April 2nd, 2008
There’s more to Life than Work
My life has taken me a lot of places, but lately, I've been seeing more of the place where I spent a lot of time while growing up. I'm seeing more of my parents' home town in Georgia because I'm traveling there so often for funerals as my parent's siblings die. The reason for the trips are sad, but the reconnection with cousins has been empowering, insane, comforting and downright fun. I've driven with my parents again recently to Warm Springs for yet another aunt's funeral, as my Dad's youngest brother's wife died.
The cousins from this aunt and uncle were the ones I hung out with the most growing up. I never lived in the area because Dad and Mom left when he got out of college, but we spent every holiday I can recall there. Many of the holidays included visits from the Texas or Florida cousins and sometimes even the Kansas ones, plus all of the local ones. In all, we were the large gang of cousins from a family of 7 kids who had a bunch of us, and we gathered and roamed the fields, the branches, the fishing holes and train tracks. The family homeplace sits on country road that has very deep and fairly wide ditches on either side. Hurricane Branch runs the back of the property, and at the peak, 4 homes belonging to our family lined one side of the road and commercial timberland (read this as a large stand of future telephone poles) across the street.
We spent nights in the unheated back room at Mom-mom's house with multiple kids tossed into the bed for maximum warmth. As we got older, we got into a little more mischief here and there, but in the end, we turned into pretty darned decent, bright and successful adults who have a shared history, shared memories and a lot of love, even though we have a broad range of education, careers and homes. The visits by us mostly 'city kids' (about a dozen of us) to the rural area around Pine Mountain, GA gave us a good grounding, a chance to hurt ourselves, a chance to learn to fish and build dams, a chance for the local cousins (about the same number) to laugh at us and teach us and blame us sometimes.
Given that we are all pretty bright and have little fear, family gatherings have historically included somebody doing something memorable. I grew up with tales of Dad and the uncles catching a skunk instead of a raccoon by mistake, and getting lost on the mountaintop while hunting when they placed a light on the fire tower for direction-finding, only to realize that brilliant stars look a lot like a light on a fire tower, and many other adventures and misadventures.
My generation has a somewhat different history, as our adventures tend to involve cars in ditches and on mountainsides, inappropriate (but spectacular) use of dynamite, fire, broken car windows and broken bones and stitches Still, nobody has been killed, nobody has been wounded so badly that they couldn't be fixed, and it makes for good memories.
We now come to this most recent trip and one of the adventures. From my involvement, in this adventure, I have been able to look back at all of the others and see the patterns, and even realize the rules. I have to start with a disclaimer, because otherwise, you'll never believe it. Most of the people involved in this and all other incidents never drink anything stronger than Mountain Dew. Those of us who do drink adult beverages were stone cold sober every time. Why, you ask? Because we don't need to be drunk to do stupid stuff.
So - the rules, as I've figured them out. When you do something stupid.
Rule 1. Confess (preferably to peers, and if you're a teenager, ONLY to peers)
Rule 2. Call for help if needed. Footnote: You can only call relatives. In-laws are allowed.(And often involved)
Rule 3. Ridicule and taunt the victim.
Rule 4. Fix the problem
Rule 5. Repeat Rule 3
Rule 6. If needed, make up a story to protect the guilty. (usually needed for teenagers and it never works, because we all 'know')
As mentioned earlier, the ditches surrounding the houses are deep and wide. So much so that when you pull into a driveway or begin to leave, someone always says, "Careful! Watch the ditch!" After the funeral, a lot of us went back to my uncle's house, we all changed into our blue jeans and 'regular' shoes and started off onto adventures, roaming the hills and branches because at our ages, we figured this might be the last time we got to do this sort of thing with that many of us there. As most of the group took out on foot through the woods, I offered to drive Dad and Uncle Mack to meet them. We got into Dad's Buick, and I backed confidently and forcefully out of the front yard, directly into the ditch!
This is the first time that I got to be the idiot! Only the right rear wheel was off the dirt, but the bumper (and tailpipe) were on the opposite side of the bank and the wheel was touching nothing, and the car was tilted at an angle that hinted at the desire to roll on over....So as Daddy and Uncle Mack got out to try and fix the problem, I started obeying the rules. Uncle Mack sent one cousin to get a shovel to free the tailpipe and bumper, but I sent the nearest child into the house to tell my Mom, Aunt Betty and all the other people still inside to come look at what I did. (Rule 1 - Confess). When it became clear that the digging and the few pieces of fence weren't going to work, I went for Rule 2 - and called back the 6 or 7 other cousins - by calling one cousin's cell phone and confessing my stunt. It took them a while to get back because they rolled and howled with laughter the whole way back....and they began to enforce Rule 3 with great skill. This bunch of people ranging in age from teens to 80's fired off some of the best one-liners and wise cracks ever delivered. The wisecracks from Aunt Betty were some of the funniest. But Rule 4 was next.
Daddy had already sent one kid to find a cinder block when one of the help team just pondered the issue a couple of minutes and said, "Heck, let's just fill in the ditch." BRILLIANT! So each of this gang of mostly men grabbed a few large rocks, threw them into the ditch, placed a board across them, and with my tailpipe freed from the opposite side with the shovel and with the help of a good shove from the men, I was able to drive out of the ditch in a very unspectacular manner. Still, this IS our family and the crowd in the yard had all ducked behind other cars just in case I came out in a Dukes of Hazzard style jump (which has been done in the past). Somebody pulled a few handfuls of dirt and grass out of the tailpipe, inspected the bumper and declared it fine, the rocks and boards were returned to their starting positions, and Rule 4 was over.
With the problem fixed, Step 5 began, with continued taunting and ridiculing and laughing and understanding that we'd just spent one of the best hours ever, on an otherwise terrible day, with our family carrying on a great tradition. Within a few minutes, we were all back on our way to our original adventures of roaming and stomping around, but this time I turned the car around in the front yard and drove out forward, with 2 or 3 men out front guiding me like I was pulling a plane into the gate. I'll never live this one down. And I never want to. Knowing how it all went down, I would have done it on purpose
