Louis and I are hanging out with dad’s cousin Vic’s family at their home. We’re all sitting around the kitchen table, talking about dad, and how funny he was. Lou comes up with this ditty that had us all dying with laughter:
“It’s like late spring or summer of 1979. Me and some high school friends are hanging out after school at my house. Dads in the kitchen marinating steaks, getting them ready for the grill. We kids are in the den, sitting around the TV, watching the video tape “Faces of Death”. It’s a gruesomely narrated documentary of accidents, and people dying. The film is near the end and there’s a scene with a rocket car jumping over a canyon. Midflight, it disintegrates. the wreckage and driver plunge to the river below. The announcer says, “… he was lucky to have only a broken back.” Dads in the kitchen listening in and is snickering. Walking past the den to check on the grill he looks in and says, “How can anybody be ‘lucky’ to have a broken back?” Everybody’s laughing.
Soon the video ends, and we kids are sitting there trying figure out the best way to die.
My friend Paul D. says, “I wanna get run over by a freight train because it’ll be quick!”
Dads laughing in the kitchen.
My friend John K. says, “I wanna fall into an electrical transformer!”
Dads laughing harder in the kitchen.
I say, “I wanna get sucked out an airplane window and into the jet turbine – instantaneously vaporized!”
Dads roaring with laughter, and poking his head into the den says, “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m dying of old age!”