Today's the 15th, so Beware the Ides of 'Tember.

I have been saying that to the dogs all day. I don't think they care.

Recently, Toole wrote a post in his blog about seeing a clown while driving. It is a very similar story to our family's all-time favorite vacation moment. Whenever we talk about this moment, we start the story by just saying this: 'Remember 'Let's Pass This Clown'?"

So it goes like this: the four of us in my family (Mom, Dad and the two daughters that sit in the back of the station wagon with their Walkmans, listening to Erasure and Monty Python tapes for an entire car trip without speaking) were driving to Martha's Vineyard. We had the pop-up Starcraft camper hitched to the Chevy Caprice station wagon and everything. As we were going over some bridge somewhere, the traffic was slowing down considerably, causing my Dad to look for a way to get around the slower cars.

Since it was a bridge with at least two lanes of traffic, one by one the cars began to scoot over to the passing lane and fly down the road. Finally, we came up behind a white van. Just a non-descript, white van in that popular style we often think of as "Kidnapper Van." But Dad couldn't get over into the passing lane, at least not right away. We had to crawl behind this white van all the way over the bridge. And this white van was moving really slow. Dad was starting to sigh loudly and get that "losing my patience" look on his brow.

There came at last a break in the traffic. Dad went for it! As he put on his blinker and hit the gas, he said, "All right, let me pass this clown."

As we passed the clown, we looked over to see who could be driving that goddamn slow the entire way over a major bridge like that. To our collective surprise and extreme amusement, it was a real clown. Rainbow wig, white face paint, the whole thing. We could see some balloons over near the roof on the passenger's side.

The reason we thought it was so awesome was because I really don't think my Dad could have seen that it was a clown driving because of the highly-opaque nature of the white van, and "clown" was one of his standard father-friendly phrases that he used back in those days-- when he didn't want to say asshole or fuckhead or something like that.

What sucks is I always thought this was a cool story, so a few years ago I wrote it up and sent it in to Reader's Digest. Because they often publish shit like that-- sweet, heartwarming Americana stories. What could be sweeter than passing a real clown while saying "let me pass this clown"? I thought I had publishing gold on my hands.

Fuckers. Apparently not. They did not publish my story. Stupid Reader's Digest.

Anyway, that is the Let Me Pass This Clown story. If you ever see my Dad, or any of us for that matter, mention anything clown-related and we will invariably tell this story.

We just don't have that many clown stories.

(Unless you count that time when I was 5 and I heard a lot of loud thumping noises, and went outside just in time to see a pair of big red shoes being dragged through a path of blood. I turned the corner of our house to see my Mom dragging a clown she'd just killed down to the basement. She raised a finger to her lips and went, "Shhhhh... hush now... go back in the house, baby, I got it.")