My Very Weird Daughter The Heir

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," where the apple doesn't fall far from the tree! Actually, it's supposed to work this way: Each generation builds on the previous generation -- onward and upward we go.

Except if Mama is weird, what does daughter do?

Behold the world of my offspring, The Heir! (I call her The Heir because she's the oldest. Meaning, she inherits. My younger daughter, The Spare, is a backup plan. Well, not really, but I'm not gonna reveal my kids' names and get all their adventures Googled on them.)

For two years The Heir has been begging for music lessons. She wants to play the musical saw.

I'm totally serious. The kid is 19, and she's drooling over a saw that you play by drawing a bow across it.

We did some YouTube of the doggoned things, and they sound like cats in the middle of torture or sex, take your pick. But The Heir really wants one! And she has assured me that she doesn't want to learn to play tunes on it, only to make the worst sounds the thing can make. So it won't matter if she's not proficient.

That will scare away every ghost in the county.

My only consolation is that she'll be going to college in the fall, so the bulk of her practicing will be inflicted upon her dorm mates. I'm sure she'll be wildly popular.

Yesterday The Heir called me from work. She told me she wanted to stay another hour.

When I got to her place of employment, she eagerly ushered me into a basement room. (It's an old school building, no longer in use for educational purposes.)

Spread across the floor were about a dozen big white posters. All of them featured a photograph of some species of salami, stark against the white background. I never knew there were so many different kinds of salami, but each and every one looked so unappetizing that I'll never eat another Italian hoagie in my life.

The Heir gazed about herself in awe. "Aren't these great?" she enthused.

Her task is to organize the posters into sets, so that her employer can sell them. (They're signed and numbered prints.) There are hundreds and hundreds of salami posters, and The Heir is handling each one as if it had been personally drawn by Picasso.

She expressed the fervent hope that none of the other staff would finish the job.

I told her that there are 400,000,000 people in America, and 399,999,999 of them would rather not stand in a cold basement sorting salami posters. Nevertheless, she's anxious that this important task not be delegated to anyone else.

So, what do you do with a 19-year-old who doesn't drink or smoke, who has friends but no particular boyfriend, who has never broken the law or had a harsh word for anyone?

Oh sure, it's easy for you to say I should love her. But what about this salami thing? And the musical saw, for the love of fruit flies!

Where did I go wrong?