Some stories stay buried for a reason.
This weekend was our annual trip to Minneapolis to visit my mom’s side of the family. She’s one of nine kids, and they’ve all had six or seven decades to propagate, which means I now have ten thousand cousins, give or take a few. I’d give you an exact tally, but the NASA supercomputer was all booked up this weekend. This year, though, attendance at the family’s annual Fourth of July reunion was down, probably because everyone knew my kids and I were coming. Our reputation precedes us. Lola had to work half a day Friday, so we didn’t begin our nine-hour drive until early afternoon. When we arrived at my aunt’s house late that night, well after everyone else’s bedtimes, we were shocked to see the old people (many of whom are my age or younger) still awake. The alcohol was flowing, and so were the stories. It was the start of three days of learning new things about my relatives that I’d never heard before—and with good reason. Now, after waiting my entire life to uncover these family secrets, I’m going to share them with you, my favorite strangers on the internet. Without further ado, here are the tales of the cat, the dog, and the wookiee.
Let’s start with the cat. My aunt has one, which is a fact I often forget. The ancient furball usually hides the entire time we’re at her house, which is probably how the thing survived to be seventeen. You don’t last that long by letting Waffle pet you. This weekend, though, I learned the cat’s name, and it changed my whole perspective about her. The feline is mostly deaf but doesn’t realize it. She meows until she can hear herself, which means she walks around the house all night shouting at the world. Imagine an air compressor hooked up to a clarinet and you’ll be pretty close to the sound. Naturally, the next morning, the topic of the cat came up, probably in reference to packaging her up and mailing her off to Abu Dhabi. Shoutout to the two people who get that Garfield reference. That’s when my aunt explained how the cat got her name.
Contrary to my expectations, the cat wasn’t named Shrieking Banshee or Violin in a Blender. Apparently she was much quieter as a kitten. Seventeen years ago, when my aunt brought her home, no one in the family could decide on a name. They tried Penelope and Violet and other dainty monikers for their furry little princess. Nothing quite fit. Then my cousin Mark’s punk rock bandmate saw the cat. “Call her Bruce,” he said. My aunt scoffed. “I’m not calling her Bruce.” But the name stuck, and the cat has been Bruce ever since. Gender is just a construct anyway. The next time I hear that someone is pregnant with a girl, there’s only one name I’m going to suggest.
Okay, that story was pretty tame by my standards, but we’re just getting warmed up. Let’s blow off some fingers. Much like the cat, my mom’s side of the family has trouble with volume control. They’re a loud and boisterous bunch, especially when alcohol is involved. If the neighbors can’t hear your inside voice from a half mile away, are you even really talking? This weekend, we had more chances than usual to chat indoors. For the first time any of us can remember, it rained during the reunion, which is supposed to be an all-day pool party. It was my moment to shine. Guess who brought two bags full of board games. Lola doubted me when I packed them, as is her job as my spouse/chief critic. My mom’s side of the family isn’t really made up of board game people, unless you count Scrabble, which to them isn’t so much a game as a blood sport. All word challenges are resolved with pistols at dawn.
Unfortunately for all of my relatives, I’ve stockpiled a dangerously large collection of board games and am always on the lookout for opportunities to pull them out. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like someone who wants to play board games with you. As soon as the rain hit, I opened the bags. There was no going back after that.
It was during one such game that I learned the second story. Many drinks and turns into a came of Concept, my aunt Nella casually mentioned a date she went on many Fourth of Julys ago. A guy took her out on the water because, when fireworks are involved, you want to go where the law has no jurisdiction. It was just him and my aunt and his dog on the boat. To impress his date, the guy naturally started setting off M80s. Men’s courtship techniques never really change after middle school. He lit an M80 and held it up like a grenade to toss it in the water. Then his dog dove in the lake. Here’s where the logic gets sketchy. The man didn’t want to hit his dog with a small bomb, which is commendable. But rather than tossing the M80 in literally any other part of the lake or in the boat or even straight up in the air, he held onto the lit firecracker. BOOM. There went two of his fingers.
Okay, not the whole fingers. Nella defended him by stressing that he only blew off the tips. She would know. It was her job to pick them up before they drove to the emergency room to get them reattached. Let me remind you that this was their first date. It was safe to assume there was no second one after that. Except my aunt kept talking, and she accidentally let the word “boyfriend” slip out. Not only did they go out again, but they were in a relationship for six months. You know what they say: The couple that recovers from a self-inflicted firework injury together stays together. Eventually, they broke up, presumably because he wasn’t blasting off parts of his body anymore and the thrill was gone. Obviously that was the last she heard from him.
But Nella kept talking. Alcohol is the world’s most powerful truth serum. As we tried to get the group to guess yet another word in the game, Nella mentioned that she unexpectedly made contact with her ex years later. When she was looking to open a store, she called real estate ads in the newspaper because apparently this story happened in the late 1800s. The person who answered recognized her voice right away. It was her ex-boyfriend, complete with all his digits. He asked to meet with my aunt about the property right away. Wanting to make a good impression because she liked the building and also because her ex was involved, she grabbed her best pair of jeans from the dryer. Then she drove straight to the site, where the guy used his reattached fingers (I’m sorry, reattached finger tips) to point out all the finer points of the building. Then he pointed out something on her leg. “What’s coming out of your pants?” he asked.
Nella looked down. To her horror, there was an extra article of clothing sticking out of her pant leg. She pulled. And pulled. And pulled. Gradually, she removed an entire pair of tights one leg at a time. Her ex was most impressed. She got the place at a huge discount. I’m not sure what the moral of the story is, but if I’m ever holding a lit firework on a boat, it’s going in the water, and the dog can duck.
The next big revelation over the weekend was the most important yet. After an absence of an undetermined length, my aunt’s friend Dave was back. He makes the greatest grilled ribs in the history of the world. Unlike everything else I’ve ever written, this is not hyperbole. He’s the reason Prometheus brought down fire from Mount Olympus. Dave learned how to make ribs from Wolfgang Puck who gave him the recipe when they collaborated on a business deal or had a wizard duel or something. Magic is honestly the only plausible explanation for why these ribs are so good. If everyone else in my family said they weren’t going to the reunion and the entire trip was just me driving nine hours to meet Dave in a parking lot to eat his ribs, I would still go, and I’m the guy who won’t stick around if there’s a ten minute wait to be seated at a restaurant. The ribs are that good. Dave’s return to the grill this year was announced by a chorus of angels descending from on high and also by a tweet on God’s verified Twitter account. If you combined an orgasm, chocolate, and heroin, it would still only be half as good as these ribs. The point is, I ate a lot and will probably be in a food coma until next October. It’s a miracle I was conscious to witness the last story of the weekend.
After food and sparklers and the board game where we discovered Nella’s explosive dating history, we rushed inside to avoid the mosquitoes, which in Minnesota always come out precisely at sunset. Mosquitos, like vampires, sunburn easily. We were extra careful to close the doors to make sure no bugs slipped in with us. The mosquitos are big enough that, if they get in your house, they automatically get squatters rights. Your only choice at that point is to move. Full of meat and booze, we moved on to the final game of the night, a fun and simple production called Just One. The game takes thirty seconds to explain and has approximately two rules, which was the maximum number any of us could understand at that point in the night. The entire group tries to get one person to guess the selected word. Everybody helping the guesser can only write a one-word clue. If two people write the same word, they cancel out, and neither person gets to show that word to the guesser. My extended family prefers games with lots of shouting, which is every game they play, including the quiet game. Just One turned out to be a very shouty game.
It also involved a lot of sound effects, which were in no way supposed to be part of the game. We’re a family of cheaters. For the seminal moment, we were trying to get one of my aunts to guess “Chewbacca.” My mom and I both wrote down the sound Chewbacca makes. I spelled out my version as “Rawrrr.” My mom went with “Eeeeeeeeg.” I leaned in, legitimately perplexed. I needed to hear what sound it was my mom thought Chewbacca made. She proceeded to let out a highly realistic and slightly disturbing dolphin squeal. Lucas Arts should have hired her for its sound effects. Every Star Wars movie would have been so much better with bottlenose Chewbacca. Of course, then I had to verbalize my entry, which somehow sounded even worse. This prompted an entire round of attempted wookiee sounds around the table, which I must admit is all I’ve ever wanted from a board game night. Equally helpful, for her one-word clue, another aunt wrote down, “Lara,” greatest of all the space princesses. We almost had all the ingredients necessary for a credible Star Wars knockoff. We’d just needed Larry Skywalker and Han Sorros to round it out. Unfortunately, all our planning and sound effects were for naught. The aunt who was guessing had no idea what any of us were talking about. According to her, normal people don’t watch Star Wars, and our wookiee chorus only proved her point. Oops.
This whole weekend was an eye opening experience where I learned more about my relatives (and their ex-boyfriends and pets and ability to make wookiee noises) than I ever wanted or needed to know. Yet now my curiosity is piqued, and I can’t wait to discover more. Who knows what long-buried stories and strange auditory quirks we’ll unearth next Fourth of July? I’ll keep you posted. Insert dolphin wookiee noise here.
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James
The Cat, The Dog, and The Wookiee