concocted glimpse

Rosc came home with a new ornament for our Christmas tree. A frog. A French frog. A Québécois frog. His co-worker brought it back for him from Quebec City, because he doesn’t collect frogs.

A Froggy Canard

I’m not sure—no one is sure—how the frog thing started, but I know how I found out about it. Roscivs’ family were visiting for the ’98 holidays. My sister Rita got a frog calendar for 1999, and when she showed her Christmas spoils to Timothy, Roscivs’ youngest brother, he remarked that the calendar would make Roscivs a jealous froggy green. When I asked why that was, little Timothy said “Rosc loves frogs!” Roscivs wasn’t around to confirm or deny such accusations, and I came away with the idea that this statement was founded in truth. I probably should have known a little better, seeing as the last information that I’d gotten from his siblings about him was that he was dating a girl named Monika Filbert with dyed blue hair. That simply wasn’t true. Her hair wasn’t dyed blue. It was dyed a clementine orange. They didn’t date, either; they carpooled to school. To the passel of kiddies that seemed like a prelude to a marriage proposal.

It wasn’t long before I found out that Rosc had no abiding preference for frogs [or Filberts], but it was a while longer before I found out that he had never had a preference for them, never ever. No frog experience at the zoo, no favorite book with a frog in it, no frog phase that accidentally got misconstrued into something long term. But his family escalated operations as though he had an amphibian fetish of Miss Piggy magnitudes. One of his sisters took a picture by a frog statue she saw in Japan and sent him the picture. They sent him some frog stickers in a care package. They gave him a couple frog figurines.

The record needed some major straightening.

Penguin is the New Frog

So Roscivs announced his actual favorite animal. The announcement was made on the bad habit elimination principle: you can’t just drop a bad habit, you have to cultivate a good one to take place of the bad. It took a while for it to catch on, though. In the transition phase, he got a pewter box with a wizard on top from Timothy, who said “I wasn’t sure if you were collecting frogs or penguins, so I got you a wizard.” [This line lives on in infamy.]

Rosc went through some boxes last year and disposed of and weeded out all the things he didn’t use, want, or need. All froggy items fell into these categories, so he took them to work in a box with other items that he planned to redistribute. [The company Roscivs works for has job community services like craigslist and freecycle.] However, there were no takers for the frogs, and he ended up just putting them up on the cubicle walls.

Maybe we’ll make penguin ornaments this year.