This was the second year the girls on my mom's side of the family went to a beach house for a weekend full of laughter, games, and secrets. I am really amazed at the sorts of things I discover about my relatives during these summers.
Aunt Brenda's confession of The Cheeto Incident came out while we were playing cards one evening. She had brought a bag of the fluffy orange stuff and was sharing them with us. I absolutely adore Cheetos because my mother would never buy them for me as a child, since she considered unnaturally orange powdered balls of crisp unhealthy and not part of a nutritious diet. I could tell by the number of hand reaches that my Aunt Brenda and I were the ones who love Cheetos the most.
My mom and Gram were looking over family tree/geneology records when Brenda says, "Did I ever tell you about the time I thought I had a Cheeto heart attack?"
"No, you didn't," I say. Nobody else has heard the story either, including Gram, who is Aunt Brenda's own mother. I don't know about you, but if I survived a supposed Cheeto induced heart attack, I would call my mom the next day and tell her of my close encounter. Or maybe I wouldn't, on account of how my mother does not approve of me eating Cheetos.
Aunt Bren launches into the story, telling us of how this one time she was on vacation and ate an entire bag of Cheetos within an hour. Next thing she knows, she feels like she can't breathe, her heart hurts, and she panics. Her friend calls 911 and an ambulance picks her up and takes her to the hospital. After some preliminary tests, the doctor tells her she didn't have a heart attack. "Oh, thank goodness," she says. "But what is wrong with me?" The doc asks her what she has eaten in the past 48 hours. Brenda lists off some margaritas, chocolate cake, french fries, donuts, a few beers, pancakes with syrup, fried chicken, and an entire bag of Cheetos.
"I would lay off the fatty foods if I were you," the doctor advises.
"But it's not like I eat this stuff all the time!" Brenda wails. "I'm on vacation. The whole point of it is to eat a lot of crap and have a good time."
In the end, Aunt Brenda had to pay for her ambulance ride to the hospital for her fake Cheeto-Induced heart attack.
"Where were you on vacation at?" I ask at the end of the story.
"Las Vegas."
****
I've never really asked my grandma about how things were like when she was a child. I remember my mom telling me how grandma used to have to take cold baths in a tank in the living room of her homestead, and I felt like checking the facts with the actual source. We were preparing dinner one night when I said, "Grandma, when you were a kid, did you have electricity?"
She told me of how they didn't when she and her brother Dexter were small, but then they got lights when she was about eleven years old, which was not in 1892, like I had previously thought. Kidding about that. I've never thought of my grandma as old. She's in really good shape and is more active than I am. She'll probably live to be one-hundred and twenty.
"We had to go to the bathroom in the outhouse. We didn't have toilet paper then, we used catalogs. Were were in the tulies, you know. When we went to school or to restaurants they had toilet paper. It was just that if you lived in the sticks, you didn't have it on a daily basis."
During the discussion of Gram's childhood, I learn that Grandpa Pitman never went to high school. His family couldn't afford it because they needed him to work. So he went to the mill and later became a logger.
While on the topic of the generations before us, (and with the fat binder of records Gram has with her) I learn another family secret. Gram tells us that she is pretty sure the whole family has been lied to regarding the parents of my great-great grandpa. We've always been told/thought that he was an orphan and all his papers burned in an orphanage fire, thus leaving a gaping mystery in the ethnicity of that line. The beginnings of my grandma's side of the family came from French-Canada, and it was rumored that great-great-grandpa Pitman was part Native Alaskan (Inuit). Turns out this could all be lies, because the family used the whole orphan thing as a cover up since my great-great-grandpa was the result of a scandal. He was actually raised by his grandma or aunt or something because his mother was unwed. Regardless of whether or not he was truly an orphan or if it was just a lie for cover up, the lineage there is a mystery and it has left me especially with a gaping hole of my heritage, because my eyes don't look anyone else's in the family except for my Great Grandpa Pitman's. And God knows where his father came from. Maybe I really am part Chinese like all those kids in elementary school thought.
The serious nature of this family lie turns to the subject of socks and fashion.
Gram says, "When I was a teenager, we used to take large amounts of toilet paper and wad them up under our socks and roll them over. In those days, the bigger the roll the better!" Mostly I'm just glad to hear she was able to use toilet paper by her teenage years.
She continues to tell us about her exciting days of youth.
"Back in those days the Grange Hall was a very popular thing. Every weekend we would go dancing, or sometimes they had roller skating."
"Did you skate, Gram?"
"I burned up the floor!" she replies.
***
At breakfast Sunday morning I recounted my dreams to everyone. I dreamed that I had to substitute as a high school math teacher, only the kids starting getting out of control. This was a stressful yet incredibly boring dream, compared to my aunt."Last night I dreamed I could breathe under water," says Aunt Brenda.
"Like a zombie?" asks Aunt Bink.
"Or a vampire?" I say.
"Or maybe like a mermaid?" my mom says.
Pause
Then Gram says, "Or...like...Kevin Costner?"
"Huh?" We're all completely stumped. A lot of things that Gram says puzzles us, but this one tops them all.
"You know, from the movie Waterworld," she explains.
"Ohhhhh."
then we proceed to bust into rib shattering laughter
***
One our favorite games is our family created version of Things. Creating the list beforehand is just as fun as playing the actual game. How you play is everyone writes down an answer to go with the question, (for example, Things That Aunt Bink Would Never Wear), and then the reader reads the answers and we go in a circle taking turns guessing who wrote what.
Gram was tapping her pen when she laughed and said "Oh, I have to think about this!" Because apparently Gram runs over a lot of things and has trouble remembering all of them. She only needed to pick one thing to write down, though.
The rest of us giggle at Gram for not remembering, when I say "What sound did it make?" This launches Aunt Brenda into her erupting laugh which you can hear from a mile away. Then Brenda says "I wouldn't worry about it as long as it didn't say 'help'!" This sends us into a whole other round of laughter. Finally the reader collected everyone's answer and began to read them off so we could guess.
"Answers are...curbs...the curb...the center line...the curb...the curb at Fred Meyer's...curbs."
The fact that everyone basically said the same thing makes us laugh so hard we can hardly breathe. I wouldn't know from personal experience, but it could be laughter more dangerous than a Cheeto heart-attack.
My other favorite category from the game of Things was another question about Gram. The category was "Things that Gram keeps in the trunk of her car." Answers included things like gloves, extra gloves, a porcupine carcass from the side of the road, wading pants, buckets, and gloves. We laughed a lot when the answers were read, but when the reader got to "wading pants" a special look came over my grandma's face, like "Wow, that's a good idea, I wish I had those in my trunk." I was the one who wrote down wading pants, because I was reflecting upon my spring break trip to Gram's where we went rock hounding at the river, and Grandma was trying to get me to wear Leon's wading pants that he uses for fishing.
***
- Beach Walking and Rock Collecting
- Playing Clue
- Ping Pong Tournament
- Eating (esp. lunch at McMenamin's where we learned of TWO family secrets I cannot share with you, and when Aunt Brenda made Grandma's Noodles, which are fattingly delicious).
- Necklace Beading
- Geneology/History stories and pictures
- Contests to win the privilege of wearing The Breakfast Beads (Mardi Gras beads that Brenda brought). Contests included estimating the time when my sister would actually arrive in the evening (9:45pm) and who could complete their 100 piece puzzle the fastest.
- The Game of Things
- Yahtzee (I won!)
- Sorry
- Eating pizza
- Making homemade ice cream in this really ancient wooden mixer
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