When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time To Go Home by Erma Bombeck

am too impatient to play games. Especially thinking ones. If I don't know the answer to something I say, “I don't know and I don't care” and I pass the die on to the next team. I play games to get them over with. Other people play games to have a good time.
    My son was the worst. Every time he got a question, we lost another ten minutes of the game. He contended there was no answer you couldn't come up with if you used logic. Logic took time. Lots of it.
    “All right,” said my aunt, drawing a card, “for Science and Nature, how many compartments does a cow's stomach have?”
    “He doesn't know that,” I said. “Pass the die.”
    “Wait a minute,” he said, “give me a chance.”
    “You know nothing about cows,” I insisted.
    “You don't know that,” he said defensively.
    “I know you entered a cow-naming contest when you were seven years old and named the cow Big Bill. You do not know anything about cows.”
    He went into his hypnotic state and said, “Let's see, a car has one compartment for gloves, a submarine has at least one compartment, a sleeper on a train is a compartment. I say a cow has four.”
    “Right,” chirped my aunt. “Roll again.”
    It wasn't just me. As the evenings wore on, we all got a little testy from too much togetherness.
    One night my mother drew a question. “What bodily function can reach the breakneck speed of two hundred miles an hour?” She answered quickly, “My husband's feet hitting for the bathroom when I pull in the driveway with groceries to unload.” My father was not amused. He said if she was so smart, then how come she didn't know how many stars were in Orion's belt. If it had been Joan Collins's belt, she'd have known.
    I was angry at my husband because he couldn't remember the answer to “In her book, what does Erma Bombeck say the grass is always greener over?” and all in all, we agreed we had to get out of the villa more.
    The upside to being in a home atmosphere is that everyone can pretty much do his own thing. It's probably one of the most relaxing vacations you can plan. By this time, Ascension and Marguerita were able to tune out all of us, and I kept smiling and Mother kept patting her stomach (which was growing before our eyes) and saying, “Yummy, yummy.”
    Our sons and their friend left every morning to cruise up and down the Costa Brava shoreline in search of topless beaches. My parents and aunt played cards, and my husband and I climbed over the rocks of our private beach watching the blue waters of the Mediterranean. He did a little fishing from the shore and I needlepointed. One day as we swung down to our familiar spot, we heard voices. They belonged to two totally nude bathers making their way toward the water. For a full five minutes, my husband and I turned to salt.
    The naked woman nearest us resumed her way to the water. At one point my husband cleared his throat and I thought he was going to say something, but he didn't.
    Finally, she entered the water and swam out to a rock about fifty feet away and stretched out lazily to catch some sun. My husband turned to me and said, “Did you see that! She wasn't wearing shoes. She could have cut her feet to ribbons on these rocks.”
    “You really are certifiable, aren't you?” I asked after a minute. “Here's a tramp who invades our space and the only thing you see are her tender feet!”
    “How do you know she's a tramp?” he asked. “She looks like she has a nice personality.”
    “She has the personality of a food processor.”
    “You don't know that either,” he charged.
    “When you leave an ankle bracelet on in salt water you're not too bright.”
    “Well, she obviously comes from a good family. Probably military.”
    “How can you possibly arrive at a revelation like that?”
    “Her posture. It's superb.”
    “Men! I suppose you'd want your son to marry someone with a tattoo of a duck on her hip.”
    “That wasn't a duck. It was probably a family crest of some