The great thing about family reunions is once again hearing all the stories that every member of the family knows by heart. No, not inspirational stories like how grandpa whittled his own false teeth using wood from the old oak down by the creek. Instead it's stuff like "when your mom was young, she used to eat chicken poop." Apparently, she suffered from a nitrogen deficiency.
Invariably, being the youngest and hands-down cutest of the family, I naturally star in the bulk of the remember-when stories. Christmas proved to be especially fertile ground from which the crop of family legend grew.
There was the Christmas when I was three or four, and mom gave me a rosary to keep me occupied. For those of you who are Catholicism-challenged, a rosary is a prayer device resembling a necklace, but with distinct groupings of beads. Each grouping indicates which prayers are to be said and when. It's kind of a holy abacus. From one point on the rosary, there is a five inch or so string of beads with a crucifix (a representation of Jesus on the cross) on the end.
According to an eye-witness account from my sister Sharon, it started slowly with me swinging the rosary from side to side. Soon there was hip action involved. The next thing anyone knew, I was full-on dancing, twirling the rosary over my head like a lasso, and yelling "hang on Jesus; you're going for a ride!" It was the first time in Sacred Heart church history that midnight mass was followed by an exorcism.
The Christmas that will forever hold the most notoriety in the annals of family lore would be the infamous Chex mix incident. This would be the first recorded incidence of the profound affect that garlic has on my particular G.I. tract.
Mom had put together an especially tasty presentation of Chex mix, laden with butter and garlic. I had no way of knowing then, as I do now, that the warning claxon of impending olfactory assault was the now all-too-familiar bloat in the lower intestine area. If I had, I may have spared us all and went to the morning mass.
At midnight mass, I sat next to my brother, and hero, Marty. He was seven years older than me. I was about eleven or twelve at the time, and I idolized him. I liked what he liked because he liked it. Had he known the next hour and a half or so would be his reward, I'm sure he would have been a lot meaner to me growing up. It started innocently enough.
Uuuuurrrppp. Phweeeeww!
"Geez, Billy, did you fart?" Marty asked.
"Nope. That was a burp." I sheepishly replied.
"Good Lord!" he exclaimed.
With each subsequent, irrepressible expulsion, the invisible cloud of putrefied air wafted slowly down the line of alternately sickened and disbelieving family members and those parishioners unfortunate enough to be within a five foot radius of my festering pie hole. This was definitely a case of what would later come to be known as the zactlies. Your mouth smells zactly like your arse. Add to this the fact that the neighbor girl blew chow five rows in front of us, and you have one stinky situation. Whether this was a coincidence or an unfortunate byproduct of my foulness may never be known.
Unmercifully, the typical midnight mass at our church was standing room only (the Catholics take that be fruitful and multiply thing very seriously) and had duration of a typical Godfather movie. It got to the point that all anyone could do was laugh and start planning the retelling of this incident at every future family gathering.
Of course, there are other incidents of Bill-lore that also receive play. One of my favorites is the great broke-a-necklace-stuffed-beads-up-his-nose-when-the-family-doctor's-daughter-had-the-lead-in-the-school-play-and-he-had-to-leave-in-the-middle-of-it incident. Then again, there is the equally entertaining "who-dat?"-scared-by-his-own-fart-when-he-was-two story.
However, I feel the two Christmas stories truly define my essence: cute and stinky.