Family Folklore

[susandennis]

My family wasn't huge. Me, Mom and Dad, my brother and sister. We never lived near any other relatives and didn't have that many anyway. My Mom had a brother who was killed in WWII and my Dad had a sister who had one kid. We lived in the southeast for a lot of my growing up and everyone I knew had grandma next door and cousins to burn. Not us. We were it.

And so we kind of created our own family traditions and sayings and general folklore over the years.

Long before telemarketers... My sister spent the years from age 10 through - well, I suspect she's still doing it - on the phone with her friends. But there was one. Judy Gold who invariably called every night during dinner. To this day if two of us are eating together anywhere and the phone rings - one or both will say 'It's Judy Gold."

In a never ending (and rarely successful) attempt to fit in, I was constantly asking my Mom for whatever. Even though it never once worked, my main argument was 'But, everyone in my class... ' has one, is doing it, etc. My Mom would always respond with 'if everyone in your class jumped off a bridge, would you?' (Of course the answer she was assuming was no and the answer I always knew was true was yes.)

This morning I got a note from her that said "the sun is out and everyone says it's a beautiful day - everyone in my class, that is"

When I was young Mom had a woman who came in to help with the housework. Her name was Lilly and she was wonderful. One day she and Mom were working on the kitchen floor and singing together. Mom stopped in the middle and said "This is kind of fun, isn't it?" Whereupon, Lilly replied "Mrs. Schubert, you don't know what fun is!"

"You don't know what fun is" has been a staple in our houses since then.

Daddy's father was born and raised in Germany. His English was still pretty broken when I was a kid and while he rarely used any German words at all, he had a couple of phrases. My sister, being the self centered diva that she is, was never on time for anything in her live. Unless everyone was waiting for her, she was so not ready. My grandfather used to call her the koosh faunse. Now that is simply what it sounded like. I have no idea what so ever how to spell it properly or even what it actually is. As I remember it was something like slow cow or last cow. I think I loved it because I loved calling my sister a cow.

But today anyone who is late is a koosh faunse.

Probably the one my Mom loves best and the one we all use most often is one of the newest ones. In the early 80's I worked at the IBM plant in Charlotte, NC. I worked in the communications department and we were in charge of plant meetings. When it came time to address the populous, we had to go to the cafeteria and, with the help of the janitorial staff, move all the tables aside and set up the chairs theater style.

One year we had a new college hire who was so full of herself it was hilarious. She spent 24/7 wallowing in her coolness and that left little time for actually doing anything. Then came her first plant meeting. We all trooped down to the cafeteria and started moving chairs. She just stood there and watched. Finally the director said way more kindly than I would have 'Kathy, come on, pitch in, give us a hand...'

She just looked at him with a very pained expression on her face and whined "Don't we have people to do this?"