Dec. 9: Weird family

 For a while now, my dad has supplemented his income by officiating at funerals. He's a pastor/chaplain, so he's most comfortable invoking the Lord at these funeral services, but there have been times when the family strictly forbade him from mentioning anything divine or metaphysical.

At one of these occasions, dad had to wait for the family to show up at the graveside. They wandered in fashionably late. Several were hungover and a few were wearing attire more suitable for a strip club than a funeral. They seemed bored and listless as dad spoke the words that would see the dearly beloved into the ground.

"Does anyone have anything they'd like to say before we depart?"

"Yeah," one guy says, and then breaks into a story about how the dearly departed took a lot of money off some recent immigrant restaurant worker who was trying to make a little extra money as a bookie. The poor guy didn't understand how things worked on this side of the pond and he lost a lot of money because of it.

"Buddy used to go to the race track, find out who won the races, and then go to the restaurant and lay bets on the horses that already ran," this guy said, probably laughing. "The poor schmuck didn't even know the races had already been decided. Man, did my buddy ever fleece him."

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I wasn't there. All of this was relayed to me later.  

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My family, the family I was born in to, was weird. All families are weird. Here is the weirdest thing about my family: Not one of us suffers from North America's most common fear, which is speaking in public. 

In fact, not only is no one in my family afraid of it, we all relish it.

My dad, as I said, is a pastor and former radio broadcaster. I have heard him make keynote speeches at seminars before.

My mom is a PR/marketing expert who, while in her early thirties, hosted an on-air television show about the Calgary race track.

I am a magician/former aspiring actor/writer who's not at all shy about speaking in public. My sister is a teacher. My brother is a former DJ. We ain't shy.

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All families are weird. Some are weirder than most.

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In Regina, turn of the century, I somehow found myself in a house where a weird family lived. The dad was irate that the city was making him get rid of the hundreds of pet pigeons he kept above his garage. The neighbours were getting tired of these pigeons constantly shitting on their houses and their cars and their belongings, so they invoked a city bylaw to get the pigeons out of there. The man absolutely could not see reason. "Birds shit on my car all the time and you don't hear me complaining about it," he said. He couldn't see the difference between one wayward bird and living next to a veritable bird sanctuary.

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In 1992, former US President George HW Bush said that families should be "more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons."

It was a controversial comment but it really shouldn't have been. I would rather be in a Waltons house than a Simpsons one. Hard work and family bonds never hurt anyone.  

 

  A former employer of mine, a hotel owner in northeast Calgary, said he met George Bush once. He didn't say much about the encounter except that Bush was very media savvy. "When he's one-on-one with people, he will tell you the real reasons behind his decisions," he said. "But he will tell the media something else."

That probably goes for most politicians.