Lies

My husband lies to our children. Truthfully, lies may be too strong of a word, but he tells these little untruths constantly just to annoy them, and mostly they just annoy me. He tells them things like he was on the Titanic, or he learned to drive a car when he was 4, or that he was in high school when he was 8...weird things. And its all the time, and they are constantly coming to me to verify everything he says. The latest is that now that Barack Obama is going to be President we can only eat out once a week (pretty much anything that would cost money he tells them we can no longer do because Mommy voted for Obama). That's a fun one. Anyway, it brought to mind two untruths that I was told as a child (one by my Dad, one by my Grandfather) that have stuck with me, and turned out to be pretty good memories.

On a trip through the mountains one time, my Dad told me and my sister that the "Watch for Falling Rocks" signs were for an Indian Boy named Falling Rocks that was lost, and his tribe was looking for him. It kept us busy, and we swore that we saw him more than once. Now I always gave my Dad great props for being so creative with this one, until I heard a someone call in on a radio show with this same story. I even tried it on Sam once, and he just said "whatever" and went back to his Nintendo DS. Oh well!

The story from my Grandfather still makes me wonder what was wrong with us that we fell for this. My grandparents had a cellar at their house that we like to go into, but it was really creepy, so we wanted an adult to go with us. It was a real cellar, all dark and damp and dusty, not a walk-out basement like they have today. Even the lure of this fancy-smancy dollhouse that was down there couldn't get me to go. Anyway, my Grandpa was an archer and he kept his bow and arrows down in the cellar, with some boxes set up to practice shooting at. Oh, how we loved to do this, but we had to have his help, which he wasn't always too keen on, which resulted in us bugging the crap out of him until he agreed to go down and let us shoot. So he concocted this story about a mean lady named Mrs. Furnace (yeah I know) that lived in this little room in the cellar, and she hated kids and noise. To this day I have no idea what was in that room, I assume is was the mechanicals of the house (i.e the furnace, duh!). Hence when the furnace kicked on it made this incredible noise that we thought was the mythical Mrs. Furnace and we would hightail it up the stairs, putting to rest his obligation to help us with the bow and arrows.

My memory may have edited out my Mom getting annoyed by us insisting that we go back because we saw the Indian Boy, or my Grandmother getting annoyed by us running and screaming up the cellar stairs, so maybe my boys can edit out my annoyance when they tell their kids some of the memories that they are making by their father's "lies".