Plastic Gene Pool
Certain pertinent photos from the Pumpkin family archives that may (or may not) unlock the secrets behind the very meaning of this blog, including brief side trips into pointless dissertations on the vagaries of heredity a.k.a. "Why I Don't Look Indian."
This is my grandfather on my father's side standing in the doorway of his brand spanking new Bunny White bread delivery truck and looking all Boris Karloff-y and not at all like the sort of person you'd expect to see stocking the shelves of your local IGA with loaves of squishy soft white bread with cartoon bunny rabbits on their wrappers. Grandaddy A. was the sweetest guy you'd ever want to meet, but you can't deny the fact of his looking all Boris Karloff-y. This was due to his being half Cherokee... or Cree... or Chippewa or some Indian something or the other that started with a 'C.' In later life he and my grandmother opened up the biggest & best antique store the little town of Mount Sidney, Virginia ever saw. And this was back in the days when 'antique store' meant 'ramshackle old storefront filled to bursting with the coolest collection of junk you'll ever see again in your entire lifetime.' My grandparent's store did very well although I can't imagine how, since they let me and all of my cousins wander off with whatever musty treasures we could get our greedy little hands on. From my grandfather I managed to not inherit any sort of Native American features what-so-ever, but learned a love of gaudy '70's comic books, crazy '60's board games and pretty much anything molded from plastic.
That's my father in the foreground looking a bit shellshocked. I think that's because the lady behind him has a knife jabbed between his shoulder blades. If he was anything like me at that age, he probably deserved it. On the right is my Aunt Brenda. Aunt Brenda was the most funnest member of my Dad's side of the family. (Shhhh! Don't tell the others!) She was two feet tall and I never saw her not smiling. She could get to laughing at something so hard that she'd rock back & forth like a Weeble Wobble with tears pouring down her cheeks and she would do this at the drop of the hat with little to no provocation. At family get-togethers you'd walk through the living room and there she'd be, sitting in the corner, rockin' and laughin' and cryin' with everybody around her just carrying on normal type conversations and nobody having any idea what set her off.
Aunt Brenda was born extremely premature in a time when even a little bit premature was not a good thing. When she was born she could fit in the palm of a person's hand with plenty of wiggle room leftover. The doctors in the little country hospital where she was born took one look at her, chucked her into a crib in the corner of my grandmother's room and basically told my grandparents "Better luck next time." While they went off to notify the local undertaker my grandfather stayed up all night with her. The doctors, surprised enough that she made it through her first 24 hours on Earth, told my grandfather that she might as well die at home as anywhere and sent the pair of them off. She was so tiny that for the first few weeks of her life they carried her around on a great big pillow so that they wouldn't set her down and misplace her. She never got much bigger, but she kept right on living large up until just a couple years ago. I inherited her stubbornness and her laugh. I don't do it as often or as easily as she did, but the right word or look from the right person can send me into Weeble Wobble convulsions that sound eerily like hers.
And that lady with the knife in my dad's back? Don't know who she is, but that's the person I got my looks from. Ask anybody who knows me. It's scary.
A fender bender on a small back road? Nope, it's just an amazingly lifelike reproduction of same put together by my father using some of his toy cars. He says that he spent hours getting it to look just right and that he tore up most of the pics he took because they looked too fake to him. Thank the gods that I did not inherit from him his love of NASCAR, deer hunting or bluegrass, but look to him if you ever wonder why I spend hours making Mighty Morphin' action figures look like they are running away from giant bunny rabbits.
Something else I didn't inherit from my dad... this cool ghoul costume! Why, oh why, did people not use to hang on to this kind of thing?
This is such an awesome picture of some couple's legs that I'm going to have to believe that it was taken on purpose and was not just some ill-framed mistake. It looks like they're doing the Twist or something. From whoever took this picture I'm going to say that I got my love of 'Hairspray, The Musical.'
This is the yellow bug that my mother owned when I was born and which she kept on driving right up until I was about... thirty-two. I exaggerate only a little. This was the best car ever. It was a little yellow beetle, so how could it not be the best car ever. I know that it's not technically related to me, but I always thought of it as a member of the family and after seeing 'The Love Bug' for the first time (in a drive-in theater in this very car) I became convinced that it was actually alive, so to it's DNA I credit my basic body-type and my slightly jaundiced skin coloring.
These pictures are all from my father's side of the family... here's a true story about my mother's side of the family that explains why I didn't go digging too deeply into their photo albums-
So, my mother's aunt one day decides that she needs to kill her husband. Her husband works for NASA and is a kind of an absent minded professor type. He often works late and was always forgetting his keys, so one night my great-aunt locks and deadbolts all the doors and windows in their house except for the window right by the front door, which she leaves open just the tiniest bit. Then she turns off all the lights and sits down by the front door with a loaded rifle in her hands. Great Uncle Fred MacMurry comes home late, can't get into the house and can't seem to rouse his wife's attention with all his knocking and doorbell ringing, so does the logical thing and starts to crawl in through the open window halfway through which he suddenly finds himself shot in the head. The wife calls the cops, all hysterical & sobbing & screaming that she accidentally mistook her husband for a burglar and killed him pretty dead. The cops come, survey the scene and try their best to comfort the remorseful neo-widow who's story they buy hook, line and 12-gauge. After many hours and some body removal later, the cops and whatnot are taking their leave when this great-aunt becomes so overcome with pride at the wool which she's pulled over all these folks' eyes that she confesses everything with a great big smile on her face. She is shortly thereafter sent off to the loony bin, where several years later she dies peacefully in her sleep.
Or so everybody thought, until the day she showed up on my mother's cousin's doorstep all alive and not dead and freed from the loony bin due to non-loony behavior. Turned out my great-grandmother had lied about the whole dying thing because she was embarrassed to have kinfolk in the nut farm. The cousin found this out after she came to, picked herself up off the floor and was able to steady her hand enough to call great-grandmother and scream hysterically into the receiver "There's a dead crazy woman in my foyer!"
A couple of years later crazy great-aunt was in church one Sunday morning when she suddenly began foaming at the mouth, started speaking in tongues and then keeled over dead in the aisle. For keeps dead.
Basically, I'm scared to find out what I've inherited from that side of the tree.
So, my mother's aunt one day decides that she needs to kill her husband. Her husband works for NASA and is a kind of an absent minded professor type. He often works late and was always forgetting his keys, so one night my great-aunt locks and deadbolts all the doors and windows in their house except for the window right by the front door, which she leaves open just the tiniest bit. Then she turns off all the lights and sits down by the front door with a loaded rifle in her hands. Great Uncle Fred MacMurry comes home late, can't get into the house and can't seem to rouse his wife's attention with all his knocking and doorbell ringing, so does the logical thing and starts to crawl in through the open window halfway through which he suddenly finds himself shot in the head. The wife calls the cops, all hysterical & sobbing & screaming that she accidentally mistook her husband for a burglar and killed him pretty dead. The cops come, survey the scene and try their best to comfort the remorseful neo-widow who's story they buy hook, line and 12-gauge. After many hours and some body removal later, the cops and whatnot are taking their leave when this great-aunt becomes so overcome with pride at the wool which she's pulled over all these folks' eyes that she confesses everything with a great big smile on her face. She is shortly thereafter sent off to the loony bin, where several years later she dies peacefully in her sleep.
Or so everybody thought, until the day she showed up on my mother's cousin's doorstep all alive and not dead and freed from the loony bin due to non-loony behavior. Turned out my great-grandmother had lied about the whole dying thing because she was embarrassed to have kinfolk in the nut farm. The cousin found this out after she came to, picked herself up off the floor and was able to steady her hand enough to call great-grandmother and scream hysterically into the receiver "There's a dead crazy woman in my foyer!"
A couple of years later crazy great-aunt was in church one Sunday morning when she suddenly began foaming at the mouth, started speaking in tongues and then keeled over dead in the aisle. For keeps dead.
Basically, I'm scared to find out what I've inherited from that side of the tree.
