Summertime Stories
Here's a funny story for you.
One summer, my Gram fell down our basement stairs and broke her leg. She'd been carrying a watermelon down to the cellar - a watermelon we'd insisted on her ordering from the grocery store and which we had neglected to take down to the cellar before we went outside to play.
It wouldn't have been so bad (for us) except that she slipped on a baseball, which my brother had left on the shelf going down to the basement (where Gram also kept soot for Christmas pudding - which is why I never eat Christmas pudding) - even though my Mom had yelled at him about 50,000,000 times about putting his baseball on the shelf where it could roll off and land on the stairs, causing someone to fall and break their leg going down to the basement.
Still, the watermelon was unexpected. Although, as my Mother pointed out - we SHOULD have expected it. Pointing out that it was a total wildcard cut no ice with her.
Anyway, Gram spent the summer up in her room in traction with a little bell at her bedside to ring whenever she needed anything. We took turns responding to the little ding - which is to say that me and my brother took turns attending to her while our older sister went off to summer camp and my younger sister continued to sit two inches away from the TV, sucking her thumb and watching Mr. Dressup. (I was a bit of a Juniour Mom and tried to convince her to sit further away from the TV for fear she'd get radiation sickness, but no sooner would I leave the room then she'd be back with her nose practically touching the screen. The thumbsucking bothered me for the germ factor, but if I pulled it out of her mouth she'd want to wipe it off on something, so, I decided it was the lesser of two evils to leave it in. Mr. Dressup I had no quibble with, although I always wondered if he wasn't just a bit sexist and I'm sure I caught him being crabby to Casey and Finnegan a couple of times. Years later I saw him being interviewed about being Mr. Dressup while having kids of his own - teenagers at the time - and it confirmed my suspicions as he confessed that there was no cache in his job for his kids, and that he'd even seen "Mr. Dressup Is A Transvestite" spray painted on a wall in his neighbourhood.)
Anyway, my brother and I were deemed responsible for my Gram's accident on account of it was his baseball and my Mother decided I was the one who'd been told to take the watermelon down to the cellar, so that was the way the cookie crumbled for us that summer. The thing is, when I'd been told to take the watermelon down to the cellar, my older sister was still at home and she said, "Haha! Bloody Bones is going to get you for sure with that big watermelon in your arms. He's just waiting down there for you and as soon as you get halfway down the stairs, I'm going to turn off the light and you'll be totally at his mercy."
And she wasn't fooling. I mean, there's no way I'd be able to get down to the cellar with a big old watermelon in my arms before Bloody Bones got me. He lived just around the corner in the creepiest part of our super creepy basement - where my Gram had stored stuff from "people who'd been dead for so long there was no use for their things". So I'd done the only thing I could and disappeared outside long enough for my Gram to give up and finally carry the watermelon down herself. (For some reason, my older sister was never asked to do anything like that - she was exempt from menial chores by virtue of... well... I have no idea, really - except maybe that she was better looking than the rest of us, which woud have conferred a higher status on her with my mother - who was a bit disappointed in our potato faces, I think.)
Anyway, that's how my brother and I spent that summer - I forget which one it was - and for years after that my Gram would complain of an ache in her leg whenever it would threaten to rain and remind my Mother of the time my brother left his baseball on the basement stairs and she slipped and fell while carrying that watermelon down to the cellar on account of I'd skipped out of my responsibility to do it because of some crazy story about Bloody Bones. Finally, one summer, I said, "Hey yeah - whatever happened to that watermelon?" and my Mother laughed until tears ran down her face and my Gram finally started chuckling and that was the last time we heard "The Watermelon Story".
