Flashback Friday: Legend of the leg lamp. I mean fish.

I haven’t done Flashback Friday in a while.  What can I say, I have an infant and a toddler, so going to the bathroom without anyone with me is hard, let alone keeping up my blog.

This weeks post is by Lois, from My Cruise Stories, AKA, my mom.  I was supposed to put it up for Christmas, but I didn’t have the time…. P.S. A while back, I wrote a post featuring the very same fish.

The Perfect Christmas Tree Ornament

I found the perfect Christmas tree ornament for Sheri this year.  OK, it’s not a leg lamp, but close.  In case anyone wonders why a leg lamp would make a great ornament, I’ll have to go back in history a bit to the point where this story begins.

 

It all started one dark foggy morning driving across the trestle on my way to work.  The trestle is a raised road passing over a couple miles of floodlands and sloughs (slow moving waterways).  Everything seemed fine until I spotted a dark car with no lights stopped dead in the road ahead.  Just ahead, in the dark and the fog by the time I saw this car I could not stop in time to avoid hitting it.  Luckily this road has two lanes.  However the car in the other lane prevented me from moving straight over.

 

I hit the brakes and hoped the other car would hurry up and get by.  At the last minute I dived over to the other lane. I just about made it, but the front corner of my pick-up truck barely clipped the mirror hanging out of the side of the car.  Not hard enough to break it off or anything, but it did leave a little dent in my truck.

 

After driving past the dark dead car, I saw some cops stopped in front of it.  Not right in front of it where their lights would have showed through the fog, but close enough to know it was why they were there.  Knowing the law frowns upon those who leave the scene of an accident, I pulled back over to the other lane after I got around them and stopped.

 

Busy apprehending car thieves, the cops pretty much just said go away, we don’t care when I tried to tell them I had hit the mirror on that car.  Perhaps they realized they should have parked behind it where people would see their lights and not hit the car and didn’t want to get in trouble for their negligence.  Or else they were just busy and didn’t want to be bothered.  Either way, I went on.

 

About this time my husband proudly came home from the taxidermist with a giant salmon ready to mount on the wall.  I thought it should go downstairs in his office where nobody else would have to look at it.  He thought it should go in the living room where everyone could see it.  We pretty much agreed he wouldn’t say anything about the dent in the truck if I wouldn’t say anything about the fish on the living room wall, which he hung opposite the front window.

Sheri hated the fish.  In spite of the fact that her dad always insisted people couldn’t see it from the road, when she had a substitute school bus driver and tried to explain where to stop, the driver piped up with “Oh, the house with the fish.”

 

Over the years, we took in a few strays.  Never official foster kids, just people who needed a place to stay for awhile.  Relatives or kids from the 4-H club.  One of the 4-H kids was Maria, whom I mentioned briefly in one of myblogs.

 

Around Christmastime, Maria started comparing the fish to the leg lamp in the move A Christmas Story.  Problem was, none of us had ever seen it.  I don’t think we had actually ever even heard of it.  One day Maria rented the movie and the kids and I watched it with her, anxiously waiting for a leg lamp to appear and laughing hilariously while comparing it to the fish when it did.

Maria moved on, but it became a family tradition to watch A Christmas Story every year.  One year Sheri’s dad even watched it with us.  When the father on the movie put his new leg lamp in the window, her dad looked at the rest of us quite seriously and said, ”Don’t even compare that to my fish.”

 

At which we all burst out laughing, having compared that leg lamp to his fish for years.

 

While out shopping for Christmas gifts this year, I looked at some Christmas tree ornaments.  There, dangling from a peg in between Sponge Bob and the Grinch, hung a row of little boys in glasses wearing pink bunny suits.  Ralphie, the main character of A Christmas Story in the much-hated fluffy pink bunny suit his aunt made him for Christmas. One of those had Sheri’s name written all over it.

If you don’t know what a leg lamp is, or find yourself wondering what this blog is about, just watch A Christmas Story. Everything will come to light.

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Why straight men shouldn’t be allowed to decorate

My Dad has always been into fishing.  Well, as long as I can remember anyway.  I used to love going fishing with my Dad.  We’d wake up at some un-Godly hour in the morning, get some donuts from the Red Barn, and then be on our way.  I’d sleep in the bow of the boat until a more reasonable hour, then wake up and eat some donuts and go fishing.  Good times.

The fish (but it used to be on a different wall, it got booted in favour of the new fish)

Anyway, fishing was good.  Until the day Dad brought home the fish. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem, men put them in their offices, den’s, man cave’s, garages, or what have you.  But not my Dad. Nope, my Dad put the fish, the giant stuffed, mounted ugly fish, on the wall in our living room.  Not just any wall.  He put it on the one wall that you can clearly see through the giant bay window that faces the road.

My family always compared the fish to the leg lamp from ‘A Christmas Story.  If you haven’t seen that movie, go out and watch it, it’s pretty funny.  My Dad always hated the comparison and as soon as he saw us watching the movie, annoyingly stated “don’t you compare that lamp to my fish!!”  Haha, that was the whole reason we started watching the movie.  Someone suggested it to us because of the lamp.  Makes me giggle just thinking about it…

When I was in high school, I was on the track team.  Not that I like running, I hate it.  I was a pole vaulter.  Anyway, they had special activity buses to take the people who had to stay after school for some reason home.  They usually took a long time, since there weren’t very many, and had to cover a wide area, but they did the job.  When you get on, the bus driver asks where you live.  “Oh, you mean the house with the fish?”  The driver asked me.  Oh. My. Gosh.  Everyone on the bus was looking at me, wondering what the fish is.  If only there was a hole I could crawl into….

But it doesn’t stop there.  Before the fish, Dad put up some nice landscape photos that he took and framed.  They looked quite

the second fish (where the first one was), the landscapes, and a chinese artwork

nice.  It was good to have something on the walls instead of  just the plain, white, boring paint.  But then the fish came.  The fish doesn’t match the photos.  In fact, it looked pretty silly (my Dad is going to kill me for writing this…not literally, no one call the police please).

Native American art plus the magazine covers

Slowly, he kept adding other things to the walls.  A framed magazine cover (under some native American artworks, neither of which went at all with the original landscape photos), some sort of bow and arrow, a cluster of random photos and paintings that neither match each other, nor anything else in the room.  He added another fish.

Recently, Dad started going to China for business on a fairly regular basis.  He brought home some hanging Chinese artworks and added those to the wall as well.  Looking around the living room, it’s kind of like my eyes are being assaulted with decoration overload.  What do I look at?  Why does none of it match?  What is that thing?  AARRRGGGHHH!

my parents room

My parents re-did (well, did, it was never actually finished in the first place) the bathroom downstairs.  My mom suggested a theme for the bathroom: Lighthouses.  It looks fantastic!  Everything matches, it’s cute, it’s interesting, it’s pleasing to the eye.  But then there’s the pink flamingo.  Everything matches apart from that.  Guess who put that there?  Yeah, my Dad.

And this, ladies and gentleman, is why straight men should not be allowed to decorate:  They have no idea.  I’m sure they think it looks good, but really, it doesn’t.  Sigh, my Dad is not going to like reading this (but I hope you did!).  I hope he doesn’t die of embarrassment.

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