In our family, you don’t do anything, start a conversation, play a game, make life altering decisions, unless it’s funny. The bigger the joke, the more epic the win. For Dad, if he could fool you, pull the wool over your eyes, even better.
The first time I experienced the full dimensional depth of his “game” came at my grandfather Les’ funeral. As it is at these times, family gathers together and the storytelling begins. Long held rivalries are explored and family secretes slip out. According to his contemporary female cousins, Les Blumstein had an airplane, yes an actual airplane, and was a bit of a cad. He would take dates out to an island, where he would mysteriously, run out of gas. Spare gas cans could only be boated out the next morning disastrously leaving him and his object du jour stranded. I was more than a little shocked to count the number of women who gave a nudge and a wink while whispering, “you too?” Then, I think it was one of the Fields’, who called out, “That was nothing! You should know what your Dad got up to!”
“What?” And stories started. Original 50’s hoodlum. Engine oil duckass hair, motorcycles, 7 cars in various states of repair parked around the block so his parents wouldn’t find out. Military school in his future, and past, and present… But the real eye opener was all the crime. Living in Philadelphia meant the New Jersey shore was an hour away if you had a fast car. Dad had dozens. Beer, cigarettes, and moonshine was also cheaper. Martin(?) detailed plans of how Dad would take a carload of … whatever and traffic it across state lines. He’d take dirt roads and drive hell bent for leather to loose pursuit. But that didn’t always work. Grandpa Les would get calls at some gawdawful time in the morning to come bail Dad out. More often than not, he’d tell the cops to, “Let him rot.” Not because he was angry, but that he was disappointed Dad got caught. Paying fines put a dent in Grandpa Les’ profits. I stood there spluttering as each misdemeanour and outright felony was uproariously shared and then bettered by relatives I only saw once every decade and barely knew. Now I knew it was to protect the guilty!
This could not be real! My dad? The straightest edge in the knife block! The absolute authoritarian who let none of us slide on anything? The time one of us was caught smoking, if we got a B in anything, army level inspection at any completed task…”Hey, Bob!” called out the cousin who started this info dump. Yep. There was Dad towering right behind me.
“But, but…you never let us get away with anything?!”
Dad, stood there with the biggest shit eating grin on his face and said,
“Gotch Ya!”
You’ve heard other people say when the kids leave home, we are going to move out and not tell them where we are going. Well, they did it. They actually did it. I had just landed in England in August. Nick and I were talking about Thanksgiving, Christmas and visiting home.
“You can’t”
“What? Why?”
“Your Mom and I don’t live there anymore.”
“What? Why? Where did you move to?”
“Not tellin'”
How much planning, the lengths they went through to keep it quiet in their circle of friends (who were all the parents of our friends because that’s how adult friendships work…) The manoeuvring and level of cunning deployed. Downright sneakiness. And they refused to tell any of us kids their new address for months.
“Gotch Ya!”
If you have your own Bob Blumstein Gotch Ya moment, please share in the comments.
2 Responses
My “gotcha” I might recognise in retrospect was at the end of what was probably our first trip to visit them in Florida, after we were married. I must have been chatting to Bob about technical matters and a bit about my work, and this ended up with him offering me a computer – apparently a cast-off from work. This being about 1986-ish, affordable home computers still hadn’t really reached the market, and we were just buying our first house.
So, without much thought at all I said “Yes, thankyou” without really considering the practicalities. The machine concerned was an early Compaq, which I now see referred to as a “luggable” or suitcase PC. It had dual 5.5 inch floppy drives, a RAM expansion pack (1 MB ?!) that doubled the physical size of the thing, a demountable keyboard & and a very small screen. Along with a lot of software on floppies (MathCAD, Lotus 123 etc) plus paper manuals (remember those ?) the whole lot must have weighed near 20 kg and did indeed occupy virtually all the space in the largest suitcase we’d brought with us. And the case didn’t even have a pair of wheels, so had to be carried everywhere.
I rather wonder if Bob quietly thought “gotcha” to himself as he saw us off at the airport ? To be fair, it was used a bit once we got it home, but was soon overtaken. Perhaps it’s still in a cupboard somewhere – does anyone want to come and collect it ?
It’s in my loft. All 70lbs of it and the extra box of manuals and a couple of floppies. It’s been promised to a computer museum.