The refrigerator story

My favorite uncle has a blog too. He e-mailed me the other day calling dibbs on the refrigerator story.

I respect dibbs as much as the next guy, so I ruefully considered the episode off limits.

Then I had three thoughts. 1) Unca Rob hasn’t written a post since before the Superbowl, and that one appears to have been deleted. 2) I have now given him seven days to use his dibbs, which everyone knows expire after three. And 3) He already got the haunted apartment story. Family lore should be fairly distributed.

So here it comes. Remember You hate to hear it? You have not yet begun to cringe.

My great-grandmother had a small refrigerator in the ’50s. It had one of those handles that attached in the center but continued up like a spire to the top of the door.

One afternoon during a family party, all of the children were playing hide and seek or tag or something. Unca Rob would know.

One of the cousins climbed on top of the fridge. He was a little boy.

At olly-olly-oxen-free he slid off. But he aimed poorly.

The handle went up through his anus. He hung there, legs adangle, until rescuers were able to slide him up and off.

He had to go to the hospital.

He’s fine now.

But I’ll bet you’re not.

The hemorrhage story

My grama tells this story all the time.

It’s basically about guilt.

When Unca Rob was a little boy, Nana had some kind of small surgery on her uterus. Then she went to his spelling bee.

While she was sitting in the audience, something inside her snapped, and she hemorrhaged all over herself. Grampa had to carry her out of the elementary auditorium.

Unfortunately, this happened when Rob spelled his word wrong.

She found out after he became a man that he spent his lifetime thinking  it was cause and effect.

I’m sure he lived with the guilt of his misconception better than she’s living with the guilt of giving it to him.

This would have been a better story if the word he missed had been ‘hemorrhage.’