Sometimes Family is much stranger than fiction. |
"Confessions of the Son of a Holiday Goddess" Samuel didn’t know how his tie got stapled to the wall. He just considered himself lucky that he hadn’t been wearing it around his neck at the time. It hung on the wall across the room from him like a macabre imitation of a hangman’s noose, its tail having been stapled slightly higher than the knot and loop. “Is this really my life?” he muttered, half-aloud to no one in particular, had anyone been paying even the slightest amount of attention to him—which no one was, as usual. Samuel was kind of grateful for that, too. The holiday gathering had started out innocently enough, just as it had for countless previous years. Everyone seemed glad to see everyone else, and they were all jovially exchanging greetings, laughing and teasing together. By the time the last relative arrived—Samuel’s bachelor Uncle Charlie—however, the event had pretty much disintegrated into chaos and confusion…just as it had for countless previous years. The matriarch of the motley crew posing as Samuel’s family was his mother, Leona. Leona looked harmless enough to unsuspecting outsiders as a typical grandmotherly type with “shrinking woman’s syndrome” and graying hair, but to Samuel and others “in the know,” she was Leona, Holiday Goddess….of war and destruction, that is. One day a year, Leona was allowed to make the one thing she was able to cook and not have it taste like burnt cardboard: the Christmas Turkey. The perfect final product had been carried to the table and was presented with much fanfare by Leona herself, who could barely even see over the silver tray it rested on. It didn’t take long after that for Samuel’s strange assortment of relatives to begin in engaging in several lively, animated discussions amongst themselves around Leona’s huge cherry wood dining room table. The loudest of these was conducted by Uncle Charlie and his sister Melanie, who were arguing over who should eat the last one of Auntie Sue’s famous buttermilk biscuits. “You take it,” Melanie insisted. “No,” Uncle Charlie countered. “You take it.” “No.” “Yes.” “No.” Samuel resisted the urge to grab the basket from the table and hurl the lone biscuit at his Uncle Earl, who was ranting about the Government Conspiracy of the Year, which this holiday happened to be something about nuclear waste and children’s cartoons on cable television. Samuel kept his head down and ate his meal as quietly as he could manage. Staring blankly at his mound of mashed potatoes, he absently pushed around a few of his fresh green baby peas with his fork. Thhhhh----Wack! Tink! Samuel jerked his head up, almost flinging his peas across the table and into Uncle Charlie’s open mouth. That’s when he saw the tie, stapled like a prophetic warning, to the wall. He laid his fork down, stood up in slow motion, as if he were moving underwater, and walked over to his tie. He mused that it gave new meaning to the term “tie tack” as he pulled the three staples from the wall with the stubs of his half-chewed fingernails. He heard stifled giggling from behind him, where the whirling dervishes posing as his twin four-year-old nephews stared up at him angelically. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw one of them trying to hide an object shaped suspiciously like an office stapler behind his back. Samuel sighed and returned to the dining room. Folding his mangled tie into a neat bundle and shoving it into his left pants-pocket, he mused, again half-aloud to no one in particular, since clearly no one was listening, “Lord help us all, but this is my life.” Uncle Charlie and Melanie were still arguing as Samuel shrugged and sank back into his chair. Resigned to his fate, it was obvious that all there was left to do was sit down and eat that biscuit. The End |