My Mom took this picture, it was the first time I had ever brought a girl home to meet my parents. I was living in Penticton, it was a long weekend and we had made the five hour drive to Vancouver (Port Moody) in my 1974 455 Trans Am SD (the same one I used to pick her up from high school in...cool). Mom was trying to show she was at ease with the whole deal by saying it was OK if we slept together--we tried it the first night and it was just way too weird sleeping (literally) with somebody in my old bed with my folks across the hall. We kept to our own sides of the bed like mannequins and I spent the rest of the weekend on the couch.
Her parents owned a motel and one weekend when they had gone out of town, Patty asked me if I wanted to spend the night at her place. If memory serves (which it probably doesn't) I think we had only been dating a week but we'd kind of known each other for a while, she was the sister of a girl ("Jane") dating my best friend at the time. Which reminds me, I liked her but I think the biggest reason we started going out was because our whole crowd of friends were all coupled up and I always felt like the proverbial fifth wheel-- I wanted a girlfriend...pathetic reason I know.
Anyway back to the night at her place. Like I said, I'd only known her a week and I told her I thought I was falling in love with her-- turned out I wasn't but like George Costanza I just wanted to say it. Her Dad was this large, intimidating German guy who never said too much-- it was hard to get a read on him but I knew he had threatened her last boyfriend subsequent to "an episode" that had occurred. Patty and I were lying in bed in the morning and her sister suddenly threw the door open and shouted, "MOM AND DAD ARE HOME!!!" Talk about panic, I was trapped! The bed was tucked into a corner of the room, I had nowhere to go and I was fearing for my life. There wasn't even a window close by, not that it would have mattered, I leapt out from under the covers naked and started to claw my way up the wall behind me like a caged squirrel.
Jane all of a sudden broke into into hysterics with Patty not far behind. Turns out the parents weren't home at at all, they were just playing a trick--very funny. Both in tears and howling they wanted to where I was intending to go with my balls literally to the wall.
What brought this story on was an experiment in nostalgia I tried the other day in London Drugs (the only place you can go for toothpaste and deodorant and wind up spending a hundred bucks). I was walking past the perfume and cologne aisle when Charlie caught my eye, the perfume Patty used to wear. It's not locked up in those glass cases and I've never seen it there before so I went over for a closer look and a sniff--resurrect some nostalgic feelings from days gone by. I done this with other scents from the past so I took the bottle out of the box and sprayed it in the air. The spritzer was turned towards me and I ended up with a face full of Charlie--I reeked of it for the rest of the day. I think they changed the formula because it didn't smell the same as it used to, but then, what does??
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