowing the truth, despite his elaborate and more ridiculous stories of how a rock got in his ear.

Eventually, he did confess.  To the nurse.  He had put the rock in his ear, then taken it out, and did it again and again, each time putting it deeper and deeper until it wouldn’t come out.  It was almost a week before he told my Mom about the rock.  We made fun of him incessantly, which, might be the reason why he withheld telling us.

Perhaps one of the myriad of reasons I fell into comedy is due to the ball busting family I come from.  Getting in trouble sucks.  The initial yelling and disappointment bestowed by one’s parents is never fun.  Though anger in my household was usually quickly replaced by humor.  Whatever fuck up you did would be forgiven but not forgotten.  Ever.  You could be mocked for it for your entire life (and maybe after death! Who knows?!).

My sister finds our “locker room affection” to be off putting at times.  She’s accused all of us (mostly me) of being overly judgmental and sometimes cruel.  I find her criticisms to be compliments.  Yes, I am judgmental, and proud to be.  Yes, my humor is sometimes at the expense of others, but just as well, I’ve been the butt of my own jokes.

In the weeks that followed the removal of the rock from my brother’s cranium, we had the very rock in a clear vile displayed in our kitchen, and we showed whatever guest came into our house the infamous rock and the increasingly poor white lies my brother had told until his ultimate confession.  And every time, we laughed and laughed.  My brother too laughed at his own idiocy, realizing, in retrospect, just how absurd his fables were.

Some fifteen years later, we still will poke fun at my kid brother for this.  It’s funny because, had he just told the truth, we STILL would have made fun of him, but the mockery (and straight up entertainment) wouldn’t have carried on for so many years.

I think about this anecdote every time someone doesn’t claim liability for their fuck up.  It happens all the time.  Within the inner circle of my friends and family, with comedians, at my loathsome office job, even in the news with celebrities and politicians.  Let there be no mistake, I’m guilty of not admitting to issues I’ve caused for myself as well.  Few problems are really as serious as we make them out to be.

How many rocks are in our heads that rattle around, causing us discomfort, annoyance, and even pain, that we plainly put there, where we will make any excuse imaginable not to admit that we caused it?  Especially if we can no longer remove it ourselves.  If I’m laughing at you, it should be remembered, I would laugh at myself in the same position.  Time is humor’s best friend; what seems horrible at the moment is usually funny later, because we are all so flawed.  With my family, the one I was born into, and the friends I’ve chosen to be my family, we will always be relentless jesters, and I for one, would never want it any other way.  There is forgiveness in laughter.