Cheeseburger

Okay, so I was out running errands with my dad, and we had just made our last stop. He told me to call mom to see if she wanted us to pick up some lunch on the way home. Well, she had actually just finished making some stuff for us, so we were just going to head home. However, as soon as I hung up, my dad laughs and says, "You still want a cheeseburger, don't you?" This is really his way of saying, "I'm hungry now, so let's get a dollar cheeseburger and if mom asks about anything, I'll just say you were hungry...."

Yeah, we caved in and got two small cheeseburgers on the way home. We pull up into the driveway, and my dad laughs again and says, "Great! Now trash goes in the bag, we hide the evidence, and don't tell Mom!" That got me laughing, because whenever he would say, "Don't tell mom!" growing up, it usually meant we had done something pretty bad (setting something on fire, ruining a meal, someone got hurt, and the list could go on). So I was having a really hard time keeping a straight face walking in the door, and I would have been fine, except the first thing my dad says walking inside was, "Boy, I'm starving!"

I don't know, something about the way he said it, and the sneaky way we were trying to put the trash in the garbage can without making a noise---I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing (I have a terrible poker face...). Even during the prayer over the meal, I could hear my dad laughing silently about the whole thing. Sure, it was just a cheeseburger, but at the time it was the funniest thing to me.

I've been laughing a lot with my parents these past couple of days. I was remembering all of these random events from growing up in Georgia, and I'm just realizing more and more that I didn't have a "normal" childhood (normal maybe for the South, but boy do my friends act surprised that I'm still alive with all the crazy stuff I used to do). Just one story will do for now (and this isn't just me...my siblings and I believe some of my cousins were there for this incident...I think it was the Cutlers, but I'm not sure). My mom was out running some errands, leaving us kids alone in the house. We started playing around with a superball in the living room, just throwing it against the brick fireplace and bouncing it around a little. I can't remember who suggested it, but someone pointed up at the ceiling fan. So we proceeded to throw the ball up into the fan (which was at its highest setting) and laugh hysterically as it ricocheted off the walls. We continued doing this for a little while (15 minutes? 30 minutes?). But then the inevitable happened---the superball shot off and hit a picture hanging on the wall. Of course, this was also the moment that my mom was just pulling into the driveway...Thinking quickly, my older siblings and some of my cousins took the picture off the wall, pulled all of the broken glass out, and then hung it back up.

It was a good three or four years before my mom ever found out. She always had us kids do the dusting in the living room, and it's not like we were going to just outright say, "There ain't any glass in this picture here!"