A stuntwoman in the family

A true story of my viewpoint of growing up in a large family

    I grew up the oldest of six children and I loved it. However, anytime our family lived out of Utah we were subjected to many tirades on the evils of over population. And maybe with good reason. If any of you have seen the movie “The best Christmas pageant ever,” you will no doubt remember the horrible Herdsman children. Well, we were worse. Not in a financial sense, my Dad taught at an University and we always had a nice house to live in and enough money for any need that arose. No, our similarity was more in the behavioral zone.

    All of us had a warped sense of humor and considered being bored a fate worse than death. My Father was always spanking someone, who I must admit probably richly deserved it. While my Mother was a member of the living dead, You’ve heard of them, they walk among us but they are not really there. In retrospect I’m sure she opted for this mode of behavior as being preferable to mass murder. As awful as all this might sound, I want to point out some of the less obvious advantages of a large family.
    First, no matter what awful plan you cooked up, with all those brothers and sisters someone was always willing to help you. As a fringe benefit to this, if by chance you did get caught the punishment was spread out evenly between culprits, no one had to suffer alone. The second benefit was there was always someone to pester if you felt bored. Lastly, we never wanted to run away and join the circus because our life was a circus.

    One of my favorite memories of an adventure that we enjoyed was the time my sister Yag, (not her real name), decided to become a stunt woman. It was the summer that she turned ten. My Mother drove a large station wagon to accommodate all of us. This was in the days before stringent safety precautions. That meant that the window in the back could be unrolled by children riding in the back. Since it was summer and hot, the window was always down.

    That summer Yag was always looking for new tricks to add to her growing list of skills. So, she was delighted to discover that if she were careful she could climb out of the window and ride crouched on the bumper for miles, with my Mom none the wiser. After a while though, this trick got old so she started doing things like pretend her hands were slipping or her leg had slid off the bumper and she couldn’t quite regain her perch. These was great entertainment for a while, but since she never actually fell off we eventually lost interest. Well, every great performer knows that success comes from giving your audience what they want, so she decided that she would learn to jump off the car while it was still going.

    Well, we were just jerks, not idiots and we knew this was dangerous, but the more we discouraged her, the more determined she became to accomplish this feat. She declared that we were all a bunch of wimps. It was one day in August when Yag finally got up the courage to preform her ultimate stunt. She began, by crawling on to the fender while my Mom was still driving on the freeway. Up until this point her fender riding had been confined to the town limits. We were amazed and delighted. She was encouraged by our reaction and clung their determinedly. As we neared our house she prepared to leap from the still speeding car. She let go in front of the neighbor’s house. She was going thirty miles an hour and the ground was going zero. When she hit, instead of rolling gracefully like they did on TV, she crumpled and skidded for several yards. As we stared in morbid fascination at her limp form my brother Jim whispered in awe “Oh my heck! This time she’s really dead!” But, in true performer’s style Yag staggered to her feet and raised both bloody hands high over her head in a victory sign and then bowed triumphantly both to the left and the right. She then staggered into the house to throw up. My Mother, blissfully unaware of Yag’s scrape with death, continued unloading groceries.

    There was an adventure in almost everything we did together growing up. Whether we were laughing, fighting, at home or away, we were never bored because we had each other. There were (and still are) definite advantages to being part of the population explosion. 
*Yag’s name has been changed to protect her IQ reputation. 

Reviews

[Laura E. Aranda]

OMG This was so vividly and conversationally written that I was captivated throughtout the whole write....very very funny. You ended it too quickly though....(that is a relief and honest to write since I sincerely CAN NOT say THAT to every poet I read here) HAHA
Anyway in the lines below:

One of my favorite memories of an adventure that we enjoyed was t he time my sister Yag, (not her real name), decided to become a stunt woman.

THE has an extra space between the 't' and the 'h'

Other than that it was AWESOME
WRITE SOME MORE!!!!!!!!
Cheers,lea

[Dom Macchiaroli]

Terrific piece. I love this style of writing. My favorite line:
"Well, we were just jerks, not idiots and we knew this was dangerous,"
Very clever. Thanks for posting.

[Wildecat]

I grew up in Utah too. Is there such a thing as a small family lol Delightful story, a pleasure to read.

[Pink Poison]

Jeez you damn mormons should just get sterilized at birth if that's how stupid your kids are. Seriously, Yag must have ended up - er, I don't know...dead or paralyzed or something. At the very least she needs a check up from the neck up.