|
the works... |
||
|
Some nice people in a white van came for my mother one day though. She went with them, but I'm sure they'll take good care of her. The first thing they did was give her a brand new jacket. So off we were shipped to live with my father. He lived in one of the remotest parts of the country, not even the mailman knew |
||
where he stayed, breezes stopped by the house to ask for directions; if there was a place that was behind God's back, it was here. Boring was not the word to describe the house and it's environs, boring doesn't do the place justice. But how do you describe a place where you can hear a pin fall, where you can hear the rustling sleeve of a person about to drop a pin, a place where
ants wear socks so as not to make noise, a place where timing dust as it collects in a pile in the corner of your room is the highlight of your day. No... boring doesn't do the place justice.
Four of us lived with them, my eldest brother happed upon a girl and chose marriage over my father's cooking. My other older brother tried every way he could to stay in university and from gourmét a la papa. In that house, I became more fully aware of just how different some people can be. The hiding of stuff like candy, was something my mother used to do around Christmas time, and even then, we never noticed because we never knew how much there was to begin with.
At my father's place, anything and everything that could be hidden, was. They, (my father and his new wife), hid door keys, (a most frustrating thing when you wake up at night and can't get into the toilet) candy, snacks, bananas, cornflakes, cheese, eggs, bathsoap, soap-powder, toilet paper, cheese, sausages... just about everything imaginable. It got to the point where we began to imagine that we were on a pirate ship and our father was the evil Captain Balding, his wife was first mate Bearded, together they were the dreaded couple of Balding and Bearded. He held the maps that led to the hidden treasures. Of course, it made no sense to simply ask for the maps, so we had to scurry about the house digging in every imaginable hiding place. We, as treasure hunters, were very successful I must add, we found all sorts of things… especially in the refrigerator… week old food, last Wednesday's chicken sandwich, a block of mouldy chocolate, a dried up lettuce leaf, dead bachacks and even a shoelace… Food never tasted the same after those hunts.
But here I am, alive and in a physically stable state, so everything's just fine and dandy. I'm even a godfather and I can't wait to give my godson his first two-by-four. (I'll reconcile my differences with ol' Jimmy and his kind.) I'm just going to wait for the time when I could put my own kids through everything that I went through…
Let's get a tradition going here
|
|
||
