Pranksters

I am participating in #SOL22. This is Day 17, St. Patrick’s Day. Thanks for providing the space to write, share, and grow.

My Uncle Herman and Uncle Nick were really my great uncles. I didn’t know them very well because they both decided to move to sunny California when they were in their early twenties, marry, and have families out there. We never got to know our cousins, and my only memory of Uncle Nick was the time he came east to visit his mother, my nana.

Uncle Nick was an amateur magician and had loved to work magic his entire life. He was a trickster and could make playing cards leap into his hand and coins disappear and reappear. He was a very big man, maybe six feet five inches, or maybe he just seemed to be so tall because I was only nine at the time, and my great aunt Elda and my nana were about five feet tall. Anyway, he had shocking white hair like my uncle Earl and a hearty laugh that seemed to bounce off the ling room walls in waves like an echo.

My grandmother told us bedtime stories about growing up on Lehigh Street with her sister Elda and her two older brothers. There had been four older brothers, but Nana’s first children, the twins Archibald and Marshall, had died as infants from what people were calling “summer sickness.”  Anyway, Nick and Herman were a handful of trouble! 

One time, Grandma and her sister were walking home on a beautiful fall evening, a few days before Halloween. When they approached the house, they heard low moans and what sounded like chains rattling. They tried to scream but nothing came out – they were that scared. On legs that felt like wobbly noodles, they finally made it onto the porch and banged on the door. By the time Nana got to the door and opened it, they had collapsed in a heap, whimpering and sobbing. And who emerged from the pile of leaves in the gutter? Why, Uncle Herman and Uncle Nick, of course!

Then there was the time the girls went up to bed after dinner (they shared a room) and discovered their bedroom door was gone. The boys had unhinged their door from the door frame and hid it. But where?  The girls searched the entire house. No door. Finally, they told their parents, and even though Nick and Herman swore they had nothing to do with the prank, no one believed them. They were grounded for two whole weeks when my great-grandfather finally found the door propped up behind the garage.

It must have been exciting living with those two boys. I often regret not having a brother. My grandma assured me that I was lucky to have two sisters instead!