270: Family Legend
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
In Eddie's family, there are lots of stories about his mom's Aunt Mary, nobody wanted to cross her. She said what she felt, I did what she wanted. She'd open the Christmas present that you gave her and tell you right then, right to your face. No, this is too small. This isn't appropriate. My parents claim that she would drive up and down the Garden State Parkway and take the azalea bushes off the side of the freeway and take them home because she felt that they were free. She said, oh, they're just growing on the road. We tried to explain to her, no Aunt Mary, they're not growing, just growing there wild, you know, someone planted them there and then she would try to make excuses. Well, she only took a little piece of the plant. She didn't take the whole thing. There was plenty more there. It was the time she invited the family to dinner, but didn't want to cook a chicken in the middle of a hot summer day. So she cooked it in the morning, covered it with a piece of newspaper and left it sitting in the attic all day. Nobody wanted to take a bite, but he didn't argue with Aunt Mary. Then there was her laugh. Aunt Mary had a tremendous cackle. It really was like a sort of room-stopping sound that as a kid, she always appeared to me like sort of the joker from the Batman TV show. Here's Eddie's dad. That laugh was very strange to it. So a cross between the riddler and the wicked witch of the west, but she wasn't necessarily trying to be funny. She would just say something crazy. And then you would laugh at her laughing. You were laughing at what she said. You're just laughing at her laughing would be a big laugh. What's up, that's a better one. Aunt Mary lived with her second husband, Uncle Vito, under one roof, but separately. They slept in separate beds, ate food from separate refrigerators. Uncle Vito had a refrigerator of his own in the garage, and Aunt Mary had her refrigerator in the kitchen. And that came about how? I guess Aunt Mary did not really care for Uncle Vito's children, her stepchildren, and so she put a padlock on the refrigerator in their house. So as to keep Vito's children out of it. And so Uncle Vito decided that it would just be easier to keep his own set of food and drink in the garage. And beyond that, he actually built his own sort of like Italian manly palace in the garage where he had a couch and a television showing sports games and a little rug and that was his sanctuary. And whenever we went there, whenever there was a spread on the table, we were always very nervous about which food would you take because it might be all out there together, but there would be always a back and forth about which food you should be selecting. The two of them, they kind of would compete with each other. It was sort of like a little hosting duel. I remember that Aunt Mary would say to my father, "Hey, would you like a beer?" And you know, you couldn't refuse Aunt Mary, so he would say, "Sure, Aunt Mary would offer you a beer." And Uncle Vito'd look and have one of my beers. And Uncle Vito'd be, "I have some Miller in my refrigerator in a bottle." And Aunt Mary would place this rusty beer can in front of you with some store brand beer, and it was actually rust on the can. She'd give him a beer, and it would have rust on the top, and it was like a really old, cheap beer. Okay, let's just hold the story right there and consider what is being said here. The way this family story goes, she handed out beers so old that the can was rusted, and the story has been told so many times that that has basically become fact. But even though that is possible, there was still some steel beer cans back in the '70s when all this takes place. How likely is that? Is that really something to be believed? You know, I do. You know why? Because my mom describes her Aunt Mary's hygienic habits around her own home, in that she never used soap to wash dishes ever. She just rinsed them, and she let her dog lick all the dishes. And the one time that my mother did-- Wait, wait, wait, wait. Again, I say, "Now, I know that that's the story that's told in your home, and it's a family legend, but is that actually a believable story?" Well, I think it is because my mother was so horrified one time at the prospect that the dishes weren't really washed with soap, that she went under the sink to find dish detergent, and when she did, she opened the container and started pouring it into the dishwasher, and rust came out. Again, I think there was a lot of rust. I say, that's a really great story that you guys tell each other. But first of all,
Transcription truncated.