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Health & Fitness

Chapter 2: The Twins

The Twins and I go way back and I suppose they would hardly call me one of their best friends, but I did go up to their house to play.

        The Twins and I go way back and I suppose they would hardly call me one of their best friends, but I did go up to their house to play.  They had one of the nicest houses in the town of Bellingham, Washington.  As I had one of the not nicest houses, I wasn’t exactly in their play group, but when their mother was really desperate for a break from the Twins she would reach pretty far down in the playmate food chain.  Since there was a few kids below me that were the real bottom feeders, I suppose she thought I’d do in a pinch.  A pinch must have happened pretty often, because I’d get invited up when they wore out their other friends which was frequently.  You have to understand that they weren’t bad kids, and they did have lots of toys, but all they ever wanted to do is play politics, which is an awful strange thing for kids to want to do.  Actually it’s an awfully strange thing for grownups to do when you really get down to thinking about it, but that’s best left for another book.  Well, so all they wanted to do was play politics, which normally entailed me being some type of flunky as they got to be president and vice president.  The problem was that they could never agree on who was going to be president, and they’d get to raising such a fuss that their mother would come out and have to settle it.  For a while she got them taking turns, but it wouldn’t last long. They drove away most of their regular friends because the friends would come over expecting to watch videos or play with trains and end up in the Cabinet.  I didn’t mind the arguing, as I could play with their toys while they fought.  As I told you before, I never cared about politics, or religion.  Not even now.  I leave all those types of decisions to Alice.  What made the whole thing worse was that one Twin (Ike) was a Republican and the other Twin (Frank) was a Democrat. 

            It really started with their maternal and fraternal grandfathers.  Alice was reading over my shoulder as I was typing and had me change “their mother’s grandfather” to “maternal grandfather.”   I fought it at first, but now that I look at it, I kind of like it, but I’m not going to give Alice the satisfaction of knowing that.  I don’t want to spoil her.  Anyway, the story is really about the grandfathers and not about me and Alice.  The maternal grandfather, Albert, was some type of important person in the Democratic administration just after the war.  His people, up to that point, were always on the poor side, being dry land farmers in Eastern Washington.  The completion of Grand Coulee Dam and all the irrigation that went with it raised his family into the respectable middle of the middle class, cementing his feet forever into the ranks of the Democrats.   Unfortunately, forever came faster than he planned on.  He came home to visit the old farm and got involved in what they called a farm accident.  Do yourself a favor: if someone has a farm accident, don’t ask for the details because they most always involve some type of chopping or grinding.  Anyway, because of that I’m not going to give you the details as I know them.  For those of you that like that sort of thing you’ll have to be satisfied with the details of Fifi’s demise which I will tell to you in a later chapter.  I had a great grandfather that took a shortcut under a belt in a saw mill and didn’t get to the other side. Well, he actually got to the other side (in the biblical sense) but he wasn’t expecting to get there that soon.  More exactly, two pieces got to the other side, so that goes to show you that these things happen.  If Alice would have been there to tell him “then you’ll be sorry” maybe he wouldn’t have taken that shortcut.  Well anyway, this isn’t getting the baby fed or the car washed so I’d better get back to the story of the grandfathers. 

            As I already told you old Albert didn’t get to enjoy being a Democrat all that long, but he did make his daughter Ann (the Twins’ mother), promise him she would name one of her children after a famous Democrat.  And if that wasn’t enough of a burden to stick on a little kid, he wanted her to tell him or her every night the story of how the Democrats built Grand Coulee Dam and saved Albert’s family from poverty.  Well, when she had the twins she named one Frank.  It didn’t take much prodding to get her to do it since she grew up on the same story.  The gist of the story was that if the Republicans had remained in office she would still be living in a shack without running water and a nice flush toilet, and she wouldn’t be going away to a good college in Bellingham, but working as a maid for some Republican family, and so on.  You get the point.  So, now I need to tell you about how the other Twin came to be named Ike, and that means I need to tell you about the paternal Grandfather.

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            As fate would have it his name was Albert also.  However, he grew up in Tacoma in Western Washington, in the middle of the upper class.  His father, who would be the Twin’s great grandfather made his fortune by buying and selling money.  I never could figure out how that worked.  If I could figure it out maybe I wouldn’t be stuck in my situation, but my situation will become clearer as the chapters get written.  To get back to the story, Albert’s father made the money so Albert only had to hold onto it.  Albert tried to hold onto it by starting a shipping company.  However, he tried to hold onto more than he should have by paying low wages, which the union organizers didn’t like, leading to his losing the business.  Well he actually didn’t lose the business, but you would have thought he did by the way he carried on about how much paying union wages was costing him.  Now, this story is all second hand since when all this happened I wasn’t born yet, and it’s hard to hear well when you’re not yet alive, but I’m relating as best I can what Ann told her sons about Albert. 

When the Twins retold these stories to me I hadn’t started to take notes yet, either, but if I had I could tell the story better, which reminds me that I wanted to tell you something at the start of this chapter.  I wanted to tell you that all this history concerning the Twins would be from my memory, as I only started to take notes ten years ago.  Well, Albert was still rich, but he couldn’t stand it that he wasn’t richer.  He set out to be richer, but as it turns out he found out sooner than he wanted to that he couldn’t take his riches with him.  It seems that he was visiting one of his ships when it was loading grain and he was involved in an accident.  If anyone ever volunteers to tell you about an accident involving loading grain, don’t let them.  It always involves some type of sucking and stretching, so to save you the gory details, I won’t tell them as related to me by the Twins.  It will suffice to know that they didn’t have a coffin at the service as was the custom in their family, and that a whole load of grain in one of the cargo holds had to be thrown out.  Actually, the family wasn’t going to throw it away to save money, but word of the accident leaked out. 

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            Now you know that the second Albert also left this earth much earlier than he wanted to (I suppose that you could put Fifi in the same company as the Alberts, but of course being a dog and a dead one at that we can’t get her to confirm it). But, before he did leave, he managed to impress on his sons the importance of carrying on the Republican tradition in the family.  He even got his son Robert (the Twins’ father), to agree to name his son, if he had one, after a famous Republican.  So when the Twins were born Robert named one Ike.  It’s no wonder Robert did it.  All his life he was told how they had a good life, which they had earned fairly and they deserved since they worked hard. The story continued that the Unions, being jealous of their good fortune and being made up of lazy people, wanted to take their money away from them and give it to deadbeats, and so on.  Well, you get the idea.  Since Robert didn’t want to end up being a servant in the house of one of these Union deadbeats he took this all very seriously and made sure to impress all that on Ike. 

Now Alice tells me that I’ll be sorry if I try to pass the story of the two Alberts on to anyone because, even though it’s true you won’t believe it.  You won’t believe it since the two stories are too much the same and you’ll think I was lazy and lacked imagination, so I just copied one and made it fit the other.  She insisted that I make something up that was more believable, but when I started this project I pledged that I would stick to the truth, and that’s what I’m doing.  You can believe it or not, but don’t trust me, ask the Twins.  Truth is always stranger than fiction.  Here’s an example.

When I was small, my dad told me about a man who was sleeping with his false teeth in a jar besides his bed when the hotel he was in caught on fire.  He ran out of the room in his long johns, without his teeth.  In the course of the fire the boiler blew and the hotel went up several hundred feet into the air, along with his teeth.  He eventually got a new set of teeth, went to Chicago, and moved in with a cousin once removed from St. Louis.  I found out that if you don’t really know how people are related it’s easiest to use the term “once-removed” because there’s not a living soul that can explain what it means and most people don’t want to ask since they don’t want to seem ignorant.  Well, anyway, he was sitting in the living room of the cousin’s house at Christmas; sound asleep actually, with his mouth open. Because of this, his new teeth had fallen out and were lying on his lap.  All of a sudden the family heard “Meow---errrr----fizzsdt---fizzsdt---meow---eerr. The lights on the Christmas tree blinking off with every “fizzsdt” and on with every “meow-errr.”  Well they didn’t have long to wait to find out what was happening as the cat shot out from the back of the Christmas tree with the wire from the lights wrapped around it’s back leg.  Well, if anyone thinks that cats can estimate length, forget it, as that cat was sure surprised when the wire came up short.  The cat jerked to a stop, but not before pulling over the tree onto the sleeping man.  In the commotion he lost his teeth under the seat cushion.  When they turned the chair over his teeth dropped out, but they also found another pair that had been wedged into a spring of the chair to brace it up.  Now this is the unbelievable part: the other pair wedged in the spring was his first pair of teeth that were blown up in the hotel.  He washed up the old pair, stuck then in his mouth and they still fit.  In fact, he preferred those to his newer pair.  So, there you have it–the truth is stranger than fiction, and that’s why I’m only going to tell the truth.

So, now I have to continue the story of the twins, where I continued to play off and on with them.  Ike wanted to play “financier.”   Frank wanted to play “union organizer.”   What was my part?  First I’d borrow play money from Ike (with interest), and when I couldn’t pay it back on time (which was part of the game) Ike would take my bike as payment and lock it in his room.  When Ike took my bike I was supposed to go to Frank who was the union man (in the game I belonged to a union, which in the game was never given a proper name, but simply called the Union).

  Now this brings up an interesting thought about naming things.  In the Twins’ family they had several pets.  For the sake of the story, and in the spirit of my later note taking, I will give you an exact count.  There was a rabbit, which they called Bunny, a cat which they called Kitty, a parrot which they called Bird and the first pet was a turtle which they named Turtle.  Now their mother told people it was because the twins could never agree on anything, not even the names of the pets so they picked what now might be called a generic name.  Actually I’ve conducted I small study of families that call pets by their real names (like a rabbit called Bunny) and I have come to the conclusion that the practice probably indicates some type of mental instability.  Maybe that would explain why this whole business of dividing up Washington State got started.  Well that’s something for the experts to sort out and I just will report the story as I “noted it.”  For completeness, I should tell you that the Twins did get a dog when they were in high school. You probably are thinking they called the dog “Dog” since I just talked about the naming convention, but they called the dog “Albert,” which kept the Twins from fighting over the name since each twin could claim it was after his favorite grandfather.  Interestingly, their father called Albert the dog “Dog” anyway, so this adds credibility to the mental defect idea and targets their father’s side as to how it got into the Twins. 

I already told you that I would go to Frank, the union man for help.  Frank would fix me up with a sign saying that Ike was unfair to workers and have me march with it up and down in front of their house.  This picketing didn’t go over very well with Ann, the Twins’ mother.  Actually she was mortified to have a picket in front of her house, even if the picket was only four feet high.  Now this next part isn’t from my notes either, since I already told you that I wasn’t taking notes at his time, but I think it’s as accurate as I can get it (later on when I have my notes to consult I’ll give you accurate quotes).  Ann said something like old Albert (the Democrat) would roll over in his grave if he knew that his daughter’s house was being picked for unfair treatment of workers and she wouldn’t have the neighbors seeing such a sight as long as she was alive, and so on.  I felt, even at my age, that she might have overreacted–but then maybe the mental problems came from her side.  Well, the end of all of this was that she banned all political play and decided that a good outlet for the Twins’ energy would be hiking.  I was invited to go along so the Twins would have someone else to play with besides each other. 

You probably aren’t surprised to learn that the whole thing turned out badly.  All the way up and down the trail Ike kept talking about how many board feet of lumber the trees would produce at what profit and so on, while Frank argued that the whole area should be set aside for a state park.  As they bickered between themselves during the hike I guess that Ann decided that she had only been embarrassed not mortified by the picketing and let them go back to politics. 

This brings up something I always wondered.  How much does a person have to be embarrassed to have it move on to the next higher level, which is mortification, and is there a word for an even higher level of embarrassment beyond mortification?  I suppose that the phrase “to death” could be added to mortification, used such that “she was mortified to death” is the next higher level.  There’s some precedent for such usage since people add “to death” to “scared” to distinguish just plain scared from the next higher level of fright.  Most people that use “scared to death” don’t actually mean the afflicted person actually died, and I never knew anyone that was “mortified to death,” but I’m sure that I saw it once happen to a cat. 

This cat belonged to a neighbor and she (the cat) was the prissiest cat I ever saw.  She wouldn’t eat out of the food dish with the other cats, but insisted on having her own dish which had to be a fancy one with roses on it or she wouldn’t eat.  She never sat on the lap of anyone unless they were dressed in Sunday clothes, and she never palled around with the other cats.  Now, I wouldn’t tell the rest of this story if the cat had been involved in a farm accident or something to do with a grain unloading accident, but since she wasn’t, I’ll continue.  One day we were coming home from church all dressed up in our Sunday best and since we went to the same church as the neighbors that owned the cat, we were invited in to visit.  When their cat would enter a room, it would walk around with its tail and nose in the air checking out the people to see if they were good enough to stay around.  She didn’t think that our clothes were up to her high standards because she turned her back and proceeded to jump up on the top of the upright piano, where she could lay down and ignore us.  I guess our neighbor’s aunt didn’t first consult with the cat before she decided to wax the top of the piano, as the waxing caught the cat by surprise.  She skidded across the top of the piano flying into the clothes tree standing at the other side.  I have to give the cat credit for trying to hold onto the clothes tree, but down she came and landed stunned on the floor, with a cap stuck on her head.  We were laughing so hard that the tears were running down our cheeks.  Our neighbor couldn’t even breath he was laughing so hard, but just made little snorting noises out of his nose.  It was very close to a true silent laugh, which is similar to the silent bark Fifi made just before her unfortunate accident, except Fifi wasn’t laughing.  Well, the cat looked at all of us laughing at her then dropped stone dead without as much as one word (or meow, in her case). 

My neighbor maintains to this day that the cat wouldn’t have died if the cap that fell on her head hadn’t said “Bill’s Bar.”  I guess he thought that the use of the common name “Bill” instead of the more formal “William” pushed her over the edge.  Well anyway, I need to get back to the story of the Twins, but I thought that you would like to know that it is possible to be “mortified to death.”  If you know of such a thing involving a person I’d like to hear about it. You can contact me through the publisher of this book.  I’d like to continue with this chapter, but the “new compact sized” Alice is sitting on my lap which reminds there is more to life than telling our story---so---I’ll take a break and start the next chapter tomorrow. 

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