The Hoax
A resurrected post, I swear to G-d true, and appropriate for April 1.
Now, after reading of Vman’s hoaxing tendencies, I have to tell something that has been a family secret for many, many years.
One monday, when I was but a pup, Mom dropped me off at school and dropped gramma off at the church. She was the cleaning woman/housekeeper for the two old priests that lived in the beat up old rectory, and she worked monday, wednesday, and friday. Anyway, as mom backed out of the parking place, that morning, she backs into a giant oak on the corner of the lot, crushing a taillight and breaking a casting on the back end of her brand-spanking new 1967 Olds Delmont 88.
She’s a wreck. She cries all day. She lives in fear of telling Dad that she damaged a car with less than 100 miles on the clock.
Meanwhile, Dad shows up at church after getting off midnights at Ford. He and three guys with a backhoe cut down said tree, cut it up and haul it off, and rip out the stump, covering the hole with gravel so it looks as if it has always been parking lot.
He returns home and is met by a tearful Mom, who explains that she has wrecked the car, and how, and where. Dad pipes up- “Where did you do this?” She explains again. Finally, he takes her over to the church and asks her to show him the (now nonexistent) tree.
She is really in tears now, she’s confused and doesn’t understand, but to his credit dad reassures her “hey, it’s just a car, and all that is important is that you’re OK, we can fix the damned car”
That was 1967. Dad died in 1987. Mom never new until after dad’s death. There was a man who could pull off a hoax.
I suspect that when they reunited in the hereafter, words were exchanged about that . . .
;-)
Peter: Mom is still going strong. Which means she will have had lots of time to simmer over that event.
Don’t think for a moment, though, that she didn’t get back plenty of her own.
Yeah, but that is hard core pranking. I understand more about where you got some of your stuff now.
Puts me in mind of the time, not that long ago, right after we’d gotten the left taillight on the wife’s Caravan fixed because it had literally fallen apart. It looked like it had been glued back together once before instead of just replacing the unit like the previous owner should have.
So about a week goes by and I’m not paying any damn attention to her van. Then the kids come down from Fort Wayne to visit, and when we walk back into the house from dinner, the boy says, “Hey, Sally, did you know you’ve got a hole in your taillight?”
She says, “There’s no hole.”
He says, “Yeah, look, right here, like something punched into it.”
I say, “What the fuck? We just got that fixed.” I walk over to look and it’s NOT the one we fixed — it’s the other one. So I look at my wife. Meaningfully.
She says, “It happened when I was at the doctor on Monday. I wasn’t going to say anything because we just got the other one fixed.”
I said, “So what happened?”
She said, “There was a dumpster in the space behind me and it jumped out and hit me.”
And that’s her story to this day.
So was the confession in your dad’s will or were you the brave soul that informed her of his prank?
His co-conspirators.