This is a little true story my brother wrote in December of 2006:
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It’s true – I do have a pretty dark sense of humor. Macabre even. But I really can’t help it. I think the germ of this character trait lies in the environment in which I was raised. I went home for a visit yesterday. What follows is an actual dinner conversation.
First though, I should say a word about my father: Dad is a total safety freak. He constantly is making contingency plans, worrying about robbers, bears, carbon monoxide, radon poisoning, nuclear fallout, spontaneous combustion, terrorists… you name it, he’s probably thought of it and has a plan to protect the family. He checked the mail with latex gloves and opened the letters with a metal ruler for six months after the anthrax scare. I wish I was kidding, but I’m not.
“Don’t you think that’s a little strange?” I asked my mother.
“Now, you should be thankful that you have a father who cares enough about you to do something like that,” she replied.
Now Mom is not quite as concerned about all of these possible threats of extinction, but Dad’s paranoid tendencies allow her to indulge in her own strange habits of hoarding food and water. If you were to look in our pantry, you would not only see an enormous amount of canned goods, but everything is ordered and arranged by the date on which she bought it, prominently displayed in bold permanent marker on top of the can or bag.
Now, that’s not too terrible, but one of the things that always irritated me was that whenever we finished a gallon of milk, we couldn’t just throw the jug away – we had to wash it, and let it dry, and then she would add half a teaspoon of bleach to it, fill it with water, write the date on it, and make me take it down to the basement to join the countless others… I’m also not joking about that. If the bombs ever do drop, you should probably head over to my parent’s house. So, to the point, here’s the lovely conversation we had the other day:
“Lisa, have I told you about the SOS emergency action plan?” Dad asks over his plate.
“No, I don’t think so…” Mom answers cautiously.
“We need to have a plan in case the van is ever suddenly submerged in water. SOS stands for “Stay calm. Open the windows. Seatbelts off.”
“Okay…” Mom says, as I nearly choke trying not to spray water out of my nose.
“You know, this is serious,” Dad says reprovingly, and turns back to Mom. “It’s not as unlikely as you might think. This is what I’ve come up with: The van shouldn’t fully submerge for three or four minutes. We have to get the windows down first. Next, you have to get out off your own seatbelt, before you worry about anything else. Then you need to get Cody out of his car seat, hold your hands over his nose and mouth, and swim him out the window and up to the surface. Then Meme should go next, so she can help you with Cody. Then I’ll crawl to the back of the car to get little Summer out, since she’s bigger and might be harder to manage. Then we’ll swim up to the surface.”
Silence.
“Are you going to tell Meme about this?”
Silence.
“No, I don’t think so.”
We return to eating as if nothing has happened. So much for the SOS emergency plan.
However, the next day, Mom is out shopping and, I kid you not, sees some sort of special hammer that is made specifically for bashing out your car window in case you are ever trapped inside. That hammer is now lovingly wrapped, waiting for Dad underneath our Christmas tree, with “SOS” written in red paint on the handle.
Oh, another beautiful Christmas story.
