Is it just me or is everyone.... (Sampiro Story Request)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

The Christmas Menu: Country fried steak soaked in gravy, country fried steak without gravy, Cornish hens, ham, green beans, dressing, congealed salads, pears with mayo & cherries and lettuce (yes, really), stuffed eggs (yuk), storebought pies to replace the ones Meemaw Mustang incinerated, lots of other stuff. My mother spent two days cooking, alone.

My aunt is sweet enough to realize how overworked my mother is and announces a few minutes after she exits to the restroom, “Honey, I noticed you hadn’t had time to clean your bathroom good so I took care of it for you.” My mother says a sweet “Thank you” and the country fried steak gets pounded like it had killed my mother’s children.

The last part of the holiday is the arrival of the Ancient Ones, my aunts Kitty & Carrie in their identical jewel tone dresses. At this point they’re only in their mid 80s but this is far from their last Christmas, not that they celebrate it for they’re both Jehovah’s Witnesses more or less. My father’s old maid Jehovah’s Witness cousins also attend, free to celebrate Christmas by eating and accepting gifts so long as they don’t bring any food or gifts.

Two backstories about my father’s Jehovah’s Witness roots, one of which is in the hyperlink above: my father was drafted into the Navy in 1945 when, of course, it was the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. His cousin Harley (the same man who in 1982 offered to haul my father’s dead body to the undertaker in his horse trailer) had managed a deferment on basis of conscientious objection and being sole support for his wife and daughters, but my father wanted to go. Even his cousin Pete was over there in spite of being “the world’s shortest man” according to his later carnival sideshow (Pete claimed he was 22 inches tall, but he was 24" if he was an inch and even so that’s only because he didn’t count his legs- Pete was in England working on aircrafts.)

My father went through naval basic training in August 1945. A combination of the atom bomb and their intel informing them my father was on the way convinced the Japanese to surrender before he actually got over there, so other than a sole Zero shot down from the ship he was on (USS Taussig) he saw no action. He did, however, go to a huge Christmas party, the first Christmas he’d ever celebrated, that December. It was in Hiroshima and so the first carols he ever sang echoed off the ruins of the A bomb. He never really got into the spirit.

The next year he returned home and visited his cousin Harley. As Harley talked to him of cotton and peanut prices Harley’s wife, Dido, heavy laden in pregnancy, walked up the steps of the porch, jumped off, rolled over, went back up the steps, repeated, went back up the steps, repeated, etc… My father, who after about six or nine repetitions of this noticed a pattern, finally asked “What the hell is Dido doing?” and was told by Harley “I know you don’t believe our ways, Gahlin’, but the end of Days is coming in two years. Our girls are safe cause they’ll be over seven, but this baby won’t be so he won’t be able to come back to the New Earth. Dido’s trying to lose him so that we don’t get too attached to him and then miss him for all eternity.” (The baby was a girl and is still alive- the end of Days was postponed due to lack of interest.)

Meemaw adored Kitty and Carrie and even stopped her game of shake along to come and hug them and welcome them. “I’m always so happy to see y’all! You’re looking so good! I wish you two would come over and stay with me sometime!”

The family and the Others sat down to dinner, my father got drunk and played everything from Adeste Fidelis to Bell Bottom Trousers on the piano, and a good time was had by all, especially Meemaw, who having finished her dinner and resumed shaking hands with the St. Bernard looked up and noticed “Why Kitty and Carrie are here! I just love seeing them! You two need to come over and see me some sometime!” and went over to hug and greet them for the third time that evening. Their mouths full of circus peanuts (their annual gift, for they loved them and were able to process them with a minimum of teeth), they spoke to her and accepted their third hugs for the evening as Papa Mustang watched his wife of fifty years once again evidence the absence in her presence and responded in the way that Southern gentlemen have responded to heartbreaking tragedy since Jamestown.

“I’m gonna go outside and shoot something.”

“Mustang it’s 10 p.m…”

“Well… those squirrels or possums or whatever gone be just as dead as if it was high noon, won’t they? And they’ll be good in gravy for dinner tomorrow.” BB the St. Bernard decided to accompany him as Meemaw watched.

“Where’s he going?”

He said he was gonna go do some night hunting meemaw.

“Sometimes I think he’s just gone crazy. Was that a St. Bernard with him? Those are pretty animals. When did y’all get one?”

SKIP AHEAD SEVEN YEARS TO CHRISTMAS, 1981

tbc

22

Christmas 1981:

Gone (in order of death): Meemaw, Papa Mustang, my aunt’s husband (dead)
Gone (in order of divorce or dissolution of relationship): My cousin Mandy’s first husband and my cousin Ron’s 19 year old girlfriend from the early 70s.

Added: Mandy’s second husband, though he’s only present in spirit because
he’s forbidden by my aunt to be seen with the family as it’s the first divorce/remarriage in the family unless you count my aunt’s husband (but that was a wartime marriage and she was English and she was unfaithful so, according to my aunt, it doesn’t count). My cousin Ron’s 19 year old wife, the one with the unpronouncable name she claims is Indian, though she herself is “pure Bama trailer stock”- Mangalathay, or something like that. Enormous boobs had she.

My cousin did the… most memorable… thing at their wedding. He had enough groomsmen and she enough bridesmaids to do a professional version of Oklahoma, everybody in white, and after they recited vows my cousin, who fancies himself a country singer (a fancy held by nobody else) was handed a guitar and accompanied himself in a rendition of Kenny Rogers’ Lady, ending it by handing off the guitar and kissing his bride. The marriage didn’t last long and last anybody heard of Mangalathay she was happily married or something like it for many years to a women’s gym coach, but her boobs were still really big.

tbc

23

Yeehaw! Nothin’ gets me in the Christmas spirit like a good Sampiro story!!

24

WHOA up there, Huckleberry. I refuse to believe you haven’t embellished this just a tad. A pregnant woman trying to cause a miscarriage by jumping off porch steps because the baby won’t be seven before the End of Days?

I’m going to have to call CITE for this one. I’ll be over here, munching on my popcorn, while I wait for your next installment.

I like Miracle Whip, BTW.

25

This one is not embellished in the least. In fact it gets worse:

When I was little, one of Harley’s daughters (I’m not sure if it was this one or one of the older ones) had a baby in the wee morning hours that had a conflicting Rh factor with its mother. Its only chance to live was a major blood transfusion, without which it would most certainly die. Mother, father, grandparents and all were unanimous: let the baby die. JW’s don’t believe in blood transfusions, no exceptions.

My father got a call about the situation from a non JW cousin who was majorly upset by this and frantic. My father got into his car, drove to the home of a judge he knew (he taught the judge’s kids), woke him up about 3:00 a.m. to some less than Christian screaming, and when he managed to get out why he was there the old judge just yelled “Shit! I can’t stand those people!”, sat down at his kitchen table and wrote out longhand a court order to perform the transfusion, which my father drove to the hospital at breakneck speeds while the judge called the doctors on duty and relayed it over the phone as well as his assurance of the documents authenticity. The child lived, though the parents considered giving it up for adoption.

26

I can believe Sampiro’s baby story. I’ve known JWs who acted that way. When you factor in the realization that it is his family, then that makes it all the more believable. Keep ‘em comin’!

27

Though a bit of research shows I might have the date wrong, though I don’t think so because Harley’s youngest daughter was definitely born around 1947. (Harley is an odd bird in that he’s an old redneck religious fanatic but also an early adaptor to technology- in the 1970s he was playing with HAM radios and CBs before anybody I knew was, and today he’s in his early 90s and has a web-site).

Anyway, it might have been before WW2 that this happened, though I honestly thought he (my father) said it occurred when he got back from service and that would coincide with the birth of Harley’s third daughter. The major dates predicted for the end of the world by JWs are 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994. On the other hand, there were some End of the World predictions begun as Israel was founded (1947) as it was believed this fulfilled the final prophecy necessary, and as this would coincide with both the return of my father from WW2 and the birth of Harley’s last child, I’m guessing he bought into it as well.

In actuality the end of the world came in the 1975 prediction, but the then head of FEMA was way better in containing it.

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Give 'em enough guesses, and eventually they’ll get it right!

29

Sampiro’s writings will soon be reseased as a Boggle game for band names, e.g.,

lobotomized sexagenarian exhibitionist

alleged kleptomaniac octogenarian neighbor’s obese retarded daughter (bonus points for length)

Collect them! Trade them with your friends!

30

In the favor of the JWs, I have to say that when I was a kid in the 70s and went to some of their services I was shocked because it was the only time I had ever seen a racially mixed congregation. They were actually way ahead of the curve in integration and preaching the brotherhood of all races- most Southern churches are still all white or all black (or at very least extremely lopsided, as in 10:1 one race or the other).

The odd thing was when communion was distributed. I knew why my family didn’t partake- we weren’t Witnesses and you don’t take communion when you don’t share the same beliefs- but I was surprised that most of the congregation also didn’t take communion. My father’s cousins didn’t, but one of his she-cousins husband did. When I asked it was explained that communion is only open to the 144,000 people who are going to heaven when they die- the vast majority of Witnesses are going to populate the New Earth, which will be a kill-free shelter forever. I’m still not clear on how it is and isn’t determined who’s in which class.

JWs also don’t believe in Hell. If you lead a bad life then when you die you essentially disappear- your body and your soul both are swept away forever.

What was fun was when we had the JW cousins and some Mormon friends at the house at the same time, each convinced that the other one had an unbelievably loopy belief system. The St. Bernard preferred the Mormons- she loved one of the Mormon men especially and used to insist on sitting in his lap.

31

The Three Big Memories of Christmas Eve, 1981:

1- My father by this time was a prematurely old thoroughly unpleasant old drunk. I didn’t much like him. He had gotten so grumpy that there was actually concern over whether or not he would be pleasant during the holidays, which was an especial concern for my siblings as each were bringing their significant others home for Christmas (in both cases their future spouses to whom they’re still married). My mother remedied the situation: “He’s a lot more pleasant when he drinks, and when he drinks too much he passes out, so either way…” and we had a brigade to never let my father’s glass go empty (Evan Williams & Coke) the entire holiday. Worked like a charm- Orson was plowed but genial, even laughing uproariously at jokes, whether somebody had told them or not.

2- My aunt, widowed two years earlier, also overimbibed that year. It was odd seeing her tipsy, and then beyond tipsy.
My aunt and my mother and their families had a decades old rivalry. My aunt and her husband looked down on my parents because they (my parents) didn’t have as much money or as nice a house or as many antiques (of the non living variety) and hadn’t travelled as much and their (my parents’) dogs were of the mutt variety rather than the AKC poodles and Chihuahuas my aunt and uncle kept. My parents lived in the back of beyond and my aunt and uncle had a pretentious house in what was then Montgomery’s “in” neighborhood, etc… My parents looked down on my aunt and uncle because neither aunt nor uncle had ever been to college, they cared way too much in my parents’ estimations about keeping up with the Joneses and what things cost and were, to quote Mammy, “Mules in hoss harnesses” whose kids were messed up more than the kids of my parents (the son into drugs, the daughter [who my mother thought of as her own] continually making disastrous boyfriend/husband choices and essentially abandoning her kids to be raised by their grandparents.)
Relations were always civil but two-faced.
That’s why it was odd seeing my aunt really affectionate as she drank, kissing my mother and even me (she’s always had a neurotic dislike of me, though the year I lived with her in the early 90s was… that’s another story, but I learned a lot of things about her and I think in many ways I’m her favorite relative, but she’ll never ever admit it).

When my aunt walked into the kitchen where my father sat glassy eyed but happy to the extent that he was conscious, her own spiked egg nog in hand, she put her hand on his shoulder and there, in front of her sister (my father’s wife) and her daughter and my father’s children, sat down in the old man’s lap and kissed his cheeks in a less than in-law way and proclaimed to all “Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I’ve been able to sit on a fat gray haired man’s lap and tell him I love him? I love you Steve” and kissed him again.

My mother was less angry than astonished. My father didn’t even bathe regularly and had Aunt Johnny agreed to take the old women who came with him I’m relatively convinced she’d have boxed her husband up to go for the sister, but in order to take attention away from the maudlin drunk scene she just said “The Jello’s ready!”, took the green jello Xmas tree with it’s cherry and pineapple balls out of the mold, and called out “New tradition! First annual Jell-O parade! Get some noise makers and get thee behind me!” and in a moment my mother was prancing through the house with a conga line of crazy southerners behind her, my cousin with a New Year’s noisemaker and me with a shofar my mother had brought me from Israel and my brother with a cap gun and barking dogs and a huge cacophany of noise as everybody saluted the Jell-O, the old women and witnesses clearly wondering “What child-ishness is this?” but bowing to the Jell-O as instructed anyway, Mangalahthay wondering what the Hell she’d married into, and at the conclusion of the parade my mother’s lit cigarette falling into the top of the Jell-O tree. She looked at it, cut it off gently and said “We’ll save that part for Santa.” Meanwhile my aunt was dozing on a sofa and my father just said under his breath “Two years and a month… that’s how long since she sat on a fat gray haired man’s lap, assuming it was her husband. Died November 79, long about Thanksgiving.”

The other was the most perfect straight line ever delivered. My grandmother, no less vicious at 83 than anytime before, was discussing (per Christmas custom) how we needed to shoot some of our dogs. “Like that one on the porch… big black and brown thing, she’s pregnant! Gonna fill up your whole damn place with more damn dogs you don’t need! Get rid of her! Shoot her, throw her off by the side of the road, do something with her. If there’s one thing you don’t need it’s some ugly old bitch hanging around.”

We all looked at each other as if daring each other to be the first to seize the moment, but instead we just imploded with laughter. It was too easy a line to try for, but damn was it perfect. Quoth my father: “I like Juicy Fruit. Gimme some Juicy Fruit!”

tbc

32
  • Breath in, breath out. Breath in, breath out*
    I’m going to have sore ribs from that chuckle.
33

Sampiro, admit it. You’re a writer for My Name is Earl, aren’t you? :wink:

Why in the world would they want to put the baby up for adoption? Was its blood tainted because of the transfusion? :confused:

34

Yep. My parents actually considered adopting it, but ultimately the mother decided she could accept it since, after all, the baby itself played no part in the decision to “eat blood”. (The non-transfusion beliefs all stem from Biblical passages to abstain from the drinking/eating of blood, which is why you rarely find a Jehovah’s Witness vampire- Witnesses are a sorta kinda offshoot of the 7th Day Adventists, who have the most rigid dietary restrictions in Protestantism.

The next morning: the kids (my cousin’s children) try to wake up my father because all the adults have to be up before they can open Santa Claus. Jumping up and down on his massive antique bed caused the bed slats to collapse but he still didn’t rouse other than enough to say “Go back to bed! It’s bad luck to wake up early on Christmas morning! It means that Santa Claus will get sick and die!”, but they did nonetheless.

The living room is literally half full from the gifts, most of them to Mandy’s kids, the wrapped pile under the tree representing easily a tenth of her annual income as well as those provided by the grandmother they live with and other relatives. These were the most materialist kids I’ve ever known, literally still unwrapping presents a full half-hour after everybody else is done and the pile a total time capsule of the most popular and expensive toys of the year. Mandy meanwhile confesses, almost tearful and completely serious, “I’m afraid I just didn’t get the boys enough for Christmas.” (Fast-forward to today: Mandy still goes ridiculously overboard for Christmas for her sons, her [fourth] husband and everybody else. Her younger son is a slacker 31 year old who still lives with his grandmother, talks about getting a band together and shares bowls of pot with his pet prairie dogs, and her older son is a 35 year old teacher who still has almost all of his childhood toys, still in the original boxes, filling two bedrooms of his house as well as an airconditioned storage house and whose travels are solely to various Star Trek conventions; he’s been married several years but we’re still reasonably certain he’s a virgin.)

One of my gifts that year was a telescope that had to be assembled. One of my clearest memories (which happened unembellishedly the way I’m going to relay here) was of my brother taking it from me because he didn’t think I was putting it together right, and of him handing me the larger end of the tube just as my aunt walked into the living room to hear him say “Now here… you hold this while I screw it.” She left pretty quickly.

I believe that was also the year that Baby Jesus from the Aryan Nativity set my mother always put out (Mary and Joseph and the shepherds could all have been welcomed into the Hitler youth- it had actually been a gift from a wrestler who was German many years before) was grabbed from His manger by the Nefertiti (the black housecat) and rather badly mangled. If so it may explain the nosedive of the next few Christmases.

35

snip

WHOA up there, Huckleberry! Nobody loves circus peanuts! :slight_smile:

36

Liar!

I like them.

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My mother adores them. As does my sister’s Labrador. My mom carefully shares them out so that they each get equal portions.

My family is sort of Sampiro-lite.

38

and only tangentially related, but… I’ve changed the working title of the book I’m writing. I have been going with Casseroles for the Dead but I’m considering changing the name of the whole thing to the name of an essay I’ve been writing in which the title is a neologism I’m surprised isn’t already googleable. The word/title is

**DIXIEPHRENIA **

It has several different meanings, but among them:

1- the ability of older Southerners to believe completely illogical and contradictory statements about race, religion, etc… Example: “Why of course there are black people who are smarter, harder worker, nicer, richer and more educated than most white people, but that doesn’t mean they’re equal.”

2- the ability and necessity of Post WW2 Born Southerners (PWBS) to be able and willing to both attack or defend Southern history and culture, sometimes on the same day. Example: PWBS to northern messageboard poster: “Southern culture and history is not some simplistic mishmash of violence and slavery and injustice.” Same PWBS to rabid Southerner: “No, I do not believe the Confederate flag (or, to be technical, the Confederate Naval Jack) should fly over state buildings because it’s a symbol of violence, slavery and injustice”. Both examples are true.

3- General insanity but with a uniquely Southern flavor.
What do you think, Casseroles for the Dead or Dixiephrenia?

39

I like Dixiephrenia. It just sounds like the title of your book.

40

I like the idea of Dixiephrenia, but I think Cassaroles for the Dead is much more evocative. Food, death and a hint of the macabre (“June, does he mean dead people are eating cassaroles?”)

I wish you lived next door to me, Sampiro! :slight_smile: