This is an early family portrait. Large family, yes. Normal, no.
“My family isn’t like everyone else’s,” I whimpered, thumping my knuckles against the side of my head. It made a duh sound. From the time I could remember, generations of colorful relatives — including great aunts and uncles, cousins and even a few who claimed kinship when they could have easily gotten out of it — lived in our small suburb in houses built by Grandpa.
Uncle Phil, resided five blocks across town, and Uncle Gary, our around-the-corner neighbor, had built a racing boat in our backyard, only to discover the path to water began through a gate more narrow than the seacraft. Uncle Phil, as a child, had owned a pet pig that he sneaked into bed with him. And Uncle Gary, at fourteen, had extended his hand to my dad when they were first introduced. His hand only seconds before had held a dead bird. He’d shifted the bird into his left palm, wiped his right one off on his pants and extended his empty hand to shake.
In high school, when the school gym teacher had scolded one of my aunts for wearing shorts too tight and too short, she sewed a pair of knee-length bloomers. She was feisty, I’d heard rumor. Most likely inherited from Grandpa, a slight fiery man with Paul Newman blue eyes, who said “Judas Priest” a lot. Mom said I shouldn’t talk like that. He gave me silver dollars. I liked both of them anyway.
And my youngest aunt, at seventeen, only eleven years my senior, eloped while Grandpa hunted deer in Utah. Grandma whisked the young couple away in her 1954 black Cadillac while we all waved. Grandma’s upper arms had flapped like wings of Jell-O when she turned the steering wheel. We all loved that Cadillac. It was always loaded with grandkids, even when it wasn’t going anywhere. It was big and made us feel rich.
With these genes, it’s no wonder things that happened to me weren’t commonplace, everyday types of experiences. If I surveyed how many mothers posed for family portraits modeling pink sponge rollers, the number would have come back a big fat zero. (You would’ve thought the photographer could have said something like, “Excuse me, ma’am. Did you mean to look like Salon Barbie?”)
In conversations with my most lively friends, whom I considered to be on the fringe of normal, I never had anyone confide that a vacation included disengaging the exhaust system of her vehicle from the port-a-potty she accidentally backed over. It was amazing how quickly port-a-potties melted and bonded — faster than microwave quesadillas.
Maybe somewhere out there another parent besides me had driven to drop a child off at soccer practice, somehow forgetting to stop long enough to let anyone out, only to find him still perched in the backseat after arriving home. And perhaps another intent on filming her son’s football game returned home for her purse, then for a camera, and still managed to end up at the wrong stadium. But I didn’t know any.
If I mentioned these incidents, people glared at me. Then their eyes rolled back. They appeared stupefied — similar to Cheezy’s look when long ago he’d claimed there was no kindergarten on Monday because of George Washington’s birthday. “Whose grandpa was he anyway?” he’d asked.
Who did I think I was anyway? Erma Bombeck? She spouted sensible words of wisdom with a touch of humor. The chance of that kind of success for me was somewhere between slim and none. Whenever I voiced a valuable opinion, my kids came back with, “Mom, you’re on crack.” At best that makes me Erma Bongbeck.
Related posts:
Print This Post
Have you read, "The Glass Castle"? It might make you feel better. It did me.-Shannon
Very nice article. Thanks for making me smile Penny! ; )