My first moment of doubt came when I was probably about 8-9 years old. Children that age generally attended Sunday school in the basement of the church. I remember sitting down there and looking at the framed pictures that adorned the walls. I started at one side of the room and followed the path around, seeing all these photos of saints and the like, and when I came to the end, there was a frame with a piece of white paper in it that was captioned “God”. The teacher asked what I was staring at, and I said “Why isn’t there a picture of God?” She said, “Because it’s a mystery.” I remember thinking, even at that age, that it sounded like a con game.
The day I was ever so slightly…clever
Many years ago I worked in an office with about 10 other people. We were a small unit of a much larger multi-national corporation.
One morning the receptionist/secretary said that we had received a strange phone message overnight. The message was a women’s voice speaking Cantonese or possibly Mandarin. None of us in the office spoke either of these languages and were hard pressed to come up with anybody we know who did. We weren’t quite ready to ignore the message as it might have possibly been an international call meant for our corporate offices.
Then I got a slightly clever idea. I asked the secretary to dump the message to a portable dictation recorder (yes, it was a while ago). Then I turned to group and said, “Hey, it’s time for lunch! Anybody else want Chinese food?”
We went to one of the local Chinese buffets, had a delicious lunch, and then I struck up a conversation with the cashier and asked him for a favor.
He listened to the tape, laughed a little, and looked somewhat sad. He said that it appeared to be someone’s mother/grandmother calling a loved one to ask,“why don’t you call me?”
The first law firm I worked at had a tradition of a Friday night cocktail hour (this was years before people starting cracking down on drinking and driving). Our firm was on the 30th floor of a skyscraper. The skyscraper had wide-ish ledges going around the outside of every floor, enclosed every several feet by vertical beams. The windows could open out onto it.
You can tell where this is going, can’t you?
One evening a couple of attorneys and I were the last ones left drinking, and we opened the window and stepped out onto the ledge. We walked all the way around the building and returned to our original window. It was closed and locked! The cleaning crew had evidently been in and closed the window. We again made a circuit and were lucky enough to find one associate working late, and made signs to him to open his window. After he mocked us for awhile through the glass, he did let us in.
Soon after that, the partnership had the building management contrive to keep all the windows locked permanently.
No wonder your girlfriend’s family had to go into the Witness Protection Program!
Mystery solved.
When I was a kid, I lived outside the United States as my parents were missionaries. When I was in the 6th or 7th grade, my parents wrote a short kid’s book for our church’s Missionary Society, and it was part of the missionary study curriculum for a few years.
One day, a little girl named “Robin” was reading the book and saw a picture of this scrawny kid with a bad haircut. She turned to her mother and said, “He’s kind of cute!”
Six or seven years later, I was attending a Christian college and was part of the Male Chorale, which contained 50 guys in tuxedos who toured during Spring Break giving concerts and advertising for our college. One day during my freshman year, we we gave a concert in northern California, and one of my choir mates introduced me to his cousin, who was a very nice looking young lady. We talked for about 15 minutes, nothing serious; she was talking to her cousin and a friend from childhood and I was just standing around. In fact, the childhood friend said, “This is Robin … she’s engaged, so don’t even think about it!”
The next year, she came to college as a freshman, and, since I was friends with her cousin and childhood friend, we started hanging out together, just as friends. Again, nothing serious, especially since she was engaged.
Now, during my freshman year, I had been dating a girl named “Evelyn”. She and I had an on-again/off-again relationship, and, even though I knew we could never have a peaceful relationship, we kept trying to date and then one or the other would dump the other. This continued into my sophomore year.
Robin and I became good friends. She was going through tough times with her fiance and I was trying to figure out how to stop pining after Evelyn. Robin finally said to me, “Look, why don’t you spend a little time doing some soul-searching? Go read your Bible, try to find some wisdom!”
I took her up on the suggestion. It was, after all, a Christian college. That night, I went back to my dorm room and got out my Bible and unzipped the cover.
And then I stopped and stared, because right in front of me was the answer! On the zipper of my Bible cover, the name of the zipper manufacturer was embossed on the pull tab: ROBIN
Robin and I were engaged within six months.
After we got engaged, we drove up to her parents’ house for a long weekend. They were doing some home renovations and her sisters were moving bedrooms and stuff like that. They had an old box of books, and I happened to see my parents’ book in it. I picked it up, thumbed through it, and laughed at my picture. I held the book up and said, “Look how dorky I was when I was a kid!”
Her entire family stared at me in disbelief. And then Robin said, “I had a crush on you when we were kids. I didn’t realize that was you!”
And, this year, we celebrate 35 years of marriage.
I was cutting grass on a riding lawn mower when I was about 12 years old. Dad was pretty proud of that mower, the first rider he had owned. It was a rear engine type, the first I had seen with a with a nifty, round steering wheel (as opposed to the bar steer type). It made it seem as though one was driving a real car instead of some rinky lawn equipment, at least to me. The steering wheel was mounted on a long column that came up from the deck, similar to this.
There was a ditch, about 2 feet deep by 3 feet wide, between the end of our front yard and a semi-busy highway. I always cut as close to the house side edge of the ditch as possible, because that meant less trimming later. Trimming the ditch was done with a sling blade, an implement of torture that I despise to this day. Hot, humid Georgia summers days spend swinging that infernal instrument to and fro through thick fescue and weeds is among my most despised childhood memories. It’s probably what turned me against yard work in general to this day.
So, the plan was always to ride the mower right up to the very edge of the ditch, then turn the steering wheel as hard as possible to cut as much grass as I could the easy way. One sweltering day as I made the first round on the mower, already dreading the trimming to come, I timed the turn to perfection, cutting the wheel hard at the very last instant. Only, instead of turning the front tires, the steering wheel came off in my hand. I had an instant of bewilderment while my brain processed what it meant to be holding a steering wheel in my hands, but attached to nothing else, before I had the wherewithal to leap from the mower across the ditch as the now rudderless machine plunged to the bottom. I’m not sure my dad ever fully believed that the steering wheel chose to leave the mower and join me of it’s own accord. Honestly, I can’t say as I blamed him. Thankfully, he was a mechanic by trade. He got the mower fixed and, just in case I was telling the truth, he re-attached the steering wheel with multiple heavy duty fasteners. Or perhaps he was poking fun at me. 
My grandparents had a riding mower kinda like this; the mower deck was in front and it steered by bending in the middle. My grandfather ran off the grass and into one of their plowed fields and got stuck in the softer ground. While pushing the mower back out he managed to cut off the middle toe on one of his feet.
All things considered, you and your dad got off pretty lucky.
My mother was up late at night watching a baseball game and my Dad was away from home. It was about 11:00 pm and the doorbell rang. M mother answered it.
There was a man at the door and he told her that there was a woman passed out on the sidewalk. My mother called 911 and then went out with the guy to see about the woman. Sure enough she was out cold and when the ambulance arrived it took her away. The man left and my mother went back home.
When my mother told me this story I yelled at her for answering the door. I told her that if she’d seen A Clockwork Orange she never would have answered that door.
My mom said she’d never seen A Clockwork Orange. Later I realized that it was a good thing for the woman passed out on the sidewalk that she hadn’t.
Once my boyfriend was at my house and he passed out It was Christmas and his mother had made a big Christmas dinner. She kept calling me and asking when her son would come home so she could have Christmas dinner with him and I kept trying to wake him up. Hour after hour she kept calling me and I kept trying to wake him.
Then I had an idea. I put a Ramones CD in the player and turned it on full blast. By the time “Beat On the Brat” was playing my friend had his clothes on and was calling a taxi so he could get to mommy’s house.
And that’s the story of how the Ramones saved Christmas.
Much of my career from 1985 though 2011 involved extensive travel…in 1992, I was traveling from Baltimore to Hong Kong. My company paid for business class for the international portion which meant we paid for first class domestically. My first flight was from Baltimore to San Francisco. I was in the first class cabin (two and two configuration) in the right window seat in my aisle.
Two very well-dressed men got on, Armani suits, Rolex watches, and chatting to each other. One sat down next to me, the other across the aisle from him.
One thing that you noticed as soon as they got on was how small they were, not little people, just really small guys…and as I listened to their conversation, it was apparent they were jockeys.
It happened that this was the Saturday between the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, and, having grown up around horses (steeplechase, not thoroughbred racing), I was interested.
At some point, I turned to the gentleman next to me and said, “So, you’re a jockey.” He was very nice, we chatted a little while and I said, “The Preakness is coming up, have you ever ridden in the Preakness?” He looked at me and smiled, “I’ve won the Preakness…” I laughed, and said, “I’m sorry, what is your name?” He said, “Angel Cordero.” I did not recognize him in person, but I certainly recognized his name and knew his reputation.
We chatted for a while longer, I said, “You know, there was this young rider who came to Pimlico several years ago, made it big, then went to California, Chris McCarron, do you know Chris McCarron?”
Angel looked at me for a second, pointed across the aisle, and said, “That’s Chris McCarron…” I looked over and McCarron laughed and gave me a little wave.
Granted, jockeys are generally not well-known, household names, but Cordero and McCarron were about as big names in racing for people not named Shoemaker…
They were very nice, we chatted on and off the whole flight, neither at the time had travelled to China so they were curious about traveling in the Far East and what I did for a living.
As we were preparing to deplane in SFO, I asked McCarron if he had a ride in the Preakness the next week. He said, no, but his agent was working on it for him. I shook his hand and said, “Good luck!”, he thanked me and wished me safe travels.
A couple of weeks later, I was reading the South China Post, and came across a blurb of how McCarron had won the Preakness the previous Saturday…
I give myself credit for that…:rolleyes:
Nobody thought to ask anyone else if it was really true that Professor X had a daughter who died? I’m skeptical about this too.
And I assume that you have not been able to locate this woman online?
There was a similar story when I was a kid, although I was much younger. When I was about 7 years old, a family who had 3 kids, one of them in my class, lived around the corner, and one day, a moving truck pulled up in front of the house and nobody ever found out where they went or what happened to them.
Cut to about 15 years later. I worked in an office with my classmate’s sister who was a year younger, and found out that their dad was a police officer who had been forced to retire on permanent disability (long story about that) and they moved to a farm outside a small town about 25 miles away. My previous job to that was with a woman whose grandson’s best friend was my classmate, who had a very unusual name, and at that point I found out where the family had gone.
I did try to find her once the internet made it possible to look for people. I have not found any trace of her online. of course, our brief fling happened fifty years ago.
There were a lot of shady characters in my old neighborhood. Maria’s dad could have been one of them.
There were two brothers who inherited a restaurant from their father. They could never get along, and at one point, they were out in front of the place shooting at each other. Neither one was hit, but not long after that one brother started a new restaurant in another section of town
I’ve shared two doozies already:
ADDED BONUS:
- The first thread contains the “How I convinced the priest not to quit 11 hours before my fathers funeral even though he decided my stepmother is a heretic and wanted him to break his vows” story, as well as the heartwarming…
- “The last words spoken by my father as he accused his daughter of wanting to kill him” story.
I am disappointed that none of these stories begin “I never thought the letters in your magazine were real, but I was working a job as a pizza deliveryman…”
Regards,
Shodan
It was New Year’s Even back in the '90s, when I had a job delivering pizza. My last run of the night, I knocked on the door, but didn’t get an answer. I knocked again, and after a few seconds the door opened a couple of inches, and… nothing. I said hello, and nothing again. So I pushed the door open enough to see in, and saw a bare female ass walking away from me.
I jerked my head back out and waited, I had no idea what to do. A moment later she said I could come in. It was a studio apartment, and she was in her bed. She asked me to bring her purse from the table. By now, it was apparent this chick was wasted.
I brought her her purse. She paid me. I handed her the pizza. I thanked her and left.
I swear to gawd this is a true story.
I was sitting in a airport in the late 80s. I was watching a man across read a book, every now and then he would chuckle and smile. I thought that must a funny book. In awhile his flight was ready to board, he got up and left. My son was small and he liked to watch the planes take off, we walked across to watch the plane leave. We went back to our seats and the mans book was on the seat he had been sitting it. I picked it up, processed that he’s not gonna come back to get the book. So I will read it while waiting here. After the first page, I knew I would like the book. After 2 pages I was laughing out loud.
Guess what book it was,
“The Straight Dope” by none other than our own fearless, exalted leader!
Oh my gosh, *I was that man!
*No, not really, but wouldn’t that be cool? 
A story from a local DJ (from a few years ago); I’ll keep it the first-person like he told it.
So my buddy and I were driving the interstate highway through Wyoming one summer when we stopped for gas at a truck stop. Just as we finished pumping the gas, a thunderstorm dumped rain on us, so we pulled forward to the cafe and went in to have some lunch. The rain stopped by the time we got done eating; I paid for the food and we got back in the car and back on the highway.
A few miles down the road “Ernie” says “thanks for buying lunch and for the gas”. I turned to him and said, “I thought you had paid for the gas!” We looked at each other, and I said the next exit was over twenty miles away (40 miles round-trip) if we wanted to turn around. Just ahead was an emergency U-turn point, with the sign “NO U-TURN except authorized vehicles”. We whipped through it just as a state trooper appeared behind us down the road.
The trooper flipped on his lights and we pulled over. He asked us why we had done so, and it was very dangerous (the highway was totally empty). We explained that we forgot to pay for the gas back at the truck stop, and we wanted to go back and pay.
He said he would follow us to the truck stop, and if our story didn’t check out, we’d be in a whole lot of trouble. We drove up to the cafe, walked in, and said we were here because we forgot to pay. The waitress said they had written down our license plate number, and were just ready to call it in to the sheriff’s office but hadn’t done so yet. The trooper looked at her, then turned back to us, and said “You boys have a nice day now” and walked away.