My Sister's Wit.

I couldn’t understand the anything the preacher said at church last week, the Liberian English was just too thick as it often is when the preacher’s here get excited. So my mind started to wonder and rested on one of my sisters, Michelle. Which means I smiled and chuckled to myself throughout the rest of the service. Michelle may not have been born a comedian but she certainly, perfected the dead pan comedic timing over the years.  She studied hard under my Dad and our older brother, I can remember the painful attempts at humor when she was five years old, we did not “humor” her efforts and so she quickly learned what was funny and what was annoying and became the mastermind she is today. But still I can hear her telling her favorite joke “Why did the Skelton cross the road? Because it was being chased by a dog!” Five year old Michelle cracked herself up with that one. Here are some of the stories that made me smile and make odd noises trying to squelch my giggles.

 

Michelle’s Birth

The earliest memory I have pertaining to Michelle was the night of her birth. So it’s not really about her but she caused the incident. I was 4 ½ years old when Michelle was born and somehow in the process I was dropped off at my Grandparents house during her birth, that is all blur now but I distinctly remember falling asleep alone in the center of a giant bed at my grandparents and waking up horrified to find a giant person in the bed with me. It turned out to be my great-grandmother, who complained all the next day of little Vickie hogging the bed. She didn’t live there at the time so don’t really know how she got there in the middle of the night either other than that it was the power of Michelle’s personality causing humors awkward incidents as she came into the world.

Ears

Baby Michelle had a thing for ears. Didn’t matter who you were, if you held baby Michelle she would reach up and stroke your ear lobe while she sucked her thumb and took a nap. This caused many awkward situations when introducing baby Michelle to new friends.

Play place

We were home school hippies. We ate homemade bread with home ground grains, I don’t remember eating out that much unless we were with our Grands until we were much older. Therefore I remember Michelle’s first romp in a CFA playhouse. She may have been 2 or 3 and she excitedly went scampering to the top of the slow incline foam ladder ramp, and then promptly fell all the way down it. I just remember her turning into a flailing ball and seeing head, butt, head, butt all the way to the bottom. Granny and I both busted out laughing as we watched through the window. Granny and I both have that fault of laughing when people fall… ungracious, I know. She was fine, didn’t even appear to notice the playhouse rejection.

 

Will You Open This? No.

There were not seatbelt law yet… or maybe we just didn’t abide them. But often we scrambled around in the back of the minivan on our trips around Georgia. On the way back from the grocery store Michelle had a package she couldn’t open herself. She went to each person in the car (Mom, Dad, Clay and Myself) shouting “Can you open this!” We all answered “No!” in turn so she continued around the circle until Mom stomped the breaks and all we saw were her feet straight up in the air. Did I mention I have a fault about laughing when people fall down?

 

Best Friends

Michelle not only never met a stranger when she was a kids, she never met anyone who wasn’t her best friend either. She’d come running over pulling a kid by the hand and exclaim “this is my best friend!” turning to smiling new comrade, “hey what is your name?” New comrade, “Mary.” “This is my best friend Mary!”

 

Bicycle Trick

When we moved to “the city,” which was actually a close knit subdivision, we no longer had property, creeks, and wildlife to entertain us so we resorted to amusing ourselves in other ways. One was a bike trick Michelle came up with, in which I road on the peddles, Rebecca stood on the pegs, and Michelle drooped her legs and arms over the handle bars with her butt hanging just over the tire. The older she got the more difficult this trick became as her butt began dragging on the tire below. “Alright I can still do it! (ZZZIPPP!) Ouch! It’s okay I got this!”

 

The Linen Closet

At our new house in Jackson the hall was very narrow and at one point had the laundry room to one side and the linen closet at the other. This was probably a fire hazard but you couldn’t open both the doors at once and you couldn’t pass through the hall if either of the doors were open. The four of us kids were always in and out of the linen closet getting dish rags, towel, sheets etc. And we were perpetually leaving the door ajar to our mother’s great displeasure. Who would come through the hall lamenting the door being open again and slamming it shut. Michelle wasn’t tall enough to reach most of the shelves in it so would climb up on them. Multiple times Mom would come from behind the door angrily exclaiming “Who left this door open again!” and slam the door shut, pancaking Michelle between the door and the shelves. It would be quiet for a minute and then you’d hear a little “ouch” come from inside the closet, as she was thinking out her escape route. Mom always felt really bad after the incidents but sometimes because Michelle wasn’t loud about it she didn’t even know she’d squashed her in there, until she’d pass back by and Michelle would ask politely to be let out. 

 

Cleaning the Room

While both our parents were working (Mom had a part time Job) I often stayed at home with Michelle and Becca and made sure they did their chores and some school work. Michelle and Becca shared a room. Rebecca has always been the neatest person in the house. Her bed usually made with her animals arranged in order etc. Michelle’s bed was usually made too but that was because she didn’t want to unmake it so she slept on top of the made up bed with a small blanket or towel. While cleaning their room Michelle became convinced that the mess was primarily created by Rebecca (the neat one) but that she was always having to clean it up. Michelle taped a line down the center of the room and declared that half was her side and the other half Rebecca would have to keep clean herself. In a short time Rebecca’s side was spotless and Michelle had become distracted by some toys and hadn’t put anything away. Michelle realizing her error did not relent in her conviction that indeed the messes were due to Rebecca, gathered up all her toys and dumped them across the line in defiance.

 

The Shoes

We all got up and got ready for church like we always do on Sunday morning. Michelle took her shoes off the front porch and slipped them on and we headed to church. Right about the time we entered the front lobby of the church I began to smell a putrid smell but it wasn’t that strong so I went to Sunday school and forgot about it. Michelle was still in children’s Sunday school so she went down the opposite hall to her classroom. She sat next to the pastors’ son in class and was overcome by an awful smell. She didn’t want to embarrass him but she was sure the horrid smell was coming from him. So all through class she just held her breath and didn’t say a word. Finally Sunday school was over and Michelle and I met in the lobby like we normally did. I sat down next to Michelle on the sofa in the foyer and found myself overwhelmed by that putrid smell again only now it had worsened. “What is that smell?” I exclaimed. “I don’t know” Michelle said in wonder, “but it’s all over the church it was like this in my class”. Mom came into entrance hall and smelled it too. People coming in and out the front door were scrunching their nose in disgust and saying to each other “where’s that smell coming from?” Finally, and I’m not sure how but, my mother discovered it was Michelle’s shoes. My sister had left them on the porch where our male cat sprayed them, it was winter when this happened so she did not smell it when she put them on because they were cold, but as she walked about the church they heated up and the awful smell followed her where ever she went. Needless to say Michelle didn’t wear shoes the rest of the time at church that day. I can still remember the cute guy I had a crush on singing out loudly “it only smells on that side of the lobby” pointing in our general direction; Michelle and I still oblivious to the rancid shoes.

 

Biscuit Head!

As Michelle got older her comedy became less physical humor and more, funny sayings and quick humor. While walking the Dogs together she exclaimed that I was a “biscuit head!” for allowing our leads to cross. When I asked what on earth a biscuit head was she explained calmly it was “half human, half delectable goodness.”

 

Lim-rod

While cleaning the kitchen together (a job that was usually hers) I tried to put the ice cream scoop in the dishwasher she yelled, “That doesn’t go in there you.. (she paused as if searching to find the appropriate word to vent her fury)… you Lim-rod!”

 

I Have A Dream

Michelle came to me one day while I was on the computer in my room. She said she wanted to make two boxes of cupcakes and asked if she could just double the recipe on the back of the box and mix the two mixes together. I answered in the affirmative and after a few minutes (because we were home alone) I went to check on her baking progress. When I came into the kitchen she had just begun to stir the two mixes together which turned out to be one chocolate mix and one vanilla mix. I said, “Oh Michelle! I didn’t know you meant two different mixes!”

She glared at me for a second and then continued stirring them again while she proclaimed, “I have a dream! That my twelve little cupcakes…..”

 

Strength

Michelle was always small and cute but she was also strong and athletic. She played softball and had a pretty good arm. I was never the athletic one, I would always bring a book to her games or while she was practicing in the front yard. It’s not that I hated to play sports, it’s just that, I always ended up injuring myself or others and I also hate competition… yeah I guess I did always hate sports. She tried to get me to practice with her a few times but after I beamed her in the butt every time I struck the ball, (I had nearly a perfect batting average in high school PE but never made it to base because I always hit it straight at the pitcher) she gave up on that and bounced the ball off the house.

At a church youth event we both attended, I was standing with some boys watching their valiant attempts at throwing stones across this manmade lake. They were trying their hardest to land a stone on the ground at the other side of the lake and failing. Michelle came flouncing up behind us oblivious, “Hey what are y’all doing? Trying to hit that skinny tree there?” she said squinting across that water. The boy already knowing Michelle’s strength, mumbled some things under their breath, and kicked at a few pebbles as they looked at the ground. Michelle not noticing picked up the first stone at her feet, “Fun! I want to try!” And then succeeded in hitting the skinny tree on the other side of the lake on her first throw. She jumped back and said “Yay I got it!” expecting to be high-fived by someone. The boys just mopped off, while I smiled at her. “What?! What did I do?!”

If you wanted to flirt with Michelle playfully punching her on the arm was not something you should try, as the boys quickly learned. “Ouch why’d you do that? (Serious Punch back).

As we were standing in the church hall the youth pastor passed Michelle and hit her on the arm playfully as he passed. “What was that for!” Michelle exclaimed. “It was just a friendly hit,” replied the pastor in passing. Michelle then turned to me and said “this is just a friendly punch!” And then punched me straight in the face! My head went back and hit the wall! We couldn’t stop laughing after that one. She really didn’t mean to follow through with the motion, she just miss-judged.

I Was Just Doing This!

 

Standing during a homeschool Co-op meet, I was holding a glass of juice in a plastic cup. Michelle walks up punches the cup from the bottom sending it splattering everywhere. Me: “Michelle! What on earth are you doing!” Michelle “What?! I was just doing this.. (displays latest dance moves which include punching the air).

 

Bob

Growing up I had two imaginary friends and a fairy which was born from a bean pod I found in the woods. Those who have had imaginary friends know that they find you, you don’t find them. Michelle was jealous of my imaginary friends growing up so she fabricated two, Nicholas and his girlfriend Necklace. They were conspicuously only around when My imaginary friends came over to play. But Michelle shouldn’t have made all the fuss because eventually an imaginary friend did find her albeit a little late in the game. His name was Bob. He showed up around the start of Michelle’s middle school career. Bob was special, I couldn’t see him (obviously he was Michelle’s imaginary friend) but she said that Bob was a dwarf who had no arms and legs, was mute and spoke through sign language.  Bob often came with us to play tennis. (since they wanted me to continue playing tennis with them we never learned the rules to the game so we couldn’t be competitive and we ended the game whenever Michelle sent the last ball sailing over the high fence with her soft ball arm.) Bob always missed his set. Rebecca and I were always to one side, and Michelle and Bob on the other. Whenever the ball would go to his side, Michelle would yell to warn him “That’s yours Bob!” but he always missed. If we ever bemoaned Bob’s poor tennis skills Michelle would get really defensive of him and call us insensitive to his physical challenges. She would also send him down the court to retrieve tennis balls and we would sometimes wait 10 minutes for him before we’d get impatient and get them ourselves while Michelle stood back saying “No Guys! He was almost there! Now you made him feel bad…” One day inexplicably Bob went missing, for weeks Michelle kept asking if we had seen Bob, to which we always replied “He’s Invisible!” Michelle walked outside with me as I was preparing to drive to work, I opened up my car trunk and Michelle exclaimed suddenly “BOB! Vickie How could you!?”

Telepathy

Homeschooler become really tight with their siblings, often we would finish each other’s sentences. Sometimes we can just look at each other and know what the other was about to say. We had conversation like:

“Hey did you get that thingy?”

“Yeah I gave it to…”

“Oh yeah, what’s his face, right?”

“Right.”

Once we were watching our youth ministers 7 year old while he was preaching on an out of town trip. I said something vague to Michelle and she answered the question and the kid was baffled. “How did you know what she wanted?” Michelle answered nonchalantly “Because we can read each other’s mind.” The kid was like, “That’s not true!” To prove it Michelle and I then stared at each other and did random tasks as though the other had just commanded us to do it through our thoughts. We would exclaim, “Oh don’t say that!” after a long stare, and things of that nature. Blew that kid’s mind.

 

Secret Hand Shake

Michelle and I, also perfected our secret handshake. Not with each other, with other persons. It goes like this. Meet friend in public setting. “Hey do you want to learn my secret handshake?” Unsuspecting victim, “Sure.”

Begin to shake hands, then hold tight to the person’s hand as you phantom pulling away and begin shouting, “I don’t know you! Let go of me!”

Good times good times… (also a frequent Michelle quote)

 

Slap in the face

Whenever something almost fell over, or two people almost collided or some other disaster was narrowly avoided if Michelle was standing close to you she would always exclaim “That was a close one, Fhew!” while wiping her brow with the back of her hand and then smacking you in the face with the continued hand swipe. It made me laugh every time.

Aliens

Michelle was even humorous in her sleep. She often talked in her sleep but she never said anything about the weather or asked for pancakes, she always sat bolt upright in bed suddenly, stared at you with bleary eyes and began exclaiming “They are coming! They are coming!” If you ventured to ask who were coming? She would get annoyed and yell louder, “THEY ARE COMING.”

 

Social Life

Whenever people worried about those home school kids who have problems socializing… they were talking about me. But luckily Michelle came along to help me navigate the confusing public schoolers social rules. Before she entered the youth group I contented myself with climbing trees to spy on their weird ways unnoticed or read the Bible more during youth events. When she graduated up, we discussed the public schoolers huddles and tried to discover how your broke into them. It was truly perplexing, people walked up and sometimes the group opened to include them and sometimes they remained closed. We tried creeping around the outside of these huddles and that didn’t work. Eventually Michelle decided to take a bolder approach and got a running start. She ran right through the middle of them and to our surprise they opened up like a failed red rover and let her pass straight through before closing up again. She trotted up beside me… “Well that didn’t work.”

But that didn’t last too long for Michelle, by the end of that school year, I was standing by my popular young sister who had amassed an entire group of homeschool friends who were attending our church now due mainly because of Michelle’s influence. There was a large group all in a circle and Michelle was chattering and entertaining them suddenly she stopped noticing that a public schooler had intruded their group standing beside her. She said (sarcastically) “Hey you’re not a home schooler?!” And bumped him out of the circle. Sometimes things come full circle.

 

Movie Short

Michelle, Rebecca and I only attempted two movie shorts. The first was “Odd Anomalies of the Church.” We completed that one and still watch it from time to time. The other we never completed and we lost the tape but I still play it in my mind often. I wrote the outline of the skit and Michelle filled in everything else. We painted Rebecca completely green and put her in my big green sweat shirt. Michelle painted green around her eye and a green splotch the shape of Texas on her stomach. She then proceeded, in a melancholy tone, to the camera, to explain that her and her sister were half alien and half human and had recently been banned from their spaceship home because of something she did. She said, “My sister, ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ Narf Click Click, Is angry at me for getting us kicked out.” The rest of the skit whenever she talked to Becca’s character without cracking a smile Michelle would call out “ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ Narf Click click, please don’t be angry!”

 

The Stage

After Michelle and Becca moved with the parents up too Cincinnati I would come up on breaks to visit and Dad was continually improving the house or yard in some way. One break I came up and he had just installed a platform in the living room in which he was planning to install a wood burning stove on after the next pay check. As we all sat at dinner Michelle commented to Dad, “When are you going to finish building that stove?”

Dad answered sarcastically, “Who said anything about a stove?”

Michelle answered gesturing towards the platform, “Well what is that?! A home Stage?”

Dad answered simply, “Yes.”

Michelle turned Rebecca immediately, “Your puppets can go on tonight, I’ll do interpretive dance tomorrow night.”

 

As Big as My Face

It seemed for a while there people were saying that about everything “Wow That is as big as my face!” Especially when referring to food. Mom plopped a giant baked potato on Michelle’s plate, it was so huge it literally knocked all the other food on the plate off on to the table. Michelle gasped and exclaimed “It’s as big as! AS BIG AS!” She then stuck her face right down on top of it and said coolly, “Yup.”

 

It Bit my Toe!

Rebecca woke up with start, as she heard a sharp yell followed by the disruption of a table in the bathroom connected to the bedroom she and Michelle were sharing at our grandmother’s house for the holidays. She jumped out of bed anxiously and went to the bathroom door to knock, “Michelle, Michelle? Are you okay?” (More shuffling around). Rebecca a little more alarmed, “Michelle! Are you okay?” Michelle flung the door open dramatically, standing in her towel at the door she exclaimed, “It’s in there and it bit my toe!” I woke up when I heard the door creak as they opened up their bed room door beside the air mattress I was sleeping on in the living room. I rolled over and opened one eye to discover both sisters staring at me in an alarmed manner, Michelle in her towel, Rebecca with disheveled bed hair in her pajamas. Me: “What do you want?” Becca: “There’s a lizard in the shower.” Me: “What do you want me to do about it, there are two of you.”  They answered at once: Becca: “I can’t touch a lizard!” Michelle: “It bit my toe!” Michelle apparently saw the lizard in the shower and tried to shoo it into a cup with her foot. The lizard backlashed and latched on to her toe which startled Michelle into falling over backwards out of the shower and on to the furniture against the wall.

 

This was Michelle’s second incident involving a lizard bite. On a youth mission trip, Michelle had attempted to save a lizard who was becoming over heated under a plastic tarp at a worksite. When she got him untangled he thanked her by biting her thumb and then running away with a hunk of Michelle’s skin hanging in his mouth. Michelle was dubbed “Lizzy” the rest of the week.