simpleanddestructivechemistry:
So this is a Chistmas story my mom told me while I was home recently and i thought y’all might enjoy.
So, one Christmas back in the 60′s, my great-grandmother was reminiscing about Christmas in England, and how they used to have pheasant for Christmas, but Ohio sucks and they’d never get to do something like that.
Well Shit! goes my grandfather, them woods are full of pheasants, I’ll get you one. So grandpa and a dubiously related man named “uncle popeye” went out with shotguns to get great-grandma a pheasant for Christmas dinner.
They’re gone for a LONG time. according to mom, they were basically expecting grandpa and Popeye to be gone for a few hours and come back with a store-bought chicken and apologies.
Instead, they come back eight hours later, covered in mud and freezing cold from the Cleveland winter, but Surprise! they have a Pheasant. Great-grandma gives them a lecture about staying out so long and worrying her, but agrees to dress the bird so they can all have a traditional English Roast Pheasant. Grandpa and Popeye retire to the living room to drink beer and talk about what great woodsmen they are when Great-grandma screams from the kitchen.
“TOM!!” She bellows and literally every male in the house jumps because literally every man has been named “Tom” for three generations at that point.
“THERE’S NO BULLET HOLE IN THIS BIRD.”They both look massively sheepish and eventually admit that they hadn’t had much luck finding pheasants in the woods and were about to go to the store to get her a chicken when they… backed over the pheasant.
“Then what were you idiots doing in the woods for eight hours?”
“We weren’t out there for THAT long-” Popeye starts before grandpa decks him.
Grandma and Great-grandma have to menace them with wooden spoons to get the truth out, but eventually they take thier oversize hiking boots off to reveal bandages.Turns out they had only been in the woods for Two hours looking for pheasants before LITERALLY tripping over one, and they both reflexively aim at the ground and… Shoot each other in the foot. They hadn’t backed over the Pheasant in the woods. They’d backed over it in the Hospital parking lot.
And that’s the story of how my great-grandmother made a Roast Pheasant and the ladies of the house got to eat the whole thing while Grandpa and Popey had to watch.
“dubiously related man named uncle popeye” wasn’t even close to the wildest part oh my god! This is such a good story!!!!
So you prompted me to call my mother and ask how Popeye was related to them, and apparently he’s my great-grat-grandmother’s first-husband’s cousin’s son.
The First Husband is the whole reason my mother’s family came to america in the first place apparently. in 1902, he decided he didn’t want to be father to 9 girls anymore, so he went out for a pint one night and fucked off to Chicago without actually divorcing GGG. For a few years she thought he’d been killed and dumped in the Thames (these things happened in Liverpool in the 1900′s) and shortly re-married, and Second Husband fathered two more daughters with her, including my Great-Grandmother.
In 1908, First Husband wrote from Chicago for money. This was a problem because despite fucking off to another continent, they were still married, and GGG was committing bigamy. Despite pleading her case before the courts that Really, Y’all gave me his death certificate when he didn’t turn up after a month, they fined her an outrageous amount of money and only commuted her prison sentence because “her brood would place undue stain on the orphanage”.
Yes, really.
Second Husband, who was a halfway decent man that only beat her sometimes, suddenly dies of knife wound in a Pub fight, and GGG is left up shit creek with 10 girls and nobody willing to hire a bigamist maid. So GGG attempts to woo First Husband back to England. She goes so far as to pay a photographer to take Nudes of her to remind him what he left.
That was an exciting Christmas, going through an old album and finding THOSE.
Despite GGG’s heartfelt efforts and godlike booty, First Husband remained in the US, enjoying his new life of running credit scams and bootlegging.
After another 4 years of this nonsense, GGG gets the money to ferry herself and her brood across the atlantic to America, where they weren’t so uptight about the sex lives of domestic workers and she could probably get a job. The ALMOST come on the Titanic- we found the tickets next to the nudes- but at the last moment, Great-Aunt Liz catches the Measles, forcing everyone into quarantine and saving them from an icy death. They instead come on the next boat, and have to pick up the survivors of the Lusitania. Everyone gets lice and has to be shaved at Ellis Island.
Once in america, GGG finds out First Husband has died, For Realsies, please come identify his corpse and also he owes the state of Illinois like $500 in court fees so-
To which GGG goes “LOL, NO.” and moves to Cleveland with her Youngest daughter (my great-grandmother) and her new Russian husband, and takes over as manager of the local grocery store and leads a life of relative american-lower-middle-class comfort until her death in 1928 at age of 58.
…So you understand our confusion that GG knew of Popeye’s existence at all.
This is the quality content I am on tumblr for! 😂👍🏻
Thank you for sharing this and bless you and your family! 💕I just wanna know why GGG’s nude photos were just tossed in a family album along with all the other special pictures. Did they just stumble across them between a great-aunt’s baptism pic and another’s wedding photo?
They were in a plain brown envelope tucked in with the 1963 Christmas photos.
Right between the pictures of Grandma’s Dog Spooky wearing like seven christmas decorations (So named because she was totally black except for a white mark on her chest and a propensity for 4AM garbage disposal noises) and of Grandpa getting smashed on Great-Aunt Liz’s Rumballs, to be precise.
This person needs to write a book about their family stories. It would sell like wild.
I want to hear more every time this post comes around XD
Art. Pure art is what this is.
Ok, because several people in the tags have pointed out that the Thames is nowhere near Liverpool:
I called mom, again, to ask why the hell i would write that, because I distinctly recall the phrase “GGG was certain he’d been thrown in the Thames” when Grandma repeated the tale for me, but I am also ADHD as fuck and my brain might have invented that sentence.
Turns out, the truth is another Hot Mess.
The WHOLE line is “GGG was certain he had been thrown in the Thames like his brother, Who ran afoul of several criminal organizations while running cons in London and we’re not sure WHO actually did him in but it was a big affair to travel to London when they fished his body out with the eels.”
So “Thrown in the Thames” was GGG’s colloquialism for “was murdered due to gambling debts”
“Why did GGG even MARRY first husband?” I asked.
“He had a nice mustache, apparently.”
A Holiday Story
Published
Kimchi and Justice 