Sometimes when I sit down to write, the process of sorting out my earliest childhood memories makes my head hurt. If I had known that these things would become important later in life, I would have taken better notes. Nevermind that, in most of these circumstances, I was too young to hold a pencil properly let alone jot down an accurate record of the events unfolding around me. Despite the fact that some of my stories might sound like tall tales, I frequently consult with family members to fact check my writing so that I don't inadvertently fabricate an event that never happened. With that being said, the following family recollections happened around the time of my grandfather's retirement. In my childhood memory bank, they happened on the exact same weekend, but in reality that is probably not true. I'm sure that some of my faithful readers will be able to help sort out those details but when I conferred with my own parents, they were equally foggy on the sequence of events. We did share a few laughs over the whole thing despite being unable to come up with any kind of factual timeline.
When I was small, my father's side of the family always gathered at my grandparent's house in Cleveland to celebrate major holidays. However, for those holiday weekends that fell during the summer months, the entire clan escaped the concrete confines of the sticky city to our much cooler cabin in the wilderness. As previously mentioned in numerous posts, my grandparents maintained a vacation getaway/retirement property in the mountains of western Pennsylvania. My husband always laughs at the tiny tree covered lumps of earth that we call "mountains". While it's true that his homeland in the middle of the Pocono Mountains towers over our much less lofty Alleghenies, the people who live in the Rockies probably scoff at the puny Poconos, so it's all relative. Growing up in a part of the state that was largely flat farmland made the mountains immediately to the east seem fairly large to us even though other people might consider them to be foothills at best.
Regardless of your opinion of the local terrain, there was no arguing that cramming five families and my grandparents into a three bedroom house was no easy feat especially when one of the bedrooms belonged exclusively to my grandparents. The rest of the family was dispersed between four double beds, one single, and a pull out couch in the living room. For all the leftover bodies that didn't have enough clout to successfully procure a slice of mattress for themselves, we had an abundance of snuggly sleeping bags lying around camp. Truth be told, the joke was on those poor unfortunate suckers who snagged the trusty pull out sofa bed. It was guaranteed that they would woefully regret their choice in the morning. When they woke up the following day, their spine would have a considerable kink in it from sleeping with an unforgiving metal bar across their lumbar region all night. No worries, by noon they would probably be able to stand up straight again.
For the record, if everyone was in town for the weekend, the total number of adults and children came in at a whopping twenty eight souls. Twelve adults and sixteen grandchildren. It is also worthy to note that the grandchildren varied in age from infants to twentysomethings. To say it was a wee bit crowded was a serious understatement. We were jammed in there at night like a bunch of kippered herring. Personally, I never worried about my own sleeping quarters because I had a special spot reserved exclusively for me. Being one of the younger grandchildren, I could be easily squeezed into a smaller space for sleeping. Each night, I was crammed into a crib that was tightly tucked inside my grandparent's closet. Before you consider calling child protective services over that one, I should tell you that this particular closet did not have doors on it until years later, and I slept there quite comfortably until I was about five. The crib was one of those old hazardous drop side jobbies, so when I woke up in the morning I could easily free myself. I would simply sling my little jammied leg over the treacherous half-raised side rail and scamper off down the hallway to see who else was awake.
My older brother could always be found sacked out in one of the many khaki colored Coleman sleeping bags scattered across the living room. I would run down the hall at the crack of dawn and jump on him a few times in an attempt to unsuccessfully rouse him from sleep. My other cousins were tucked into similar matching sleeping bags, so I apologize for accidentally jumping on any unsuspecting sleepers who were not in fact my brother. The guys all looked the same wrapped up like a bunch of giant green burritos on the floor. In a sea of lumpy humans who were tightly swaddled in green cloth, a case of mistaken identity was bound to happen. The fact that everyone was related and their faces were usually covered in a futile attempt to block out the blinding sunlight streaming in through the picture window didn't make it any easier to identify who was who.
As for that sunny window, our cozy little camp may not have been fancy, but it did contain curtains. Unfortunately, for those asleep in the living room, my grandfather would open those particular drapes at first light in an effort to wake everyone as early as possible. If this technique was not successful, he had numerous other options in his arsenal of wake up tools. Grandpa was almost always awake before everyone else and since we didn't own a family bugle, he would rally the sweetly slumbering troops by hollering down the hallway like Tarzan. The Tarzan yell was followed by the important informational announcement that those who were still snoozing were in fact wasting the day away. His second favorite technique was to spin his favorite vinyl on the stereo turntable at volume level 10 until all his lovely guests finally stumbled their way to the breakfast table, rumpled yet rested.
When I analyze the situation as an adult, I have no idea how we fit everyone into this small space but we made it work. The point is that my entire extended family was quite used to spending time together in close quarters and for the most part everyone managed to get along quite well. We shared loads of laughter and good memories together. Unfortunately, the rest of the world wasn't always prepared to handle our antics, especially when we arrived at a venue en masse. If left to our own devices, we had a tendency to get a teensy weensy bit rowdy. Maybe that's why my grandfather built our cabin practically off the grid in the first place. That way we had a secluded retreat where we could cut loose without having to contain ourselves because other people were staring at us and saying things like, "Can you believe those people?" That wasn't a problem for us as we never cared much about what our critics had to say. Inevitably, someone from our group would provide a sassy retort along the lines of, "If you people would loosen up a bit, you could be having a good time too instead of sitting there looking like you just sucked on an old lemon." That usually didn't go over very well but it certainly never seemed to put a damper on our ability to have a good time wherever we happened to be.
There are two distinct occasions when I remember our entire clan getting together at places outside of our camp in the woods, not including obligatory family celebrations or yearly reunions. This is where the timeline gets a bit fuzzy, but both events happened around the time of my grandfather's retirement. To celebrate the end of his contributions to the working world, our entire family minus one little cherub got together to share a special meal at a restaurant. This was something we rarely did as procuring a table for twenty-eight at most dining establishments wasn't always easy. On this particular occasion, we were probably only twenty-seven. The youngest of the clan was missing because either she hadn't been born yet or she was still in the process of incubating in the womb. Nevertheless, the majority of our brood made our way to some sort of steakhouse to fete the newly retired patriarch of the family. I was fairly excited about this outing because not only did I get to spend time with all my cousins, I also knew that this meant that I could order a Shirley Temple for myself at the bar. At the time, it was my drink of choice and ordering one from the bartender always made me feel like quite the little sophisticate. After all, nothing says grown-up like having a maraschino cherry stabbed on a little plastic sword that is casually floating in your kiddie mocktail.
I'm not sure why but this particular restaurant featured a Polynesian/Hawaiian themed floor show during dinner. The restaurant was located somewhere in the greater Cleveland metro area and when I recently asked my parents where it was or why we went there, they weren't much help. All they could come up with was that they thought it was in one of the suburbs that ended in -ville (of which there are several) and that they had absolutely no recollection of who picked it or why. Perhaps it was because my grandmother had always hoped to visit Hawaii some day or the fact that my grandfather enjoyed listening to musicians strum away on the Hawaiian guitar. How we ended up there in the first place may be a mystery but the events that unfolded during the course of the evening were unforgettable. Even if certain individuals would prefer to forget the evening altogether, the rest of the family is more than happy to jog everyone's memory. Decades have passed and the story still never gets old.
The evening's entertainment began with the arrival of a bevy of lovely hula dancers decked out in traditional hula garb. Everyone probably expected these gently swaying ladies to appear. They were crowned with pretty palm leaf garlands and they wore flowing grass skirts. It seemed like a nice relaxing backdrop to our family dinner. Our ginormous table was located amongst other unrelated diners and the whole crowd seemed to be enjoying both the cuisine and the tropical ambiance. Halfway through the meal, the mood of the evening took an unexpected twist and I'm not sure if anyone realized that the second half of the show was going to be quite so intense. Seemingly out of nowhere, the gentle hula was abruptly interrupted by frenzied drumming that was quickly ramping up to an ear splitting crescendo. It was obvious that the show was building up to something but no one had any idea what was about to come next.
We certainly did not expect a bunch of shirtless men waving flaming batons of bamboo to explode onto the stage. This type of establishment should warn their unsuspecting diners that something of this nature is about to happen. It seemed like an awfully good way to cause choking as you gasp in surprise and accidentally suck a chunk of steak and pineapple down your windpipe. Nothing a few whacks on the back by a sibling can't remedy, but for goodness sakes, a little warning might have been nice, no? What kind of performance was this? Isn't this supposed to be a family friendly show? Why are all the dancers half naked? And isn't there some kind of public safety rule concerning throwing a bunch of searing hot torches around inside a crowded restaurant? While some diners actually enjoyed the show, my mother was not among them. She was silently cringing and seeking out the nearest exit and the exact location of her husband and three children. Should the whole place accidentally go up in flames after an errant piece of smoldering torch flew into the crowd, she wanted to be personally prepared to get her own family to safety as quickly as possible. Of course, she would drag out as many nieces, nephews, and in-laws as she could manage but this was certainly not her idea of a relaxing meal.
As the initial shock of the second half of the show was wearing off, the staff began looking for a bit of crowd participation. Surely, some eager diner was willing to go up on stage and learn to dance the hula or perhaps give one of those flaming batons a few whirls. No takers? No problem. In the hubbub of the wild performance, we barely realized that one of our own had been kidnapped and drug onto the main stage. Out of everyone in the crowded restaurant that evening, my grandfather's eldest son found himself on stage as part of the entertainment crew. No one knew exactly what was in store for him, but it was too late for anyone in our party to execute some kind of rescue mission. He was already front and center on stage and committed to participate. If he refused he would surely be heckled by the other tables for temporarily bringing the whole show to a halt while the dancers rustled up a willing replacement. It should be noted that the crowd wasn't exactly filled with eager volunteers who were disappointed that they hadn't been chosen to go up on stage. A bit of a mob mentality ensued. If my uncle had attempted to cordially decline and return to our table, he might have been met at the stairs by a bunch of angry audience members with pointy tiki torches forcing him back up on stage. It was one of those "better that poor guy than me" situations.
I am sure that once my uncle realized that his fate was sealed, he thought he would simply join the dancers, politely learn a few hula moves and quietly make his way back to his seat after a brief round of applause from the audience. Instead, he ended up dancing around the stage in his bare feet, wearing a crown of palm leaves, and being harassed by a bunch of female hula dancers. They insisted that he remove both his socks and shoes and roll his pant legs up to his knees in order to participate in the show. I am fairly certain that he drew the line at removing his shirt but it all gets a bit hazy from this point forward. I don't know what was more entertaining the actual floor show or the fact that my uncle was forced to become a part of it against his will. This single event provided his younger brothers with years of comedic material. Finally, after his participation was deemed sufficiently embarrassing by both the audience and the staff of dancers, they allowed him to return to our table, blushing a bit, but essentially unharmed.
Having not learned our lesson at the tiki lounge, we decided to attempt yet another family outing with the entire brood. Around the same time as the retirement party hula incident, we arranged to take a private tour of a local historic mansion. That's right all twenty seven and a half or possibly eight of us. Now truth be told, if I were a tour guide and I saw this motley crew coming my way, I would simply resign and find a new career path. He or she was bound to repeatedly experience one or more of the following:
- Overall rowdiness
- Inattentive children who could care less that all of the woodwork in the joint was hand carved by a bunch of blind monks who lived as recluses deep in the Italian Alps.
- Skeptics who would demand to know exactly how blind monks could successfully carve all those tiny identical wooden rosettes if in fact they had zero eyesight. Could they see a little bit? Did they have some kind of help? Did they use some kind of special tools? Where did they harvest the wood? How was the final product shipped to the states? What if a piece of woodwork gets accidentally damaged? How will an exact replacement be obtained? I mean all those monks are probably pushing up daisies by now and it's not like you can just pick up something like that at Lowe's, right? The questioning would be well-meaning but endless.
- Ongoing impromptu jokes about blind woodcarving monks.
- Increasing levels of rowdiness as the tour wore on.
- More jokes as the brothers three were able to gather more hilarious material since those monk jokes could only go on for so long before they lost their zip.
- More intense questioning concerning supposedly factual information presented during the tour. Even with extremely tactful wives who have learned how to successfully intervene on behalf of their husbands over the years, it would still require a highly skilled tour guide to wrangle this boisterous clan of jokesters who also happen to be extremely inquisitive by nature.
- Did I mention rowdiness?
One minute I remember happily making my way across the grass to join the other kids and seconds later I found myself fearing for my life, frantically yelling for my parents to snatch me up pronto. A few moments prior, I had set out ahead of my parents in order to catch up with my older siblings and cousins. The gardens were massive and sprawling and although my parents kept a constant visual on me, we were all spread out quite a distance from one another. I had been merrily skipping down a flight of concrete stairs when I briefly lost my footing and stumbled. What should have ended as a simple skinned knee, a slightly smooshed ear, and a bruised up elbow quickly turned into a far more disastrous adventure.
After temporarily losing my footing, I was miraculously able to recover from what could have been a fairly major faceplant. Unfortunately, I had hardly any time to enjoy the fact that I had somehow managed to keep my balance and stay on my feet. An unexpected consequence of my amazing recovery was that my tiny feet had taken on a life of their own and were currently running one after the other down the stairs at break neck speed. No matter how hard I tried I could not control them. I knew that at this rate attempting to stop myself by falling down was much too dangerous. The rapidly increasing momentum of my little body hurling down the stairs was far too great to be able to bring it to any kind of gentle stop.
To make matters worse, there was an enormous reflecting pool on an expansive landing located directly at the bottom of the stairs. The surface of the water was covered with an intricate patchwork of lily pads and exotic floating flowers. It may have been beautiful to observe from afar but the thought of diving in head first and splashing about was far less appealing. It was at this very moment that I realized that I was most likely about to die given the fact that I had not yet learned to swim. There was no possible way to avoid impact with the brilliant emerald green water. The pool was far too wide to steer myself around and the water was too dark and murky to determine the exact depth. Everyone within a six-mile radius heard my cries for help but my parents were too far behind to catch up and my cousins were too far ahead to help. This left me solo and screaming as I hurtled towards my impending doom. I could hear my mom saying, "She's out of control...honey...she's completely out of control!"
Furthermore, drowning wasn't my greatest concern. I was absolutely positive that if I didn't drown immediately, I would be eaten by a bunch of ferocious snapping turtles. In hindsight, I doubt that this carefully planned water feature actually contained any snapping turtles. My conclusion was a logical one given the fact that the only other pond I knew of that was covered in lily pads was near the home of my great aunt and uncle. I knew for a fact that their pond was chock full of those vicious pointy beaked reptiles waiting to take a chunk out of anyone who dared to enter the slimy waters they called home. I had witnessed first hand what those snappers could do to a broom handle and since this pool also had water lilies, I assumed that it too had a flock of resident snapping turtles. I closed my eyes in preparation for the inevitable final impact. My parents would have to tearfully request that the following warning be engraved on my teeny tiny tombstone: "Here lies our dear half-drowned daughter. She would have made it but she could not swim and she was snacked on by snapping turtles before we were able to fish her out by her ankles. If only she had taken swimming lessons like we asked."
As I flew down the stairs towards my imminent demise, I briefly regretted having vehemently refused my mother's reasonable request that I take swimming lessons at the local lake. At the end of every school year, a sign up sheet was sent home for anyone interested in learning to swim. Every single year my mother signed me up to take part and every year with heaving sobs, gnashing of teeth, and fits on the kitchen floor, I refused to attend. Eventually, my mother would grow weary of the theatrics and give in to my ridiculous, unreasonable behavior. As every mother knows, sometimes you have to pick your battles. My refusal to take swimming lessons centered around three pieces of information that I had garnered while observing my older sister as she received swimming instruction at the lake in question.
Before I was old enough to enroll in formal swimming classes myself, I had been carefully watching my sibling and her doggy paddling peers from the comfortable safety of the dock. First of all, the lessons took place early in the morning and the water at that hour was absolutely freezing. The shrieks of entering ice cold lake water on blustery June mornings did not appeal to me in the slightest. Contrary to popular belief, where I grew up swimming season did not truly get into full swing until midsummer. Except for a few unseasonably warm days, everyone who grew up south of Lake Erie knows that entering a body of water in the month of June will most likely cause you to lose your breath momentarily. Seconds later your muscles will contract, rendering your limbs completely useless, causing you to nearly drown. Your only hope is to frantically fight through the pain and start swimming around all the while attempting to visualize that you are some kind of happy little arctic seal.
Second of all, I thought that one of the guys who taught swimming lessons at the lake was a little creepy. He may have been a nice enough cat. I have no idea. I never actually made it to class to find out, but he seemed weird from afar. It was the early eighties and he looked like some kind of throw back to the late sixties/early seventies. In my opinion, he was a bit too old to have a summer job teaching kids how to swim. Shouldn't he have a real job? He had long hippie hair and he wore loud flower patterned swim trunks with gold medallions draped around his neck. He looked a bit like shaggy from the Scooby Doo cartoons but he was a bit plumper. He wore gold aviator sunglasses while standing in the water, looking grumpy and twirling a whistle. I'm sure he drove a van of some sort and he was also extremely hairy. When he came out of the water after diving in, it looked like he was wearing a soggy old v-neck sweater. Of course, he was not the only teacher and it is very likely that he was an all around great guy and an amazing aquatics instructor. Still, I felt the risk of ending up swimming in ice water with seventies man as a teacher was far too great.
Finally, there was the little matter of the giant man eating fish that frequented these local waters. The lake had a little snack shack that sold...wait for it....snacks. I never actually ate a meal there so I don't know exactly what other kinds of fare they specialized in, but true to its name, they did stock chips, candy and
With bait in hand, I would stomp back across the sandy beach, crunching away on my salty snacks until I finally reached the dock. I would make my way across the planks looking for the perfect spot. Once I found a large enough space for my little eyeball to see through, I would lay down on my belly and peer down between the boards into the shallow silty waters below. Just a few feet from where my sister was splashing around in an effort to keep her core temperature from dropping to dangerously low levels, lived a massive herd of ridiculously enormous silver carp. They were bigger than my entire body, they stunk horribly, and they loved thrashing around and rolling over each other in order to fight for a few leftover bits of potato chip. It was a great way to amuse myself and way more fun than watching those boring old swimming lessons. My major concern was if those huge fish went totally wild for a little shaving of fried potato, imagine what would happen if they got a hold of a swimmer. Totally terrifying. There was no way under any circumstance imaginable that I was going to put my big toe in that chilly water let alone submerge my entire body with those filthy fish flopping around just beneath the surface of the lake.
Unfortunately, as I was flying wildly down those concrete stairs with limbs flailing and filled with panic, I began to regret this earlier decision. Perhaps eschewing swimming lessons on account of frigid water, odd teachers, and stinky carp had been a mistake, but it was far too late for regrets. There was a skinny little sliver of drab grey cement lying between the very last stair and the murky lily-pad covered pool of putrid slimewater. When my tootsies finally touched this puny piece of pavement, I closed my eyes tight and prepared for the giant foamy green splash that was guaranteed to happen at the moment of impact. I could practically taste the pond scum. At that very second, instead of hitting the stinkwater, something hit me instead. It felt as though I had been unexpectedly whacked in the throat with a log. I wondered if this was what it felt like to be dead. I sputtered and coughed and opened my eyes, fully expecting to see those enormous pearly gates before me. Instead, I realized that I was actually still alive and that by some sort of divine intervention, I had stopped short just inches away from that disgusting deep green pool of inky darkness.
I had no idea what had happened, but one of my uncles was now standing next to me asking if I was alright. I will never know how he made it to me in time, but out of nowhere, like the Flash, the very same uncle who had been hula dancing against his will earlier in the story had just saved my life. By trade, he happened to be a police officer. Prior to this incident, I would have never said that he was a particularly fast runner, but unbeknownst to the rest of the family, all those years of chasing baddies must have kept him in tip top shape. With one outstretched arm, he was able to sprint to my location with only seconds to spare in order to stop me from careening head first into the algae ridden reflecting pool. Given the urgency of the situation, his only available option was to clothesline me with his forearm bringing me to a rather sudden and abrupt halt. My uncle felt a bit bad about purposely knocking the wind out of a preschooler, but he was left with little choice. Of course, at that moment, I couldn't care less that my whole neck was throbbing and that my breathing sounded like an old busted Hoover sweeper. (Of course that's midwestern speak for vacuum in case any of you out-of-towners were wondering. We also frequently eat supper in these parts instead of dinner.) The alternative outcomes of drowning or death by snapping turtle were far more unpleasant to imagine than simply being clotheslined by a cop who also happened to be your hula dancing uncle.
In modern times, our entire family could have probably sued both of these venues for negligence and emotional distress. The restaurant for causing public humiliation on the part of my uncle, smoke inhalation for everyone else, and undue stress for all the moms in the room frantically counting the number of steps between their families and the nearest available fire exit. As for the mansion and its surrounding property, I would like to know what wizard of garden design decided that it would be a good idea to construct an enormous water feature at the bottom of a set of stairs. I'm still traumatized after all these years, but rather than get a lawyer on the horn, I'll just continue to share these crazy little stories in the hopes that they will provide my readers with a few chuckles. Then again, suing the estate of a bunch of millionaires from the heyday of the tire industry could prove very lucrative.
Nah....instead of pursuing litigation, I think I will use my free time to teach my toddler to swim. Once he masters the basics of the aquatot curriculum, we'll work on snapping turtle identification and self-defense measures. My great-grandfather taught me how to get a snapping turtle to release its grip if you are ever bitten by one, but that my friends is a story better recounted in person. Finally, we'll google "How to dance like a Hawaiian" and practice our best hula moves (minus the flaming fire batons of course). After all, you never know when this kind of thing might come in handy.
P.S. If any of you happen to run into our local hula dancing hero in your travels, tell him his niece said thanks for going above and beyond to make sure that I made it past the age of five!
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