Our family is full of great sayings: that and a nickel gets you a cup of coffee: Get ready – hold your teeth: Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.
After my airplane stopped at the debark gate, an announcement told there’d be a delay in deplaning. So, I relaxed and glanced out the window. What is that? I thought as I stared out at a pilot walking on the tarmac, wearing sunglasses, carrying a briefcase in one hand and a leash in the other. One might think, so what, but the dog he walked was a Seeing Eye dog in a harness. Is that my pilot? A result of job discrimination? I panicked, then realized we had landed safely, the flight was over and I was on the ground. The dog? Perhaps, another passenger’s and the pilot was helping out?
I thought our friend Larry approached my husband and me as we strolled through the boat show. But, the FL show was far from our home in NJ. I swore it was Larry. My husband said, “No.” As the man neared, I put out my arms, ran up to him and said, “Hi, Larry.” The man backed away. It wasn’t Larry. However, it was Larry’s brother.
Yes, my husband flashed me that look and I flashed it back. Earlier that week, he’d finished up a construction project in a local dance club. He came home to tell me about the beautiful girls rehearsing their act for that evening. I wondered what he looked like when they told him the beautiful women were men in drag, female impersonators.
A very long day of travel brought me to my bed in the southern Tuscan mountains of Italy. I had opened the windows that night to let in the cooling air and, in the morning, I woke weary, wondering about the time. As I lay in bed, I heard the clock chime out the hour. I counted the cuckoos. When I go to cuckoo number fourteen, I knew something was amiss. At breakfast, I asked the innkeeper about the clock. “No clock, lady. Youa hear local cuckoo birds.”
A man walked into our local restaurant with 5 women and 10 children. The staff quickly rearranged the tables to accommodate the group. The man sat in the middle, the women clustered around him and the children sat at the ends. This is a resort town and I figured, leave it be, until I noticed all the women looked similar in body shape and coloring. He likes medium builds, dark hair, I thought. I eves-dropped on their conversations. All the children called the man father. Oops!
As I got up to leave, curiosity got the better of me. I paused and said to one of the women, “What well behaved children.” She smiled. Then I asked, “Are you all one big family?”
“Yes, we are,” was the reply. Well, I’ll be dipped, I thought.
Saturday night, the same group came into another restaurant as we sat waiting for meals. I whispered to my friends about my previous encounter with the man, his women and children. They stared at the group. “Heard about them,” one friend said, “but never seen them.”
The next morning, I received a phone call that woke my Sunday morning sleep-in. My friend from the night before whispered, “Guess what. I’m in church. The father from the restaurant just served mass. That’s why they all called him father. He’s here visiting with his cousins, the women, because he’d been invited to serve the mass.”
What you see is what you get. But, what you get might not be what you saw.