My sister Julie wrote these words to explain the excitement of our brother coming home. Our memories of him are different. I do NOT even remember some of the things she has written about, but I did get a good laugh out of them. I wonder if Grandpa Glenn were still alive, what he would say about that bb gun. Yikes! The rest of this entry is hers, from her blog at Loneprairie.net.
Today is Jerry day.
When I was little, my brother once hid hot sauce in an ice cream cone and gave it to me.
He once put a plastic jack-o-lantern in my bedroom window, lit it up, put a hat on it, and told me a scary story about an evil pumpkin that killed kids. All right before bed, when I went to my room and found an evil, glowing pumpkin head in my window.
He once hid in the hay loft and shot at the cattle with a BB gun, making grandpa Neidlinger swear up a storm out in the pasture, trying to herd the ever-scattering animals, not aware of why they kept scattering.
Using parts of things he disassembled, he rigged up a loudspeaker system outside of his room on the second floor of the house, and would announce things across the back yard. Things like "time for supper!"
He joined in playing "tag" one night where we all were running around the yard and throwing firecrackers at each other.
He took me on a trip to the mountains in Wyoming where we and some of his friends rode horse and camped out up there for a week.
It took him almost ten years to finish remodeling his tiny house in Nebraska because he was such a perfectionist. He had a sheet for a front window curtain for a long time, and during one visit there, he and I pretended to "shoot" and "stab" and beat each other up in front of the sheet so that, during the night, from the street, our shadows performed a bizarre shadow play for the neighbors.
A few years before he moved to Australia, he whipped into the yard to recreate his youthful habit of spinning his car in circles at the end of our driveway, but instead lost control and smashed into the deck on the side of the house. I was in the, uh, bathroom on the other side of that wall and it was not a pleasant moment.
Tonight he flies in to Bismarck, and this weekend, my sisters and their families are coming up. It's going to be a lot of fun. It's been a long, long time since we've all been together. I can't wait.
