Column: Pass the Hot Dish, Alexandra Kloster

Mark your calendars. It’s Breakup History Month. At least for a few fleeting seconds one morning last week I thought it was.

When I awaken each morning I’m not always all there. Between the first sip of coffee and the first blast of Minnesota air, I see things not exactly as they are. My dogs look like Muppets. My husband looks like a Muppet, and the bowl of fruit in the kitchen tells me I should get more fiber because it’s Muppet fruit that, you know, talks.

My parents taught me to start the day with something nourishing, so I checked the top trending topics on Twitter. Black History Month and Breakup Excuses were “trending” side by side. All the letters floated through the air in “A Beautiful Mind” style and the two topics formed Breakup History Month. Before I could stop my brain from thinking, my old breakups blazed before me.

I am in kindergarten when the little redheaded boy, who I was going to marry, drops my hand as we “Skip to my Lou” around the classroom. He grabbed the hand of the blonde in front of me leaving me standing there developing a sardonic stare. Now, as then, whenever I hear “Skip to my Lou” I want to drink, heavily.

Suddenly I’m not reliving a breakup but an interruption in indifference. I am twirling my baton, hoping the little boy across the street, who I was going to marry, notices me. I know that if I pitch my baton high enough, he will walk across the street and pitch woo. Every time the baton drops from the sky and beans me in the head I think, it’s all for love. Play through the pain. One day he stopped his Huffy 10-speed in front of my driveway and said, “Maybe that’s not your sport.” Then he ignored me again.

Flash to 20 years later. “I want to keep hanging out, but my dog is getting really attached to you, and if things don’t work out he’ll be really upset.” Enough about that guy.

Subconscious, do your worst, and I am there, the night Batman broke up with me on New Year’s Eve. In 1989, Tim Burton’s “Batman” came out. My boyfriend Adam, who I was going to marry, liked the movie, a lot. Apartments became Batcaves, cocktails were Batdrinks, and matching Batman sweatshirts were presented to me at Christmas.

“Who are you?” he would beg me to ask him every time he called on the phone just so he could answer, “I’m Batman.

Adam stopped coming to the door when he picked me for dates. Instead he would blink his headlights on and off in a frenzy, sending my neighbors into strobe-induced seizures, until I finally came out of the house.

“How was I supposed to know you were here?” I’d ask. “I can’t hear your headlights. Why don’t you at least blow the horn?”

“That’s the Bat Signal baby! There isn’t a Bat Horn!”

“Adam,” I asked cautiously, “do you think this is the Batmobile? Because, honey, it’s a powder blue Jetta.”

We parted ways on New Year’s Eve. I was wearing a black dress with hundreds of tiny white bows all over it. Do not judge, friends, it was still the ’80s until midnight. A guy who had obviously been toasting the new year in every time zone staggered up to me and grabbed at my bows, “How long did it take you to tie your dress together?”

“These bows are not tied. These are sewn embellishments,” I explain evenly.

“We’ll see about that!” and he reached over to judge the veracity of my appliqué.

I ran to Adam. “Get that guy!”

“What do you want me to do? Fight him?”

“I want you to shoot that stringy stuff from your fingers and tangle him all up so he’ll be trapped as I beat him with sarcasm.”

“That’s Spider-Man.”

Well, that did it. You don’t call someone with a superhero delusion by the wrong superhero.

It was an uneasy Bat-trip home. “I hope you slip and fall!” Adam yelled through the car window as I walked toward the front door in crazy high heels that belonged nowhere in Michigan on a January evening. Even so, I turned around and lurched toward the car.

“Batman would never say that!” Then I said the most hateful thing one person could say to another. “You are not Batman. You’re Robin.”

The year I ushered in the ’90s standing alone in my driveway with snow falling on my cardboard Happy New Year tiara as The Dark Knight sped away in his BatJetta was the most unusual breakup I ever had.

Made up Breakup History Month is exhausting. I don’t ever want to do that again. I don’t want to have to clear my calendar for Relive Puberty Week or Embarrassing Moments from Gym Class Month. From now on, when I get out of bed I will let in the fresh air, have a cup of coffee, and only speak briefly to the Muppets before I fire up the computer.

Woodbury resident Alexandra Kloster appears each Sunday. She may be reached at alikloster@yahoo.com and her blog is Radishes at Dawn at alexandrakloster.com.