Kids: You Gotta Love 'Em
My daughters (and now granddaughters) and I have continued the great Bailey/Hahn tradition of family storytelling. Sitting around the table retelling funny stories was a favorite pasttime; as in my own family, and among the Hahn sisters, there would be requests for favorite titles: "Tell about the time Debbie Prayed in the Street" or "Grandma, what about the time you fell through the rotten plank and your rear end got stuck?" or "Mom, tell about the time you drove up to pick us up and we thought you were a bald man" (subtitled "Why I Never Again Paid $25 to Have My Hair French Braided").
In that spirit I'm going to tell a short story each about my three daughters. I'll start with Sam, the middle one. All three of the Weird Sisters have the strange Bailey sense of humor but we all admit that hands-down, Sam is the funniest and weirdest. She is the stuff of legend in our family and here is one of my favorites.
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I picked fifteen-year-old Sam up at her friend’s house the morning after Halloween and as we drove home, asked her if she had a good time and what they had done.
“We went trick-or-treating. It was great. We got lots of candy, and then at this one house the guy asked us if we wanted water or candy, so we took water.”
The steering wheel jerked beneath my hands. “WHAT? You mean he brought you a glass of water and you drank it?”
“Yeah.” Sam looked at me as if to say, should we have bathed in it?
“Sam! What were you thinking? Don’t ever drink anything someone just hands you like that!” I glanced at her and she was gazing calmly out the window. I amped it up a notch.
“You can’t do that! Don’t you know that he could have put anything in that water?? If you were that thirsty, why didn’t you go back to your friend’s house and get a drink?”
Sam remained perfectly unruffled, in fact seemed to find the familiar landscape especially calming. I, in marked contrast, was turning red and a fleck of spittle shot out of my mouth during my next outburst.
“He could have put drugs in the water! He could have put LSD in that water! You’d drink it and it would taste fine and then you find yourself hallucinating and you wouldn’t know what had happened!!” I paused, panting with anger, and waited to see if I had scored a hit . . .
Sam gazed placidly out at the scenery and finally deigned to turn and answer me in a disinterested tone:
“What do you mean, purple monkey?”
In that spirit I'm going to tell a short story each about my three daughters. I'll start with Sam, the middle one. All three of the Weird Sisters have the strange Bailey sense of humor but we all admit that hands-down, Sam is the funniest and weirdest. She is the stuff of legend in our family and here is one of my favorites.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I picked fifteen-year-old Sam up at her friend’s house the morning after Halloween and as we drove home, asked her if she had a good time and what they had done.
“We went trick-or-treating. It was great. We got lots of candy, and then at this one house the guy asked us if we wanted water or candy, so we took water.”
The steering wheel jerked beneath my hands. “WHAT? You mean he brought you a glass of water and you drank it?”
“Yeah.” Sam looked at me as if to say, should we have bathed in it?
“Sam! What were you thinking? Don’t ever drink anything someone just hands you like that!” I glanced at her and she was gazing calmly out the window. I amped it up a notch.
“You can’t do that! Don’t you know that he could have put anything in that water?? If you were that thirsty, why didn’t you go back to your friend’s house and get a drink?”
Sam remained perfectly unruffled, in fact seemed to find the familiar landscape especially calming. I, in marked contrast, was turning red and a fleck of spittle shot out of my mouth during my next outburst.
“He could have put drugs in the water! He could have put LSD in that water! You’d drink it and it would taste fine and then you find yourself hallucinating and you wouldn’t know what had happened!!” I paused, panting with anger, and waited to see if I had scored a hit . . .
Sam gazed placidly out at the scenery and finally deigned to turn and answer me in a disinterested tone:
“What do you mean, purple monkey?”
posted by Kathy at 5/22/2005 08:51:00 PM
4 Comments:
Dunno -- Blogger's got a few quirks, I've noticed. . . I guess it wasn't entirely weird for the kids to be offered water because in Florida it's usually still quite warm at the end of October, and they walked a long way. But it's still kind of strange.
I remember spending the night with two friends at about age 14 on Halloween, and though we hadn't planned on trick-or-treating, being too old and sophisticated, we decided to have one last shot at it. Having no costumes, we three girls went out after dark IN OUR NIGHTGOWNS and haircurlers and roamed the city for hours knocking on strangers' doors. Granted, the fashion was long flannel granny gowns, but still -- if I need any reminder that the world is a radically different place, and I don't, I need only that memory.
I used to make my kids green with envy by telling them how we had the run of the neighborhood, the parks, the woods, everyplace within walking or biking distance, until nightfall. They couldn't imagine it.
I do remember -- scared the hell out of all of us. I remember Mom running out of the house, me wondering "What if she can't find him?" and wringing my hands.
No helmets back then -- life was rougher.
Remember when the craze was putting some cardboard on a skate and zooming down the steep hill balanced precariously on our butts (pre-skateboarding, now that I think of it)? We removed most of the skin from our arms and legs from falls and wore our sneaker heels completely out using them as brakes. I can't imagine parents nowadays letting their kids do this -- unsafe, ruins your clothes, etc. etc. But we had a lot of fun.
I remember him and how cool and modernistic we thought his house was . . . I think he may have seen us using cardboard and offered to make improvements for us. Yeah, everyone bit the dust at the foot of Candlewood at one time or another.
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