My husband and I were watching Footloose with our oldest daughter the other night, and, of course, we started dancing during the movie. I showed my eldest all my really cool moves, and it didn’t take long for her dad to join in (For the record, neither of us can actually dance. We pretty much look like rabid monkeys when we try to bust a move. Have fun imagining that.)
And, of course, my teenager joined in laughing and dancing with her mom and dad shouting: “This is so awesome! You guys are so awesome!”
Not at all. In reality my daughter was basically horrified. She caught our dance on video for evidence, she says, of why she may or may not need to be adopted at a later time. And she seems to enjoy sharing these videos. She’s so generous.
“Mom,” she said after I had accidentally tripped over the bench and fallen on top of her, “you guys are just not normal.”
And neither were my parents when I was a teenager, of course. My parents were just, plain odd when I was in junior high. Take my dad, for example, whose nickname for me was “Mongrel.” Yep.
“Hey, Mongrel! Time for dinner.” So, this sort of command was common, and even somewhat affectionate coming from my dad, but while I heard, “Hey, Katie come and eat,” my friends probably heard, “Hey, crossbreed! Come get your feed.” It just wasn’t a terribly conventional nickname, but I’ll never forget it.
And then there was my mom: a woman who at the age of sixteen had the awesome opportunity to watch the completion of the St. Louis Arch. With all the excitement in St. Louis at the time, she and a friend decided to attend the opening day at the arch. When they arrived for the big event, the line to get in the doors was incredibly long. Noticing that the handicap folks were allowed to go straight to the front of the line, my mom did what any normal person would do. She acted like she was blind so she could jump to the front.
Duh.
Oh, yes she did. I asked her on many occasions why a blind person would want to experience the sights from the top of the arch. “Duh,” she’d say.
Kidding, kidding….
Oh, mom. She would just smile a conniving smile and remind us that she was one of the first people to enter the doors of the arch, and she held in every bit of “oooh” and “ahhh” whilst at the top. Instead, she stared straight ahead with her friend guiding her along, both relishing in their bizarre accomplishment.
So, not much normalcy there either. And definitely a story that even the grandkids have remembered through the years: “Tell us that story of when Ya Ya pretended like she couldn’t see so that she could go up in the arch to see what it was like!” Yep.
But this abnormal behavior goes back even farther. When my parents were engaged, my mom’s grandpa was anxious to meet the young beau who had taken my mom’s heart. So, my dad and great-grandpa met. Mom introduced dad to her grandfather saying, “Grandpa, this is my future husband.” My grandfather, who could see clear as crystal, held out his hand and said, “Yes, well, I’m blind and can’t see you.” And my dad bought it.
Hook, line, and sinker. For the remainder of the night, healthy-eyes grandpa Witmer was blind as a bat as far as my dad knew. And I’m pretty sure no one’s ever going to forget that story.
But then there’s also my husband, lest you think this uncharacteristic behavior is one sided. In college he would dress up like gandhi. Why, you wonder? Well, because new students would visit the campus.
Duh.
And so he would greet new students dressed like this:
