The Dynamic Duo Strikes Again

You would think after forty-five years of marriage, my parents might be boring or so intertwined with one another that they’d never shock or entertain each other. But their relationship is quite the contrary. They still act like goofy teenagers together, as though their relationship stopped aging when they were married at 18 and 21.

On Mother’s Day, they were sharing stories with us—each imitating the other, which may have been the most entertaining part of all.

My mom started out, making fun of my dad for dramatically telling her he needed her to come look at something in the garage recently. She was still in her nightgown and when she said, “what is it?” my dad told her he didn’t know. He didn’t have his glasses on, so he couldn’t tell. Naturally, my mom said she thought it might be a person with no arms and legs. Because that’s a common thing to find in your garage. My dad told her he thought it might be a duck-billed platypus. Seriously…I can’t make this stuff up.

So my mom went outside with him, and peered into a bucket where there was a baby opossum curled up and probably very scared. “I don’t know how your father thought it was some sort of a bird!” she laughed. Then I told her that duck-billed platypuses weren’t actually birds…

Apparently my dad’s fuzzy vision had construed the opossum’s ear as a bill. And then, because we live in California, which is only an ocean away from Australia, he naturally thought it was a platypus.

Sometimes I wonder how these two raised three children…