My side of the family has some kind of genetic screw loose. Not only do we have a weird sense of humor, which usually shows itself at times when things should not be humorous, but we have a fainting gene. It happens at the oddest times and for equally odd reasons.
The first time I fainted was at my neighbors. I was in grade school and at the beginning of each school year Mother, instead of buying new school clothes, had my dresses made. I'm sure that was a cost saving measure and the local seamstress lived two houses away.
It was a Saturday morning and I was finally old enough not to have to accompany Mother to the hairdresser. My goal for that morning was to trot over to Mrs. Seamstress and try on my new dresses so she could finish them. There were six dresses all full of straight pins and I would have to bend over and gingerly slip into them. When I had finally managed to get into them without being impaled, I would stand up and have to turn around slowly so she could put more pins in them for the hem. Then I would reverse the process trying to get out of them unharmed. On the sixth dress I informed her I didn't feel to well and somehow made it to her couch before I passed out. When I came to, Mrs. Seamstress looked like she might join me and promptly sent me home.
My daughters have fainted and my nieces have fainted. One niece still does it and holds the record for most interesting faints. So, what does all this have to do with a bargain waste basket?
Each Mother's Day weekend, my sisters and our daughters meet for our annual shopping trip to an outlet mall located in the Ozarks. We spend the daylight hours searching for bargains and the evening hours sitting in our hotel room, showing off the days' purchases and laughing like idiots.
On one particular shopping event I found a lovely ceramic waste basket. It was the exact colors of a bathroom that was in dire need of a trash receptacle. It was round with a silver background and had four bands of different colors evenly spaced along its height. Perfect, I thought and a perfect price for my seemingly custom made waste basket, $9.99. I bought it without hesitation, a true bargain.
That evening as we gathered for our session of showing the bargains we had found, laughing and story telling, the fainting subject came up. I proceeded to tell the tale of what happened at Dad's interment. Dad had been passed quite a while, years actually, before we received his ashes. It was a hot summer day when we gathered at the cemetery to lay him to rest. My niece leans over and tells her mother she doesn't feel too good. This isn't the record holder niece, but a close second. Her mother tells her to just hang on. I'm sitting in the back row watching this exchange and can see that she REALLY doesn't feel good. I get her attention and tell her to go get in my car which is just a few feet behind us. She heads to the car and I glance over my shoulder just in time to see her not make it. There was a small shrub next to the car and when she went over it she was as stiff as a board. Yep, head first, then her feet followed up where her head had been and then plop, out of sight behind the shrub. This was one of those times that the weird sense of humor came into play also.
I can not tell a story without physically going through the motions of whatever I'm talking about. Kind of like charades, but with sound. As I got to the part about her falling over the shrub, I fell backward on the bed in a 'stiff as a board' reenactment. At that moment it sounded like someone had pulled both triggers on a double barreled shotgun. The room got deathly silent and Mother thought one of us had been shot. I raised up off the bed, a little dazed, and pulled open the sack I had landed on. There was my bargain waste basket with a gaping hole in the side of it where my head had landed. The silence was then broken by uncontrollable laughter as I placed the waste basket on my head. It fit just like a Trojan helmet.
Lucky for me, there was another waste basket just like my helmet model, without the hole, waiting for me at the store. It may not have ended up being such a great bargain, but the memories we made that weekend are priceless.
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