Thursday, March 31, 2022

Fred and Wilma

While Fred and Wilma were mostly pranksters over the years, things changed once the baby was born.  My brother's girlfriend gave birth to my nephew and moved in with us.  Naturally, we made several changes to the living situation and the un-living made their own changes.  Firstly, I had been living in the garage, which had been partially converted to a living space.  Not the entire garage but at least a good 2/3rds of the space was walled off, drywall was hung and a window was cut into the back wall.  Was it up to code?  What, are you kidding?  You think dad was going to bother with permits much less doing anything the legal, proper way?  But that was my 'bedroom' for a few months, and as I mentioned, once the baby was born, I swapped the larger room for what had been my old bedroom in the house where my brother and Cynthia had been living in before the baby.  

The first instance I can CLEARLY, VIVIDLY remember when Fred and Wilma were watching out for the baby was sometime in late spring.  Cynthia had just come out of the room, I was sitting in the living room watching TV and she asked if I could just listen out for the baby while she ran to the bathroom.  As she said this, I heard the baby briefly cry out and was quiet again.  Cynthia briefly stopped, looked back towards the room and turned back to head to the bathroom again.  When you gotta go, you gotta go.  The only reason I remember this all in such great detail is because of what happened once she came back out.  

As I mentioned, I sat watching TV the entire time, not a peep from the baby and Cynthia steps back into their room, takes a few steps in, then turns around and point blank asked me if I had gone into their room.
"No, I've been sitting here this whole time.  What's up?"  I get up and start walking towards her and their doorway.  She turns and points to the baby, who's laying in the middle of the bed, sucking on his bottle.  She goes on to tell me that she was about to feed him when she ran off to the bathroom.  But she left in such a rush that when she heard him cry, she knew it was because he was hungry but she really had to go.  
Mind you, the baby was laying in the center of the bed, still too small to turn himself over, never mind crawl, and she had left his bottle on the corner of the bed, far out of his reach.  And when she got back, he was still in the same spot but happily sucking on his bottle.  Right then, I knew it had to be our other residents looking out for the baby.  

Another event with the baby, he was in his walker bouncing around the living room and he got too close to this record cabinet dad had in the living room. It was just big wooden monstrosity, super dark brown, almost black, that kind of brown. It was also up on caster wheels because dad wanted to be able to move it around if mom wanted to rearrange things. Which just looked so bad and I guess he thought all that effort to even install them wasn't as bad as just taking the records out to move the thing. Anyway, this was up along the wall between the house and garage. Sitting precariously on top of that was a large wooden cassette tape organizer. I'm sure you know the kind I'm talking about if you owned any tapes in the 80s to mid 90s. So dad was sitting on the couch, still in his bathrobe since it was still fairly early morning still. I was sitting at the dining room table half reading the paper, half watching whatever it was dad had on the TV. Rob was bouncing along right up to that record case monstrosity and hit it just hard enough that it got both mine and dad's attention. We both just saw the wooden cassette case start to wobble from the impact and we jumped up. But it was too late, the case started to topple over, right above the baby. And it somehow missed him completely. 

From the position it was sitting at and the angle of the drop, by all accounts, it should have fallen squarely on top of the baby below. Instead, the whole thing tipped forward father than it realistically should have, hit the armrest of the couch and then dropped to the ground right next to it. The entire thing barely even grazing the bouncer. Despite the baby's safety, dad was already worked up thinking the worst had happened that he swore at the cassette case, grabbed it and somehow managed to open the front door at the same time and flung it halfway across the yard, screaming, bellowing, swearing at the thing. Scaring the baby. I just looked on in shock. That the only reason the baby was even crying was because Grandpa's rage startled him. There's no way the baby could have, should have been unharmed. Yet, here we were. 

Still another time with the baby was probably the most concrete to me that would suggest we had more than just our family living in that house. 

I was sitting in the living room, on the couch, wall side so to my right was the hallway leading to the bedrooms. The baby was just strong enough to sit up, hold his own head up, so I was playing with him in my lap, holding both his hands in mind. More like his hands wrapped around my fingers lol only for the roles to be reversed for the next several years haha. So I'm playing with the baby and the only thing behind me is the wallpaper. Suddenly, he stops bouncing and turns his head to the left, looking down the hallway. And slowly, he kept turning to his left, to his shoulder, reaching back as much as he could before he reversed it and went to his right side and then kept turning, looking until the was looking at the end of the wall as it lead into the kitchen. He was watching someone or something walk through the room. That's the only logical reason for what he did. He was tracking an object from one side of the room to the other. 

Shortly after that happened, we ended up moving. No, it wasn't Fred and Wilma that ran us off. Financial reasons and we moved into a rental in a quiet cul-de-sac. At least street was quiet, the house itself was another story. 

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