My youngest child is now an older teen and she possesses the cognitive skills necessary to understand, enjoy, and/or be mortified by the tales my family has long had a habit of spinning, especially around the holidays when the audience for these anecdotes is much larger than at any other time of the year. I've often regaled my readership with the tradition that is my family's heirloom of choice, telling stories about Halloween and Christmas, and commenting on this or that human condition. Per the familial custom, I've never lied; nor have I ever allowed the truth to get in the way of a good story.
Sometimes the story is about telling a story to someone else, such that the story of telling someone a story is true, but the story that was told to someone else is not. Such was the case when all took their rightful places at the family table this last Christmas Eve to listen to and share new tales and retell old ones. As often happens, there need be only one word plucked from another story to set the stage for the next one, and so it was that my younger brother Gary seized upon the word "egg" (from someone's story about their breakfast that morning) to get the yarn ball rolling full bore.
Before I tell you the story he told, I should first tell you why it left my youngest child aghast and slack-jawed. What she heard wasn't unlike any of the numerous stories she'd heard before; and given her passing familiarity with the main characters, she didn't need to be told who did what to whom to know, based on the what, to whom what was done.
Two stories in particular (which she'd heard during previous gatherings and would hear again later that night) had already lulled her into a place of unconditional belief. The first was from my Dad who had firsthand knowledge of my great-uncle Dorr who had married my grandmother's sister, Ruth, in 1926. Dad's knowledge of the story was secondhand, via my grandfather, Frank, but the details are easily confirmed by browsing the public record.
Because of a back injury, Dorr had been prescribed the once-legal, over-the-counter painkiller, Nervine – a powerful combination of alcohol and cocaine, among other ingredients. By the time he was healed he was addicted and he continued to indulge at ever higher, more frequent doses. At the literal height of his drug-induced paranoia, he armed himself and climbed to the top of a trapeze pole that had been erected by his circus neighbors for practice during their off season. Once aloft, he began to shoot into the night sky because, he yelled down to the cops and my grandfather, "The Russians are using the moon to spy on me!"
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