Dubious Origins

I know many writers who seemed to show two primary interests as children -- reading and lying. (It makes perfect sense after all, even though I'm sure a parent's first thought when his or her child tells a bold-faced lie isn't, "Maybe I'm raising the next Hemingway!")

While I had no interest in lying, I did like to tell stories. I often wrote plays for my sisters and I to perform in. Of course, being a little control freak as well, I liked to write, direct and star in my plays. And, when my sisters gave what I deemed to be unsatisfactory performances or refused to learn their lines verbatim, I would take on their roles as well. By premiere time, I was usually performing all of the roles except for brief cameos by Snuggles the bear. I'm sure it was not the easiest story for my audience, a.k.a. Mom and Dad, to follow. 

And while many older sisters like to torture their younger siblings with tales of how they were actually adopted, I had something else in mind.

"You know you're not one of us," I told my youngest sister while we were at the beach for a family vacation. I think we were having breakfast. She was three to my wise and mature nine, and I'm guessing she'd either gotten on my nerves, or I was bored. (I was so loving at that age.)

"Not one of us?"

"You know, not a human." I continued eating my cereal with one eye on the cartoons.

"Not a human?"

"You're an alien," I said. "A per dern dern. From the planet per dern dern."

"A per what?" she said. (Also, while I was clearly creative at that age, I was also clearly not creative enough to come up with a different name for her alien race and her planet.)

"A per dern dern. The aliens dropped you off one day when you were just a baby, and Mama and Daddy took you in."

"I am not an alien! Take that back!"

"But you are an alien. Sorry."

"Am not," she said.

"That's not the worst part though," I added. "The worst part is that they're going to have to come back for you -- the per dern derns. I bet you the mother ship will be here any day now."

This is the point when my sister's disbelief turned to tears. She was not too pleased with my story about her alien origins. And, unfortunately for her, when she ran to my parents to ask about this, they thought all of this talk about per dern derns was pretty funny. Instead of getting on to me, my dad said, "I guess you better watch out for that mother ship, Sarah."

I think she forgave us once she went to college. Think.