Sadness, memories and humor.

I just got news that the older brother of my best friend in high school passed away this week.  The details are not important, but it did remind me of this story.

E was my best friend in high school, and we are still close as ever 30 years later. We met because his older brother, C, taught in the same department as my father, and in the winter of ‘76-‘77 E came out to Utah to live with his brother.  (The night we first met is a whole other story).

I was 17 the one and only time I got myself arrested.  I had some beer in the car, and a little bit of an illegal substance.  As I was coming home from E’s apartment on the Avenues, I flipped an illegal U-turn on the U of U campus.  I was pulled over several blocks away, and immediately went for the registration on the visor.  Oh, crap! I was driving my mother’s car, and she didn’t leave the registration on the visor.  It was in the glove box, with my –ahem- substance.  Now, mind you, this was 1977.  Cops would still have their faces in the driver’s window as you went through your glove box, which made it really hard to hide anything you didn’t want them to see in there.  But hell, I was 17, I was smarter than any adult, I’d just quickly move the papers around and that dumb ol’ cop would never know.  Yeah, not so much.  He noticed, and I got handcuffed, stuffed in the back seat and brought down to the U of U cop station.  

As luck would have it, my parents were in the middle of hosting a party when I called home with my one phone call, and my dad and C were elected to come pick me up.  They got there right as the cop told me I had to pour out the beer (Heineken imported from Evanston, Wyo.), and the first thing my dad said to the cop was “Uh, I’m over 21, can I take that home?” Nope, it just needed to be poured out.  Some lucky squirrel had the night of it’s life.  I don’t even remember how long all the paperwork took, but I do remember the drive home.  I got some of the best advice of my life from my father that night - “Don’t break two laws at once.”  If you have illegal stuff in the car, drive p-e-r-f-e-c-t-l-y.  This has helped me many times in the last 33 years, for things as simple as making sure my registration is up to date before I go on any long trip, because I never really had many heavily criminal tendencies (and there’s another story to that). 

C, on the other hand, gave me a big lecture on how you NEVER hide your marijuana in the glove box.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  Under the seat, in the trunk or even in your book bag, but never in the glove box.  Might as well sit it right up there on the dash.

A pain in the boob.

Both my grandmothers worked in the garment district in NYC.  My father’s mom (Nonni) made coats and my mother’s mom (Ida) made hats.  This is a story that Ida used to tell.

Ida had breast cancer and had one removed while she was still working.  Pins were a mainstay in the industry, and my grandmother decided that it was too cumbersome to carry around a pin cushion, especially when she had her own portable built-in pin cushion.  One of her favorite jokes to play on new hires was to, in the normal process of hat making, pull a pin out of a hat and jab it into her fake breast.

You can imagine how funny it looked seeing her walk around with a bunch of pins sticking out of her chest, but the faces of new hires must have been hilarious as they watched her take a pin and stick it in her breast (She would do it before there were any others there).  I still laugh picturing my grandmother mimicking herself jabbing the pin in.

Uh, Dad…

It had to be before we sold the Chevy in ‘72, so the oldest my little brother could have been was 6.  We were coming home from a road trip in  our family’s 1963 Chevy Biscayne wagon.  Dad was upset for some unknown reason, it couldn’t have been because of us kids.  We always behaved so well stuck 4 across in the back seat for who knows how many hours, so it couldn’t have been us.  Nonetheless, Dad was not happy, we’d been threatened several times with being forced to walk the rest of the way home, but since we were closer than our elementary school that was no longer a threat.

We were playing that game where whenever Dad took a turn, we’d all slide into it and squoosh the kid at the end into the door.  We were making the final turn onto our street, all pushing on my little brother who happened to be on the outside of the turn.  I guess we pushed a little too hard because the door popped open and he vanished out the door into oblivion.

“Uh, Dad?”

“Shut Up, we’re almost home!”

“But DAD!”

“I said SHUT UP!”

We pull into the driveway, all get out and Dad asks “Where’s your brother?”

“Uh, he fell out at the corner.”

Now, in my memory Dad came back with “Well, why didn’t you tell me?”, but since he is a smart guy I’m pretty sure he immediately figured out that we did try to tell him.  The entire family starts to run down the street, just to meet little brother two houses down.  He had hit the road, rolled into the front lawn of the house on the corner, got up and walked home.  Nothing broken, nothing damaged.

The winter of ‘78

I can still remember the winter of ‘78-‘79, when we had a 3 month inversion in the Salt Lake Valley.  At that time there were less than half as many people living along the Wasatch Front, so the pollution didn’t get that bad, but so much water vapor got trapped in the valley that at times you literally couldn’t see across the street.  It was eerie, and health officials kept telling people to get up in the mountain to get some sun, people were having serious psychological issues from the lack of sunlight.  After about a month of it I took their advice and drove up Emigration Canyon.  It was warmer up at the summit than in the valley, and I just laid there on the hood of my car soaking up the sun for a good hour or so.  I felt 100% better, and ended up going there once every other week or so just to save my sanity.

… I also remember driving home from Provo (about 35 miles) in fog so thick that I was going about 20 MPH on the interstate.  For a lot of the trip I couldn’t tell where I was because I couldn’t even see road signs.  I only knew I’d left Utah County and entered Salt Lake County because I felt the car going up the hill at the point of the mountain.  I was afraid of missing my exit and ending up in Ogden, but fortunately it cleared enough right around 33rd South that I knew where the I-80 turnoff was.

Click here for related story.

Serial bed-breakers

Not that the 4 of us were hard on furniture or anything (later stories will reveal this statement to be a big, fat lie), but we’ve broken beds on 2 different continents, and in I don’t know how many countries.

I don’t think  we broke one during our stay in London, but I know we broke one in Grenoble, France.  We broke at least one in Lexington, Mass and one when we stayed in Montreal, Canada.  Who knows where else, but this story is about breaking my parent’s bed right here in Salt Lake City.

The 4 of us were a very timid group, passive, quiet, reser … ok, I can’t keep a straight face any longer.  We were rambunctious.  We traveled a lot together, even if it was just going to our cabin in New Hampshire or visiting our grandparents in New York, so we were quite used to playing together as a group.  Which often manifested itself into our breaking into two groups and chasing each other around the house (coalitions changed, we didn’t always pair off in the same groups).  This continued well into our teen years, which leads into my story.

We were all in, or close to, our teens.  Who knows how long we’d been chasing each other around the house, but at this point we were headed  down the hall to my parent’s room.  The three boys were in the front, my sister behind us.  When we got to my parent’s room, the natural thing to do was a pig-pile on their bed.  As the three boys landed on the bed, we heard a big *crack* and the bed dropped to the floor.  I know this is physically impossible, but I swear my sister, who was lagging behind us, froze in mid air and, like in the cartoons, reversed through the air, landing on her feet before the bed.  To this day she still claims no responsibility in the breaking of the bed, after all she never touched it.

We immediately stopped the chase, all rivalries forgotten, as we worked together to fix the bed and cover our crime.  Who knows if we ever got caught, but if we did, I’m sure my parents weren’t all that surprised.

Yeah, I did it too…

I can’t remember how old we were, but my younger must have been at least 3 for this to have worked.

My older brother and I told him that he was adopted.  As a matter of fact, we told him, the Lexington Police had found him in on the streets and had asked our parents to take him in.  And the only condition to keeping him was that he had to do whatever his older brothers told him to. 

This worked really well for a week or so, until MOM found out what was going on.  Little brother was assured he was not adopted, that he wouldn’t be given away no matter what, and older brother and I weren’t allowed oxygen for a week.  Ok, we were allowed to breathe, but only the air in our own bedroom.

More big-brother antics.

I vaguely remember the house we rented in Waltham, Mass the year I was 3.  I do remember losing at least one night’s sleep because my big brother caught me digging with a knife into the front porch banister, and told me that if I kept it up the roof would fall in.