Patch Scratch Fever

  

SCENE: Driving back from the grocery store with Patch, who’s very animated discussing her high school Spanish project about Argentina.

ME: Hey, can you tell me the one country in the world that does not want you to cry for it?

PATCH: Huh??

ME: What country does not want you to cry for it?

PATCH: I dunno.

ME: [triumphantly] Argentina!

PATCH: [looks at me as if I’m a recent psychiatric hospital escapee.] What?

ME: [singing] Don’t cry for me Argentina! [pause] You might not remember that song. It’s from a musical. From the Seventies. Madonna did a cover of it, in the Nineties, I think.

[She shows no sign of acknowledgment. The conversation then shifts to her entrepreneurial interest of starting a website to sell used clothes she finds in thrift shops.]

ME: [lively] I know what you can call your website!

PATCH: [warily] What?

ME: Patch Scratch Fever! [It comes out clumsily, like a tongue twister. I have to repeat it, slower each time, to get it to come out right.] Patch Scratch Fever. Patch Scratch Fever.

PATCH: What even is that?

ME: It’s a variation of a song … from the Seventies.

PATCH: Dad, sometimes you forget I’m only fourteen. I wasn’t alive in the Seventies.

ME: [ruefully] Yeah. I guess you’re right.

[We sit idle in silence at a traffic light for a minute, then continue to drive.]

ME: [cheerfully] You know, Patch, sometimes when I chat with you I feel like Rip Van Winkle –

PATCH: WHO??!?!

 

Note: The original punchline involved “Laurel and Hardy,” but damned if I can remember the setup. The conversation did take place forty-eight hours ago, after all …