Larry's mom is a story teller. This is something that amuses me no end and embarrasses Larry to the same extent, because the stories are usually about him and sometimes exaggerated. I have lost track of the number of times that Phoebe has told me the story of "The Mouse in the Boot" or how Larry and his border collie Stinker rounded up the sheep when he was just 5 years old.
Larry usually excuses himself immediately when she starts in on one of her stories, which is why she frequently seems to choose to tell them when we're going somewhere in the car. It's hard to excuse yourself when you're driving down the interstate at 70 miles an hour.
But every once in a while she does have a good story to tell, especially when it's about her mother's side of the family, which seems to have its share of story-worthy characters.
Larry's aunt Kathy came to visit one week, which was a semi-annual event at Larry's mom's house. She never married and had no family other than my mother-in-law, Larry and his sisters.
Aunt Kathy was a very nice lady, but had learned to project her voice during a high school theater production of "Our Town" and had never learned to turn it back off. This meant that a quiet conversation with her was one you could hear from one end of the house to the other, even if you couldn't hear it from outside. During a particularly boisterous discussion about politics, a policeman stopped by because one of the neighbors thought that there was a brawl going on.
Aunt Kathy also liked dogs. Stinker was out of the picture by this time, as they had moved into town and didn't have room for him to run around. But Aunt Kathy had more than enough dogs to make up the gap, even though she only had two, Stan and Ollie. They were the children she had never had a chance to have on her own. Oh how she pampered those dogs. She would baby talk to them, feed them from the table and let them sleep on the bed with her. At least she did until one particular visit.
It had been a pleasant trip, and the dogs had been fairly well behaved until the last day - the day of the Great Denture Caper. Kathy had left her upper plate on the night stand when she went to start the water for a bath. She had done this any number of times without incident. However on this day for some reason, Stan decided that her dentures resembled nothing so much as a chew toy. He must have known that this idea would meet with some resistance from his mistress, as he stealthily crept up on the bed and across to the night stand. It was only as Kathy came back into the door that she saw him dart off the bed and under all the time looking like a game show host with a terribly toothy grin.
You would not think that a 70 year old woman would have enough strength to pick up a mattress and box spring all by herself, but she did that day. Stan, realizing that he was caught and cornered promptly dropped his recent acquisition at Kathy's feet and ran for other cover. We didn't see him for several hours after that. The dentures were none the worse for wear, although it did spend several hours in a glass full of cleaning solution and she always seemed to have a slight lisp afterwards.
