Strange Things

People Tell Me.

I can be a pretty good listener, and I love a good story. My husband doesn't think so, because he has often made the mistake of striking up a conversation when we've gone to bed, and being somewhat of a narcoleptic bent, I pretty much fall alseep whenever I lay my head down, it's even worse when I've got my leg thrown across his, and my arm across his chest, I'm a goner. He says "I must bore you, you always fall asleep on me when I'm talking to you." I reply, "It's just that your voice is so soothing, and whenever I get in a fairly comfortable state, I can't keep my eyes open."

But despite my tendency to fall asleep on people, I have managed to record in my mind some of the sillier things people have told me. There is my friend who told me she used to have a kitten that gave her hickeys while she slept. It seems the cat was taken too early from it's mother, and still had a strong desire to suckle, so it found a lovely little mole on her neck, and would suck on that thing for dear life hoping it would produce milk. I really cracked up when she told me this. She would wake up to a tiny little hickey on her neck.

My friend, the wacky one who constantly cracks me up with her insane antics, has a friend who is a born story teller. Apparently the woman was lying in her bed one winter night, when she heard a loud thud coming from her closet. Now, what she did next really baffles me because I would have run screaming from the apartment, but she being an inquisitive type, opened the closet door to find a man hanging upside down in her closet. The woman, I'll call her Sam because that's her name, and I'm pretty sure she doesn't have internet access, screamed, then shut the door and called the police.

The long story made short is that the man was the apartment building's handy man, and he was making no small fortune crawling from the attic into unsuspecting tenet's apartments and stealing watches, change and whatever else. I guess the dingle berry was somehow stuck, and the police had to pull him down. His story that he was checking the roof for leaks did not stick, there just was not enough moisture in the air to convince anyone. All that for $450 a month!

The wacky friend of mine relayed this story to me in the most dramatic fashion ever, and my dad and I laughed hysterically when I relayed it to him. The same friend has many many episodes that make my eyes water, and her antics are no small part of the charm of our 25 year long friendship. I should have known when she told me about the time she fell out of the back of her girl scout leader's Winnebago that this girl offered the promise of many laughs. Now, I know on the surface that falling out of the R.V. might sound scary, but she was not hurt all that much, just a few scrapes, the funny part is that the brownie leader kept driving before the girls could draw her attention to my friend hobbling on behind trying to catch the slow moving vehicle.

Now, most normal minded people might think of taking the child home, or to an emergency room, but not this brave troop leader, she pushed on. Come on, this woman was delivering girl scout cookies in an R.V. people! So, no, she had promised those girls McDonald's for a job well done, and nothing was going to get in the way of those Happy Meals. Luckily, with no concussion, my friend was able to enjoy her Cheeseburger with the other girls. It was the 80's, need I say more?

My uncle's stories are always a hit at any barbeque, he was an ornery young man, but thankfully he was steered down the right path and has stayed on the right side of the law as a police officer, but before he was in uniform, well that's another story. My favorite is how he and a bunch of his friends decided to hang a man from the town water tower. It seems that my grandfather was always bringing interesting things home from his travels as a truck driver delivering marble all over the country. One such item was a dummy he'd picked up somewhere. Well, Uncle and friends decided it would be a hoot to climb up that water tower and hang that dummy, with a note pinned to it's chest signed, "the hangmen". They thought it would be even more delightful to run to the popular hang out spot in town and tell everyone, especially the girls, that a man was up on the water tower and about to jump.

This being about the most exciting thing to happen had most of those kids running over to discover the man had already jumped. Well, rather than arresting them, the story was run on the front page of the paper the next day, with a picture of a police officer holding the rescued dummy. Everyone knew it was a joke, nobody pee'd their pants over it. He's still got the article, I saw it myself. He's also still got the newspaper from Lincoln's assassination. He wasn't there, but he's been entrusted with it by my grandmother, who collected all sorts of smart things.

It's funny what people can tell you if you stay awake long enough to listen. There's nothing like a good story. If only I could relay them as well as the original. Ah well.