Early Monday Mornings: Week Three

If you need to get caught up, please by all means start with the first segment of this miniseries here. Then read segment number two here. Otherwise, you just might be lost, because I’m going to jump right in.

Mister Early seemed to have a knack for moving things around that could not be explained any other way.

My Granddad was a truck driver for many years. Of course, there were no fancy electronic ways to keep up with stuff back then (Seriously. How. Did. They. Live.), so he kept up with all of his driving in a log book.

The log book was an absolute DO NOT TOUCH item in their house, and all of their kids followed that rule to a T, because they knew and understood that if the log book was lost, then their Dad didn’t get paid.

Well, one time it went missing. Of course, every nook and cranny was searched and every kid was interrogated. No one had taken it and no one could find it.

Several weeks later, Granddad bought an old Model A car for he and my Dad (his only son) to work on together as a project. They were going to completely dismantle and restore it. When Granddad pulled the front seat out of the car, and his log book was sitting underneath that seat.

Another item that Mister Early famously moved was the Christmas tree.

Grandmother and Granddad had a very high ceiling in their living room, and they were always insistent that they needed a tree tall enough to touch the ceiling. I remember as a kid thinking how unbelievably massive their Christmas tree was every year.

They all went out one night before Christmas to Granddad’s brother George’s Bar-Be-Que restaurant. The entire family was there and had a grand time. When they returned home, however, their ever-so-tall Christmas tree was no longer touching that ceiling.

It had been moved all the way across the living room and was lying across the sofa in the complete opposite direction that it would have been if it had simply fallen down.

My parents also had things go missing. They moved in with Grandmother and Granddad temporarily after returning from Dad’s tour of (Air Force) duty in England.

While they were living there, my Dad’s wedding ring went missing for six weeks. Grandmother was a cleaning fanatic. She vacuumed and dusted constantly, and had not found it. Then one day, Dad was walking through Grandmother and Granddad’s bedroom and stepped on it on that VERY thoroughly and continuously vacuumed carpet.

My mother also had some undergarments go missing. She added a new go-to joke to our family repertoire when she told me this story, because she kept saying that her leopard SKIN panties and (plain) bra went missing. I kept correcting her and saying that they were most likely just leopard PRINT panties.

She would agree every time, then the next time she referred to them, she would once again call them leopard SKIN panties.

I would imagine that leopard SKIN panties would be QUITE uncomfortable.

And most likely illegal.