My Life with Mister Shmoo

This year it’s been twenty-five years. A quarter of a century of Shmoo. As we all know, Luca is not a typical 25-year-old: he never smoked weed, never had a sip of wine, or coffee. He never made love with a person, only himself, he doesn’t have a driver’s license, and he never graduated from middle school or college. He has no ambitions, he never broke up with anyone, he never ordered a pizza to go. He was never sent to the principal’s office, never went to Greece on vacation, never travelled around Europe by train. He never wrote a love letter and he doesn’t have a resumé. He never cooked, never asked for expensive sneakers, he never went for a walk by himself. He made his own bed a few times, at gunpoint; the same with laundry, emptying the dishwasher or putting away groceries. Luce doesn’t care about any of that. It’s one of the many reasons I consider him to be the most amazing person in the world. Because he doesn’t miss anything. Whatever he doesn’t have, he has never wa...

Luca was born on a Tuesday in November. The year was 1996, and the weather was cold with occasional snow showers. The hospital room was very cozy, the midwife comforting, despite her pronounced lisp; especially when she was encouraging me to push. Her S was unusually long - a bit distracting, but hey, we can’t all be perfect.   As I started to really push, Dan, my husband, started throwing up the rotten chicken sandwich he had found in the nurses’ fridge. Out went the whole birth plan we had so carefully put together - down the drain, literally. Claudia, Dan’s sister, showed up to replace him. It was she and I who met Luca for the first time - and the midwife with the lisp was there too, slapping Luca on the back so that he would take his very first breath, which came a bit later than expected. But arrive it did, along with his first huge scream.   Luca was ugly: he had a conehead, a red eye and red marks on his face. It took a long time for him to leave my uterus. Three hours...