COLUMN: Quirkiness tops the charts

Most families have certain quirks, most families are weird, but I think mine tops the charts. The funny thing is that when I was living at home with my family, I did not really give their eccentricities a second thought. It was what I had grown up with; it was all I knew. Plus, I was (and still am) a strong contributing factor to the overall peculiarity that my family champions. If you think I am exaggerating, if you think that my family cannot possibly be as unconventional as yours, read on and be convinced.
    A phone call between me and my sister:
    “Can you get your foot to touch your mouth?” she asks.
    I try.
    “Nope,” I say.
    “Then it’s 50/50,” she announces.
    “What’s 50/50?” I ask.
    “Of all the people I have surveyed, 50 percent can put their foot into their mouth,” she replies.
    “Wow! How many people have you asked?” I ask.
    “Four,” she says.
    “Hm. Well, I wouldn’t go publishing this statistical discovery until you have tested more subjects,” I reply wisely.
    That’s how most of our communication runs. Randomly. But directly down to business. No chit-chat, no superficial inquiries, we cut to the meat of the chase. My mom likes to share good quotes that she reads. Most of them come from the current book that she keeps on the toilet in the bathroom. Unbelievable amounts of literature have been read in my household on the toilet. Sometimes we become distracted for hours. For a brief stint, my mom kept a joke book on the toilet. That promoted amusing phone sharings.
    Yet, all mothers, when triggered, can transform into scary, fear-instilling creatures from the black lagoon. My mother is no exception. Two instances come quite vividly and clearly into my mind. I do not think I have ever seen my mother so upset as the two times I caused her to say the swear word that she only uses when she is utterly outraged.
    I cannot bring myself to say, or write, this word because of the painful associations I have  with it, but I can promise that if you heard it, you would laugh, because it is normally used in a harmless, commonplace noun sort of way. It shares the name with a cold cereal. But in my family, it is the lowest, degrading language that anyone could ever possibly speak. I know you are curious, so I will tell you that it rhymes with “luit froop.”
    Whew. Now that that is taken care of, I will whet your burning curiosities and share the experiences that provoked my mother to use such a foul insult toward me.
    Experience number one: My mother and I were playing a card game, Skip-Bo to be exact, and I placed a card onto a pile that she wanted to use. It was a horrible thing for me to do. It didn’t help me advance my own cards in any way, I only did it to prevent her from playing her card. It was spiteful and mean, and it triggered the abominable word.
    “Fr**t L**p!” spewed my mother’s lips, causing me to forlornly shrink into my chair.
    Let me give you some background information so that you can fully realize the suffocating gravity of this situation. My family is notoriously competitive, and my mother can especially become passionately outraged in the moment of a game, especially in a card game, and especially if another person has disrupted her long chain of strategic thought in a card game. It has gotten so bad that we limit her participation of Rook and Skip-Bo to her birthday and Mother’s Day.
    Experience number two: I dropped a can of green beans onto my mother’s bare foot. As I, in slow motion, watched the can fall to the big toe, I remember thinking inside my head that no good could come from this. No good. Contact occurred. I winced. My mother added an extra biting word to her bitter, coined phrase.
    “National *ruit *oop!” my mother blurted. National. Not only was I a F**** L***, I was a National F-L. I was an NFL. Shudder.
    The screwy stories are endless, my readers, but I do not want to end on a sour note, so I will tell one last pithy, lighthearted familial tale.
    We have a swing set in our backyard for my one and only nephew, and every time he rides on a certain, specific swing, he decides to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” We took the pink, rubber tip off of a badminton birdie, glued it to the swing, and officially dubbed it Rudolph. Honestly. Who does that? Us.

Melissa Condie is a junior majoring in music education. Comments can be sent to m.condie@aggiemail.usu.edu.