There's nothing like a family get-together to conjure up notions of yesteryear. For reasons I'm still trying to understand, I agreed to allow all my extended family to come to our Christmas celebration this year. My wife invited cousins, second-cousins, step-second cousins and not a few interested peripherals with bad table manners and a real zest for alcohol.
Of course, this offered the perfect opportunity to reflect upon some of the more intricate interpersonal skills required by all to keep total chaos at bay. Sadly, these talents tended to hide behind bravado produced by Uncle Tony's revelation that Bob really does have a secret stash hidden in the shed outside, and if he'd be good enough to bring it in (without Uncle Tony's help, of course), Uncle Tony just might be willing to forget all about the lawsuit he intends to file after scraping all the hide off his left arm, incurred while sticking said arm through the hole he'd just bashed into the side of my shed because he could 'smell the hooch'.
I took the day off work today so I could be there when the city trash crew came to pick up my Barca-Lounger. It was only two years old, but forty-eight hours of Uncle Tony left twin craters in the seat where his ass had been perched and an odor untouchable by generous applications of 409, Lysol and several different brands of industrial-strength products capable of ridding a funeral home of the aroma of death. In his permanent perch, Uncle Tony adopted a pose not unlike that of some Himalayan mystic where he saw fit to grace us with witticisms and advice previously unexpressed outside a barroom on Chicago's south side. It turns out that one is wise not to "fuck with pipefitters". Who knew?
Plus, as you can see from the photo, even in the last week of December in north-central Missouri, certain people are capable of retaining the tan lines previously known only to farmers and over-the-road truck drivers. We only know because he saw fit to rid himself of his beer-soaked "Pipefitters Lay Deep Pipe" T-shirt after a bastardized and unsuccessful attempt to goad some of the younger ladies into participating in a wet T-shirt contest. It was about this time that his semi-lucid recantations of doggerel morphed into a Jack Daniels-induced rage threatening to inflict heavy casualities upon the family's pet population.
Fortunately for us, the officers responding to my wife's frantic, screaming 911 call were willing to listen to him explain the intricacies of proper sod-laying or we might still be attempting to talk him back down to earth.
Yea, it'll be a shame not to have them all over again next year, but if my wife has recovered enough by then, we may go visit someone else... Uncle Tony, for example. Revenge is a dish best served cold.
3 comments:
Sooooo you can go to someone else's house next year and be "Uncle Tony" to them. Then your hosts will write about you in their blog next December.
"Uncle Tony" looks vaguely familiar...could it be we are related, Bob? Perhaps second cousins twice removed? Come to think of it, I had to throw a loveseat out once after my half-brother...never mind....
Hahahahahaaaa
The names have been changed to protect the 'innocent'. :P)
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