the adventures of one nephew and nine questions

a few months ago i received a mysterious text message from the middle sister. something about a metal detector and our grandmother. when i looked at it a second time i figured maybe it wasn't from her at all. the original supernatural nephew has a grandmother or two. the story in the text message seemed like it would fit one of those grandmothers in particular. the one who is also my own mother. the story suggested the sender had taken a metal detector to a grandmother and had struck gold. or titanium. a whole pile of it. not a limb unscanned. i imagined my own mom sitting in a chair with the child plotting her surface on parchment with giant Xs where the metal detector beeped. imagine a gingerbread cookie covered with so many Xs you can't see the gingerbread anymore. the next message said, "it's me" and then his name in case i hadn't figured it out.

this is important. the fact that he texted me is important. he already knows a good story when he's in one. and so i did what any good aunt who sporadically writes about her nephews would do. i sent off an email right away with nine very good questions for the child to answer. questions that would help me write down his adventure from where he stood. and i emailed them on over to where the text originated. his mom. now there are things called long shots and things called risky ventures but emailing your sister with questions for your nephew usually isn't squished over into either of those categories. but i have a sister who does not listen to phone messages. primarily this is because she cannot retrieve them because she did not listen any of the ones that came before and somehow- SOMEHOW- her phone message retrieval system is clogged. fragments of voices, many of them mine, scattered all over the inside of her phone, clumping together and garbling up all that technology. this is also true of the landline she keeps in her house. this phone has a number i have not successfully used to connect to a live human voice in more than two years. there may be squirrels living in her phone for all i know.

and you're thinking, well, this is why you emailed, then. but you don't even know. i have spent years laboring under the assumption my sister lives in such a rustic community she only has access to dial up interweb. it turns out that although this is what she thinks, it is not at all true. and it is not that the computer(s) at her home are still powered by tiny gerbils on spinning wheels. no. her husband is technologically savvy (i am overstating this but i love him and know him to be computer literate so you will ignore what may be a stretching of some truth) and i am sure she owns a computer that would make mine feel self-conscious enough to wear a padded laptop case. but my sister's constant battles with user-friendly technology (as reported by reliable sources) extend even to her ability to print out a set of nine questions in a timely fashion.

so the questions were sent out again, with a menacing threat. i do not recall specifically the nature of the threat, but if it did not include a promise to leak confidential information about said sister's wild youth to her only child, it should have. and then, the day before i intended to send a third set of questions and then make good on any threats i'd promised, i got wind of tragedy at the sister household. her vehicle had been broken into and ransacked. her husband's vehicle, sitting innocently beside hers, was also attacked. now, some of you might be asking what on earth those two cars were doing sitting out there in the driveway at night. good cars. one new. one newish. cars that deserved better. you might ask why they would be sitting out there in the middle of the world all exposed like that when a few feet away a three car garage sat waiting. and i would say to you that's a mighty fine question. i'd give you my sister's email so you could ask her but you'd end up waiting years for an answer. you're welcome to call and leave her a message....

now, my sister, just like me, is at a place in her own life where she can choose to spend her money as she pleases and it pleases her to carry a nice bag. and so the car sitting unprotected in the driveway held, probably right up there in the front seat although maybe it was in a back seat, her handbag. a bag that set her back more than my 1970 chevy impala four door hardtop set back my parents in 1984. more than manhattan rent on a studio apartment. and even though the idiot crook didn't have enough sense to know it was the bag he should have kept he knew enough to take it for what might be inside and then toss it after he got the credit cards. so the purse sailed out of his car and onto a dusty roadside, carrying safe inside itself a wallet of equally stunning lineage, a set of keys to the car it was stolen from and, of course, the nine questions for the original supernatural nephew.

now we will never know what happened to the supernatural nephew and his mysterious metallic grandmother. alas, alas.

the end. probably not....