Friday, January 23, 2015

The Elephant Caper

The Elephant Caper

My cousin Rocky loves Elephant Statues.  She has them all over her condo in Florida.

Barbara, my sister Regina and I were visiting Rocky and her husband last winter at their condo and remarked on the number of statues  she had scattered around the condo.  There were big ones, medium ones and small ones.  Probably about 10 of them.

An idea began to form about how we could improve their look and make them seem more natural.

I told my sister and Barbara about my idea and everyone agreed (thought it was funny, hysterical even).  Barbara said she wouldn’t participate, but my sister would.

Rocky and her husband left for New York.  We plotted.

Rocky called me about a month later and asked me to help out her neighbor.  It seems Rocky’s air conditioner wasn’t working and the neighbor was calling the repair service.  Could I go there and wait for the repairman so as not to tie up the neighbor.

I agreed and set up a time with the neighbor, who has Rocky’s key, since she didn’t trust me or my sister, and the repairman.

My sister and I got the key from the neighbor and waited for the repairman.  He came and fixed the unit.  We took this opportunity to make copies of Rocky’s key and to pick up some brown Play Doh.  We returned to the apartment.

We formed the brown Play Doh into circular shapes and placed them under the various elephant statues so as to make them appear as if the Elephants had performed a natural function.  They looked good.  Rocky’s neighbor came in and concurred with our assessment of our handiwork.  Now we had to wait for Rocky to return next winter.

During the interval, Rocky’s husband, Larry became progressively sick and eventually died.  This devastated Rocky and was very sad for everyone.  

The only redeeming thing was when Rocky fell into a coffin at the funeral home.  

She had gone to the funeral home with her son, daughter, grandson and my sister.  I had offered to go but they said they could handle it.  Rocky was in bad shape and my sister asked Rocky if she had eaten that day. She assured her she had, so my sister gave her a pill to calm her down.  Unfortunately, Rocky hadn’t actually eaten and the pill made Rocky unsteady.

She began leaning against the coffins in the coffin viewing room and slowly worked her way over to an open part of one of the coffins.  She leaned back and went over, head first into the coffin, with her legs up in the air.

Everyone laughed hysterically and finally pulled her out.  She stood up and said, “That wasn’t very comfortable in there.  I thought they were supposed to be padded”.  

Everyone agreed her husband had probably pushed her.  

The funeral director, while not amused, now had a great story to tell at the next funeral director’s convention. He should have discounted the cost of the funeral for that story.

I was in Connecticut when I got a text from my sister saying: “Your cousin fell into a coffin.”

How often in one’s life could you possibly get a text like that? I stared at the text in disbelief.  “Really” I texted back, hoping they were kidding. While unbelievable in some families, it had the ring of the possible in mine.

“Yes, really”, she replied.

Seeing some interesting possibilities, I texted back: “did anyone video it?”  

Unfortunately the answer was no, they were too busy laughing.

Time passed and it was now winter and time for Rocky to return to Florida.

She finally booked a flight to Florida and took her daughter and grandson along with her because she is terrified of flying.  She has been known to leave deep finger indentations in the arms of people who sit next to her on the plane.

They arrived and my sister met them at the condo.

Rocky walked in but didn’t notice the more natural look to the elephants at first. I called and instructed her grandson to make sure to video her reaction when she did notice.

A few minutes later my sister called me from Rocky’s house.  Regina was laughing so hard she couldn’t talk.  I heard loud yelling and cursing in the background.

Rocky grabbed the phone from my sister and starting cursing me in language I will not put down on paper.  Suffice it to say she has what used to be called a sailor’s vocabulary.

The more Rocky yelled, the more I laughed, which made her yell more.  It was really funny.  Everyone had been in on the joke except Rocky and she was mad about that too.

She finally hung up on me since she couldn’t get me to take her seriously.

Barbara and I went to see her the next day.  She took up yelling at me where she had left off the day before.  It was still funny.

Her grandson showed me the video of Rocky discovering my little prank.  Unfortunately the sound did not work on his video.  Still it was very funny, with Rocky literally jumping up and down while she was yelling on the phone with me the day before.  It was like watching a silent film comedy with the overly dramatic rages.

It kind of made up for the lack of video in the funeral parlor, but not quite.