jcmor83 – Gen-Xer: Our family stories within the family sphere start everywhere, from long-time recipes that never got documented and shared to some of those same morsels of wisdom about life that need to be documented and shared also to help provide some reference to others. Here is one of my funny family stories. The moral of this story is that it doesn’t pay to be a showoff and sometimes we need to think things thru beforehand.
My age was around 14 or 15 years old. I was just learning how to drive. And at that age, I had been taught to drive a stick. You know, clutch, change gears, and go….I was good early at driving. So good, I thought, that on this one day, while my grandparents were away, they had left the keys to my grandfather’s truck and left me to be in supervision of two of my younger cousins, I decided I was going to “show-off” and take them on a drive, to show them I could in fact drive and had the “Juice” when it came to driving.
Well off we went, I drove off of the main streets, so as not to be seen and I drove up on what was known as “Crump Hill” as a part of my “show-off” drive. Well, everything was fine, until at the very end of “Crump Hill”, there was a Waste Processing Plant or facility and required you to turn around because it was the end of the road. Now the problem was that all around the facility was soft mud or maybe not just strictly soft mud, if you know what I mean. So, I needed to turn around at the entrance of this facility and in doing so, I/we ended up stuck in the “mud”.
Heart started racing as the wheels were spinning and spinning from trying to figure out what to do about being stuck. My two cousins were like they had balloons in their mouths they were holding in their laughter so much. It was at that time I gave them the look and an ultimatum — My exact words — with a kill look — I said to them, “Ya’ll better not tell nobody”!! Not having a solution yet to getting unstuck, that was my first order of business was to threaten them with the Apocalypse if they spoke to anyone about this. LOL
So, in my high level of panic and luckily, there was a gentleman at the facility doing some sort of work on a tractor. I ran desperately to flag him down and see if he could assist. He in fact did and pulled us out of the ditch of “mud’. Thank God. It was about to be a murder (mine if my folks came home and the car was missing and so were we.)
Drove home, straight home. Rinsed off the vehicle, re-iterated while washing the vehicle, my ultimatum to my cousins, in which to their credit or to mine, they have kept their mouth shut about it (around me anyway). LOL
The moral again, is that there was just no need to try and show off my driving skills in that fashion. All it would have taken was a simple ask. But sometimes when we are young and also when we are older, we just don’t think things all the way through.
What’s a good family funny story, recipe, etc. that you would like to share?