Many many moons ago, there was the annual December Birthday Club party (we unwrap a present we got ourselves and sing Happy Birthday To Us) where Virginia, who always got something funny, gave herself a hand mirror.
Only, when you picked it up it activated two things: a light sensor and a laugh track. (This is the closest I could find to it.)
Put it down flat, it’s silent. Pick it up to check out that wisp of hair out of place and it guffaws at your vanity. Loudly. Busted.
It was hilarious and I had to know where she’d gotten it. Alright then. So I ran down there and bought one for my dad for Christmas, because there was no one who could laugh like my dad.
How to ship it across the country, though, between the glass and the electronics.
An arriving package solved that problem: it was full of those (hated) styrofoam peanuts.
I took a plastic grocery store bag and filled it full of those peanuts and slipped the box inside and tied the top, then put that inside a larger box with other stuff for the folks with the bag safe at the center of it all.
I got comments from my folks Christmas day about how that was such a good use of those peanuts: they didn’t go flying all over the room when they opened the box, they cushioned everything while at the same time they were contained. Nice. They talked about the other stuff we’d gotten them.
But what about…? I had to know and finally asked, That bag. Did you look inside it?!
No, why would we?
Dad…
It had been tossed. It got retrieved.
And that is how I later got told that Mom and Dad threw a party and Dad snuck that mirror onto the long low (mid-century modern and all that) side cabinet to see who it would catch. Which of course it did. Thankfully the victim had a great sense of humor, and the friends of my parents I knew growing up all found out where that had come from. Busted right back.
Virginia loved that story.
And I mention all this because I got my Aftober Prize of No Particular Worth ™ from Afton today: the ever-changing annual item in celebration of having finished a project in October that everybody in our online knitting group looks forward to every year.
I opened the envelope and went oh that’s cool, I like that. Put it down and walked out of the room.
A few minutes later I walked back–and spotted what was now half-hidden in the rug. Oh wow, look at that!
I’m not going to describe it because others haven’t gotten theirs yet, but, it had been well packaged and hiding inside that envelope and then flipped out without my seeing. I almost never knew it was there.
And I laughed and laughed and missed my dad and thought of my mom (I can just picture her going Oh you didn’t at Dad when she heard that laugh track going) and of Virginia too, gone about 25 years now. Look what she started.
Thank you, Afton!