Emily+Willoughby+2014

I find my art teacher a bit strange. Don’t get me wrong, in the three years she has taught me, I have learned many different important aspects about art, it is just that she has a few quirks. The reason that this is on my mind at the moment is because she decided to tell my art class that she decided to get married on the Friday we left school for break. She and her boyfriend made the instant decision to get married at a courthouse. Generally, that is not so strange, but apparently she has been living with this guy for sixteen years!!!!

Over the break, my three sisters and I took a car ride up to Union, NJ to visit my dad’s parents. We don’t see them that often because of an ongoing disagreement between my mom and my grandmother, and the last time we visited was over four years ago. Anyway, my grandpa is starting to lose his memory, (not exactly Alzheimer’s, but similar) and he also has hearing problems. It has gotten to the point that he asks my dad the same question every time they talk, “So, what company are you working for now?” On the car ride there, my dad decided to lecture my sisters and I on what to do if Grandpa began asking our ages or grades over and over again. The conversation quickly turned to, “How can we make a fool out of ourselves in front of the grandparents?” My job was to speak in German for two minutes straight (which neither of them speaks), my one sister was fabricated an entire alternate personality (a person who has been in jail for shoplifting), and my other sister instantly became part of the “CHERUB” program issued by the Prime Minister: a child secret agency service to hunt down and assassinate foreign criminals. This was all very funny to speculate about on the car ride, but by the time we pulled up to the house, it was generally accepted that the fantasies we had been working on for the past forty minutes would never be brought up for fear of total embarrassment.

 Then, my dad happened. Grandpa asked the anticipated question, but instead of answering with the correct response as my dad usually does, he replied, “Well, I now work for the CIA, and last month I was missioned overseas to assassinate the leader of a rebel coup.” He said this all very seriously, and with my Grandpa’s bad hearing, he just nodded and said, “Oh, that’s nice.” *sigh* He didn’t even get the joke. Later on, my youngest sister tried to pull off the fact that she is used to wearing orange, on account of the fact that she was arrested for attempting to steal $300 nail polish made of gold and diamonds. But my grandma accepted this with a shake of her head and decided to give my sister her very own bottle of gold nail polish. Then, as the conversation left the kitchen and entered the living room, I started speaking random German sentences to my dad. As he tried to answer back, my grandma cut in with fluent Polish. Somehow, all the funny plans that we had made were messed up in some way…