Minky & Me

When I was a child, I loved hearing my parents tell family stories. Many were hysterical and gave me a glimpse of what my parents and their parents were like as much younger people.

There was a story about my grandmother’s unfortunate trip to the grocery store. As she was shopping, a bottle of liquid soap shattered in the aisle and splattered on her pantyhose. Outside, it was raining. When she left the store, raindrops hit her legs and caused the hose to suds up. According to my mother, it was hilarious.

This afternoon, I told Coco about Larry’s grandmother, “Gram.” She was quite the cleaner and evidently never sat down. To show Coco how gram cleaned, Layr gave a little demonstration: as I took a sip of my milk and set it down, he picked it up right away, and in a very convincingly elderly way, hobbled off into the kitchen.

Coco didn’t quite get it, but Larry made me laugh when he said, “yeah, I  got her genes pretty much.” The joke there is that neither of us is particularly neat.

Coco asked, “but how did you get them off her?”

Minky has picked up some expressions lately that we’ve been discouraging. “What the hell,” is high on the list…doubly so while her paternal Grandma was visiting. So there we are, in the living room with Gram, and Minky points to something and says, “what the hell!” I (Dad) immediately and strongly reprimand her and she bursts into tears. She does this sometimes when she feels yelled at. Her mother tries to comfort her, telling her that daddy loves her even when he yells. Minky says that’s not what she’s upset about. “I just really wanted to say, ‘what the hell!’