My Special Family

[Angela]

I had an uncle who told me that the points of light in the night sky are just pinpricks in a giant dome, and angels fly around on the other side, holding candles to make the stars.  He bounced me on his knee and gave me candy, and all his ex-wives loved him, or so everyone said.  There was a small dent of a scar on his left cheek which my father said he got running with a stick in his hand when he was a child.  My grandmother claimed a young woman’s husband shot him with an old cap and ball pistol left over from the Civil War.  My uncle called it a kiss target, but my other uncle is a doctor, and he said it was just left over after he cut out an old ugly mole.  I think they are all liars, but that is what makes my family special.

[Ali Znaidi]

Splendid 6S.

[Jadie Jones]

fantastic. it's like i tell my husband: it's not that my family's not crazy TOO, but they're my kind of crazy. Favorited.

[Toby Tucker Hecht]

Each family is special in just this way.  I love when every member of a family interprets an incident differently. 

[Mike Handley]

Great subject and execution, milady. Faved.

[Teresa]

The uncle sounds like my kind of uncle.  I didn't grow up around anyone magically clever or verbally imaginative.  Very nice.  I think people forget too many critical details of events.  Maybe there was a stick accident, and maybe there was an old cap and ball pistol shooting, and maybe there was an ugly mole removed.  But from where people stand to remember, they can't see the whole face, not where the stick/pistol/mole removal really happened.  The landscape melts in their Jell-o minds, and what's most disturbing is that they don't fear this or question their memories.  This is why I keep a journal.  I don't forget.  Not by an inch.  Maybe a millimeter or so but...

[Robert Crisman]

The thing is, they all sound plausible, though I have a sneaking suspicion that Uncle Doc is actually telling the truth.  

[Stephen Torelli]

Folklore, true or not is special. Terrific tale, Angela.

[Jeanette Cheezum]

I miss all the gatherings of family. Everyone is too busy...sad. The stories were wonderful and as a child and I believed everyone of them.

[Gita]

Belief is a strange thing.  One person's lie  is another's bedrock conviction. Is it any more preposterous to say that angels create the light for stars behind a black dome than to say an angel impregnated a virgin and out came the son of a god?  Your grandmother, if I had to guess, is the most credible sounding. I mean, who would make up a cap-and-ball story out of thin air?

[Bill Floyd]

Family mythologies are what gives us our histories, and embellishment is seemingly inevitable.  Although the truth is probably just as twisted and interesting.  Succinct take on a dicey subject.