Yesterday evening, Mr. W and I visited my parents and Aunt Jessica (who was also visiting at their house) and took them out to a newish Japanese restaurant near their house for dinner. It’s noteworthy that my aunt ate raw fish for the first time in many years, because she still swears that the last time she had raw fish, she felt parasites crawling around inside her chest. (:/) I found out over dinner conversation that my mother regularly checks my blog’s image hosting site for photos. YIKES. I must’ve stupidly neglected to delete my history when using my mom’s laptop. This is quite a disturbing revelation, cuz you guys know the photos I post here. =P I wonder what my face looked like when my mother made the comment that the photo of the sashimi platter we ordered at Yama Sushi looked good. Thank goodness she doesn’t have this blog address. (I hope.) After dinner, we sat around my parents’ kitchen table having tea, and my dad and aunt mentioned that one of their Canadian brothers (the only member of the family to have a phD, I might mention), believes all scientific evidence suggests that the world will end in 2012. I did not enjoy that conversation. Seeing the discomfort in my face, my Aunt Jessica said, “Lemme tell you what kind of person your uncle is, Cindy. Remember when he came down from Canada for Grandma’s funeral in ’99? He believed THEN that the world was going to end in 2004, and sold his property in Florida because he didn’t see the point of owning land when it was all going to be gone in a few years, anyway. And here we are in 2009 and the world hasn’t ended. Also, when we were younger, he was so mean, he tied a string to a tree and he had the other end, to mess with your cousins –”
“No,” my dad interrupted, “That was ME.”
“That was YOU?!” my aunt asked my dad incredulously. What? What?
Then my dad told the story about how their eldest sister’s two boys (who are now in their 40s) were spoiled brats as children, so he’d decided to teach them a lesson. They were all sitting around the table chatting one day, much like we were that night, no one knowing that my dad had rigged a tree outside by tying a long fishing string to a branch by the front of the house, winding the string along the outside of the house and in through the screen window, and tied the other end to his foot. And then my dad asked, “Is there a ghost here? If you’re here, tap the house one time.” He moved his foot under the table, and the tree banged against the wooden door out front. The boys looked up in alarm. And then they said it was a coincidence. My dad ordered the powers that be, “If you ARE a ghost, pound on the door THREE TIMES!” And the door banged three distinct times. My aunt remembers the boys hysterically crying.
“I can’t believe that was YOU!” my aunt said.
“You knew about that?” my dad asked.
“Yeah, I saw broken string outside the next day so I knew it was trick, but all these years I thought it was our older brother. Did you ever tell the boys it was really you with a string that night?”
“Not to this day,” my dad gloated.
The conversation then went into all the horror and disturbing stories inflicted on us in our childhood by our older relatives, and the psychological scars they left. Stories with such characters as giant man-eating apes, hopping zomboid dead bodies out for revenge, tigers disguised as old grandmas eating little girls’ fingers. My aunt Jessica was afraid to look up into a tree at night for YEARS. I wouldn’t let her tell me why, because I really don’t have room on my plate right now to be scared of looking up into trees. As for the cruel joke my dad played on my cousins? It came back on me. I can’t write all the disturbing crap the younger of the two boys fed into my head when I was growing up. Over about a gallon’s worth of tea, we had some good laughs at the absurdity of my dad’s side of the family.