Thursday, December 13, 2007

brotherhood of the traveling pants

For several years my father and a friend of his exchanged the same tie rack as a gift. they would disguise it in various forms to delude the recipient into believing that this time it would be something else. If memory serves, this included baking the rack into a loaf of bread.
It was a hoot.
Eventually, even my father and his buddy got bored with this game. I am sometimes disturbed to find myself daydreaming of similar ways to torture those closest to me. What is this tendency?
I don't know, but I doubt that anyone has taken the tendency to a greater extreme than these guys.

I think I linked to this from my old blog, but I think it merits perennial mention.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The family of an ex-girlfriend of mine did that with a waffle iron. Every year for Christmas one of them would give it to another of them.

One year, the gave it to me. Then we broke up (I won't say the two are unrelated.) So I never got to give it back to anybody, and I probably ruined all of their future Christmases.

'sokay though, I used it as a percussion instrument. Sounded like ass. Awesome.

czeltic girl said...

My brother and dad used to pass a little plastic panda magnet back and forth. It was a terrible little piece of crap, probably gotten in some gumball machine during our childhood. You kind of had to squint to make it look like a panda's face.

We had visitation at Dad's every other weekend, and sometime between Friday and Sunday, the panda would find its way either into Dad's house or somewhere into my brother's stuff to take home. This went on for years.

Twenty years later, I notice the panda magnet on the fridge at my mom's house. My brother lived at home into his 20s. Dad must have gotten it into his stuff on my brother's last weekend visit and it's been at Mom's ever since. Poor Mom. She got dragged into this by mistake.

I keep thinking it'd be nice if that stupid panda randomly appeared at Dad's new place some time. He certainly won't be expecting it.