Wednesday, July 16, 2008

mule talk at dinner

I had dinner with my girlfriend, her dad and his parents. I love those old people. The grandpa likes to tell stories that I always enjoy but that tend to end abruptly. I'm never quite sure if he finished it. I really hit it off with Granny though I only met her twice.

The first time, at breakfast when I met the whole family, I sat down next to Granny. I found out later that Astrid's aunt thought to herself, "oh no, he sat down next to Granny and she is hungry." Granny gets grumpy when she is hungry but I found this out right away. Luckily, I am the same way. Until our food came, we sat together and bitched about being hungry while she told stories. She gets so excited by her stories that she starts laughing in the middle and they get hard to understand. I'm told I have the same habit.

At dinner last night, Grandpa started talking about the smart mules they had on their farm growing up. They plowed every Wednesday and those damn mules always escaped on Tuesday nights. The story, of course, ended abruptly. Granny picked up to tell about how much her father-in-law loved those mules. One time while she was pregnant with their first child, she was standing in her father-in-law's kitchen with her back to the dutch door. She heard the whistle from the local factory for the end of the day. She didn't know that every day when the whistle rang, one of the mules came to the kitchen for a slice of bread. When that mule's head appeared over her shoulder, she told me she almost jumped over the kitchen table. Then her father-in-law came into yell at her for scaring his mule. "And me with pregnant with his first grandchild" she said with an indignant laugh.

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