I’m not funny. Not really. I use humor at times to deflect my own insecurities but overall I’m not a candidate for a stand up gig. However, I do at times even crack myself up. I think it’s primarily a warped sense of looking at the world. Mom and Dad instilled that it me and I’ve passed it along to my wonderful offspring. My earliest memory of this family gift was my dad watching the Wide World of Sports. On the fuzzy screen of the floor console appeared a mountain of pure white snow. At the top of this glacier beauty was a man decked out in the most high tech ski gear of its time. The athlete lunged and took off down the side of the mountain – his body swayed left, then right, then left again, then…head over heels…ski poles went flying left and right…all you could see was a human snow ball plummeting down the side of the magnificent mountain side. And all you could hear? My dad rolling with laughter as tears ran down his face. All he could manage to get out verbally was what a bunch of idiots those skiers were. It was small things like that, that shaped my young mind and my view on the world.

Another favorite past time of my dad’s was attempting to scare me to death and I shared in the pursuit of giving him a good jolt to the ticker as well. Unfortunately, there was an innocent bystander. My mother. It never failed that my mother would walk into one of our well thought out schemes. It’s amazing that the woman isn’t on a wide range of tranquilizers after all the years of torture we put her through. While my dad would jump out from behind doors to scare me and I would shake up some carbonated beverage for him, it was always my mother who ended up the recipient of our trickery.

But there was one particular incident that was strictly a bonding moment for my dad and I. Oh yes, it involved my mom in the biggest way. One in which just the very mentioning of it to this day, causes her lips to pull together so tight they look like one completely straight line and her eyes bead up like she could shoot lazars out of them. It was an innocent enough prank; especially, since it was an impulse move on my part.

Here’s the back story. My mother has a fear of lightning. A sever fear. She grew up in Southern Florida and to her credit there are some pretty intense and freaky lightning storms there from time to time. My entire life I’ve heard the warnings from her not to take a shower when its lightning and don’t talk on the phone when its lightning because a light pole could get struck and the lightning would travel through the line into the phone and strike you while you talked on it. Mom had a ton of warnings but these two were always included and she was adamant that if we performed either of these acts the curtains would be closed on our existence. I often wonder if that would happen by an act of God or by her for disobeying. I never tested it. Until one fateful night…

This was in the time when cordless phones had first become all the rage. We had one and loved it. Especially mom because she could move about the house working and talking on the phone without hanging one of us with 50 foot of phone cord. On the night in question, Mom & Dad & I were sitting around the den watching TV and cutting up. It was storming really good outside; the window shaking kind of thunder. Mom got up on her soapbox about the evils of appliances and lightning. Dad and I picked up on her phone issue. I remember the debate went a little like this:

“You can’t talk on the phone when its lightning…it’ll hit a pole and travel through the line and strike you right then and there” stated mom firmly. My response: “What about the cordless phone? How can it travel to it when there’s no line?” Dad chimed in with “Yeah, I guess it would chase you around the house until it could strike you down deader than a doornail”. The last two statements were followed by giddy laughter from my dad and me. We teased her for a few minutes. Then, as if on cue, the phone rang. Me being the teenager I was at the time, was the closet to the phone. Mom promptly advised me not to touch the phone. Dad and I looked at each other and an unspoken pact was made in our eyes. I reached for the phone and as I picked it up, bringing it to my ear, I shook my entire body making a “zit…zit…zit” sound. Two things happened spontaneously. My mother swore like a drunken sailor and my dad and I burst in to laughter as hard as he had laughed at the downhill skiers. Afterwards, my mom stormed up stairs swearing with every step she took and she didn’t return down until the next morning. A few years later, a friend of mine’s husband was thrown across the room when lightning struck a transformer and the current traveled through the lines ending at the other end of the phone he was talking on. I don’t answer the phone when it’s storming now.