I am continuously amazed at the number of views this thread has compared to others of comparable reply. Fantastic story, I love it.
-foxy
See, now I feel all smart for not checking out this thread 'till it got to three pages, 'cuz I read that whole thing at once and now I only have to wait for the conclusion. HA! 
Although most stories in my family start with “well, we were out having a few drinks and…”, I cannot possibly imagine having a family like this.
Although I simply have to tell you, alongside Gerrison Keiler, you are possibly the best writer I have read! Funny as hell, too!
So, continue on…we are waiting!
I think I just burst my spleen…
So I get up this morning, no updates. Fine. I’m working at my 2nd store today, wondering if there’s an update yet. I could keep working and come home early, or I could go home for lunch and see if there’s more.
Yup, I came home for lunch. It brought back the same memories of AuntieEm’s Missing Coworker saga.
This is a great story, I havn’t come home for lunch to read SDMB in… what, 1.5 - 2 years now?
This is kinda like Stephen Kings The Green Mile Series.
Except there’s no straightjacket or mouse.
Well, maybe on second thought…
As you implied, we’re not to the end yet.
Ya know, given the err… umm… dispositions of the two main characters, I don’t think it’d be a bad idea for Sampiro to keep a couple of straitjackets handy. Just for emergencies.
Like if the two of em are in the same room with him at the same time.
Or if they get SDMB accounts.
Faulkner, hell, that sounds like a Fellini comedy.
I’m with** ivylass**. We MUST see the extra features! Sampiro, you’ve hooked us & now you gotta feed our addiction.
::writhing in pain from withdrawl:: “Need… Sampiro… stories…”
Yeah, I wanted to do a crack dealer analogy, but he’s not charging us for it yet, so it seemed a little inappropriate.
Dude, I’m avoiding life this afternoon just for the next installment.
That’s the way they hook you. First a free sample, then when you have about a four story a day habit, the charges start coming in to play. Soon we will be knocking over 7-11 stores for another fix.
Sampiro, please hurry back.
I’m already knocking over 7-11’s, just for practice.
You know, the sumbitch is posting in other threads, instead of coming back here. We should strike him about the head with a burlap sack filled with small cans of shoe polish.
Well now that I wasted most of the afternoon at work reading this thread… I might as well waste the rest of it waiting for the conclusion. This is more addicting than crack! (not that I would know)
They also explode on exit.
The Conclusion
A tow truck finally came and took the truck back to Bay Minette.
Kathy: Of course they wouldn’t let Okra and Cookie ride in the cab and we didn’t have anyplace to put 'em in my car cause Dixie was already in there and even on tranquilizers she was still wild.
[quick side story]Kathy’s favorite dog ever was Sabu, who though huge and about a quarter timber-wolf [wolf hybrids are now illegal in Alabama, though strangely you can legally buy a tiger or a lion] was a remarkably sweet dog. She lived to be very old for a wolf-hybrid and with age came the usual infirmities. She moved very slow, she slept all the time, she had arthritis, her eyesight and hearing dimmed, and as time went on she was in pain more often. It was time to have her put to sleep.
Kathy loaded her into the car and drove her to the vet but couldn’t go through with it, at least twice. Losing a member of the family couldn’t have bothered her more than the thoughts of losing that dog. Then a strange thing happened: I went down to see her expecting to find Sabu lying down on the porch infirm and drooling and instead found her (Sabu, not my sister) running around the backyard playing and seeming better and perkier than she had in years. I had to ask “what happened? An operation?”
K: She’s on some new medication. She’s taking some pills that help with the arthritis, some steroidst that help with the pain and gives her some energy and then some vitamins and others and she’s feeling so much better. I couldn’t stand seeing her suffering and not able to do anything and this is just a godsend.
I was happy for the dog to, but a bit surprised. “They make arthritis pills and steroids and the like that strong for dogs now?”
Kathy (owner of an independent pharmacy): No.
[This was years and years ago and I’ve obfuscated a few details to avoid a positive I.D. of my sister, but even so this was almost surely illegal at the time so I would of course swear “I made the whole thing up” in a court of law [/spoiler]but, tween us, I didn’t… {Eddie Izzard nod}{Eddie Izzard head shake}).
Anyway, I think Dixie’s tranquilizers are actually vet prescribed (though not nearly as effective as the .38 caliber tranquilizer I’d recommend) but the space and her hatred of other animals precluded the dogs riding in the convertible, so Kathy described what happened:
“So that tow-truck man hooks up the cable to that truck and starts to pull it in and… oh Lord oh Lord, it was just the funniest damned thing you never saw watching ol’ Okra and Cookie rising up at an angle still in the truck bed and taking off down that road, their heads comin’ up ever’ now and again as we were following and you could tell what they were thinkin’- first Mama cuts all our hair off then she plops us in a truck then takes us out into the middle of a million cars and suddenly jerks to a stop and then some stranger puts us at an angle and drags us down the road while mama and daddy and Dixie follow us… just what the fuck is this all about!’ I liked to have died watching 'em. I almost ran off the road laughing from watching their heads pop up, look around, find us in the car behind 'em then go back down…”
There’s nobody in Bay Minette to fix the tire because everything’s closing because of the hurricane. Kathy offers them generous tips and everything else, nothing doing- not worth being in a category 4 to make a few extra bucks. I’m still twiddling my car keys wondering how and if I’m going to do this (she still hasn’t given a definite answer about whether or not she wants me to come get her, yes/no answers being damned near unheard of in my family [me included] and my mother still calling me to tell on Kathy (“I don’t know what I did wrong with her… I never thought she’d turn on me like that… I swear to God somedays I just feel like ending it once an… Oh! Your Aunt Joan is here! 'HEY SISTER! YOU’RE JUST IN TIME FOR SOME PORK ROAST! YOU LOOK SO GOOOOOOOOOD… talk to you later honey, my sister’s here.”
By now it’s afternoon and the hurricane has already started to attack. Kathy does something that I have no explanation whatsoever as to why she didn’t do it to begin with: she calls our brother, who lives about 45 minutes from Bay Minette in a small town in south Alabama (he’s a pharmacist also and the Marilyn Munster of the family in many ways [wife, kids, country club, Rotarians, big house, lake house, SUVs, etc.- “the whole catastrophe” of small town rich happening, though with a helluva temper hidden from public view and some odd hypocrisies [one interesting mirror image: my sister is pretty much Pentecostal in her views but doesn’t go to church at all because she likes to sleep in on Sundays and my brother is a closet atheist who’s a deacon and Sunday School teacher in his church and occasionally preaches when they’re between ministers- my views on religion are far more in line with my brother’s but I have a lot more respect for my sister [who religious as she is really isn’t a holier-than-thou and has at times been incredibly generous with her money {she bought a trailer and a lot for one immigrant family that she felt sorry for}] while I have never known my brother to give a quarter to anything that wasn’t tax deductible and in the paper.})0ajdrfa whatever- I forget how many brackets and theses are here…
Anyway, my brother comes to fetch her husband in his brand new SUV, not knowing that the package deal also includes two enormous dogs. Because our brother (cussing all the way back to his house, I understand, at the smell of the dogs in his back seat) is already packed with his in-laws who are fleeing the storm, Kathy and her husband decide to stay at his lake house. (My sister’s the only human being who goes to stay on a huge body of water 40 miles as the crow flies from the beach in order to escape a hurricane.)
Bro’s lake house (I’m told, I’ve never been there- we’re just not that close, though we do exchange Christmas presents each June or so in case one of us needs a kidney at some point) is a cottage with a huge deck on a large lot without a fenced back yard (obviously, you don’t want to fence the lake off). He puts his foot down on the issue of the dogs staying in the house- they can’t do it, his wife can’t stand the smell of dogs in a place and the maid doesn’t clean this house and the dogs are destructive, etc.). So, as the sky is darkening and the hurricane begins pounding the coast, John and Kathy take some old chicken wire left over from some project and start building a fence under the deck for Dixie, who is locked inside the convertible, while the Collies just relax under said deck as the fence is built around them. The whole process takes about an hour until it’s done to their satisfaction (she and her husband are surprisingly good jackleg carpenters and she enjoys that way more than she ever did pharmacy), then she goes to get Dixie out of the car.
“In less than one hour… LESS THAN ONE HOUR… and on doggie-downers no less, that bitch had pulled every square inch of vinyl off the passenger’s seat, torn a hole in the upholstery on the door, left teethmark holes in the convertible roof and torn out the padding in the back seat! Oh lord I wanted to sacrifice that damned dog to the hurricane! That’s two thousand dollars if it’s a dime! Do you have any idea how much I could do with two thousand dollars!”
My mother is calling me every few minutes to get an update on my sister to make sure she’s alright in the storm. She’s very concerned about her safety but at the same time she’s not speaking to her.
Hurricane Dennis passes, the most overhyped bunch of nothin’ since Rock City. Kathy had no damage at any of her properties but her car got stuck in the mud at the lakehouse. (Once she evacuated to her husband’s hometown, also on a lake, also minutes from the coast by straightline, and she got no damage in her beachside properties and houses but the tiny town she refugeed to was damned near demolished and a tree fell through the house she was staying in.) The captains and the kings and the aunts go back to their corners.
My mother thoroughly enjoyed hosting her sister and my dog though both have returned to their own homes now so she’s calling me daily to let me know that she’s still depressed.
“Why don’t you get a prescription for anti-depressants?” (for the 903rd consecutive time- maybe this time Sisiphys will balance the damned rock).
“I’ve worked with too damned many people who were on anti-depressants. The one thing they all had in common was they were all crazy.”
Bu… y’see, th… 'em… CITE? Ah… well… All I can think of to say is
“You managed a home for MENTAL PATIENTS! Of course they were mentally ill! Most people who are on anti-depressants hold down jobs and have normal lives. People like… oh, I don’t know… me. You know I’ve been on anti-depressants for more than 10 years now.”
“I know that. And when I think what you could have accomplished without them…”
“Well, I’ve missed a lot of quality time face-down on my bed listening to Lou Reed on a headset when I had the energy to rewind the tape, but otherwise I’m okay.”
“I just can’t stand the thoughts of them. I’ve seen what they did to our neighbors.”
This is a reference to the early 1990s, when my mother and I shared a 1 BR apartment that we jointly managed for recently released mental patients. (That’s some interesting stories- everything from a sacrifice to Elvis to a guy keeping his eyes propped open with toothpicks so he wouldn’t fall asleep and miss one of the messages God was sending him through the plumbing [both 100% unembellished events and both far from the worst or even strangest day there.) These people had problems for which anti-depressants weren’t even an horsdeor deur appetizer. I ask her
“Have you talked to Kathy recently?”
“No. She’s evidently disowned me. She sent me an “I’m Sorry” card with some hundred dollar bills in it like I’m Tina Turner getting a mink after an ass whipping. I tore it up.”
“You tore up hundred dollar bills?”
“No the card. The hundreds I’ll keep so I can use them to tell her what to do with 'em when I see her again. Or I might put them towards a new sofa.”
As of last weekend the beach items are still on death row in the dining room corner but the warrant hasn’t been signed. Who knows.
The poet’s shirt is the gayest thing I own. It’s too gay for me to wear, though on a semi-related subject my mother, without mentioning it, put a two page article she clipped from the newspaper into the book I was reading (Harry Potter, of course) when I was home last weekend. She didn’t say a word about it and I didn’t notice it until I sat down and started to read, but it was an article on Montgomery’s first Gay Pride Festival. That was a random and bizarre moment when evidently for a second she could see the elephant in the living room (along with whatever apparitions she has- she swears her house, or that she herself, is haunted- now I believe that of two other places we’ve lived, but I think now it’s more wishful thinking on her part as she always felt special when she had a ghost in the house. She always felt special when I was in the house as I’m one helluvan enabler- “I made her a star and I vill not see it broken…”, but that’s another story and has a lot to do with the guilt I still feel over 'taking her faerie glamour" when I left.)
My sister plans to call her this weekend. She says she’s calmed down and really wants to clear the air because “I always enjoyed going to her house… waking up to her cooking and her telling stories about MeeMaw and the old days and just laughing and having a good time was the one place since my husband’s stroke that I felt I could be a girl for a little while, but I don’t know if she’ll let this one pass or not.”
Me: “Trust me, I’ve said one helluva lot worse to her. She needs an audience that will put up with her way way more than she needs a grudge and she knows it. Just don’t ever expect an apology, she doesn’t do them.” (My mother gives “unpologies”- “I sort of overreacted when I pointed that gun at your friend Arroway. It’s just… well I grew up in the forties and we did things that way. You want some steak drippings on your cheese toast?”)
And they’re both now home alone (well, Kathi’s with her husband, of course) on their respective porches each night, Mama smoking her Pall Malls and Kathi swilling her red dog. And I love them both, but there’s a reason I always keep at least one area code between me and them.
Blow out your citronella candle, Mama, for nowadays the world is lit by bug zappers.
Silly me, always hit refresh and then reply. I was about six hours late with that one.
And on preview I see the “Conclusion”. Perfect timing, I leave here in about 30 minutes.
:::reads conlusion:::