Gone
When I was but a wee MasterOli, before I'd got any hair, before I realised that girls were, you know, ~girls~, not just soppy boys, before I'd even got a scar on my left knee, I'd get home from a hard morning's slaving away at Playschool, hungry but happy, ready for luncheon and games with my mum.

We'd play all kinds of games, such classics as "make the mushy peas stick to the wall!" and "Feed the dog the nasty bits!". My very favouritest game ever was "don't eat it!".

The rules were simple: however many silly faces and silly humming noises and hairyplane impressions my mum made, I had to jam my lips together tight just as the spoon was going in and flick it all over my face. Oh, how I'd giggle.

But she had lots of tricks. She'd alternate between planes and trains, making quick little movements to get it all in me, distracting me at the last minute till my mouth was full of mashed up veggies, meat or pudding - all from such disturbingly similar jars that they might easily have been cat food. Then the countdown to me losing would begin: one more!...another one more!...little bit more!...Last one! - All gone! we'd cry, and I'd giggle, secretly cursing and plotting how I'd win tomorrow.

But then one day I got home from a particularly stressful day running around screaming to find my parents dressed up all smart and looking sombre. Apparently an auntie had died and we were all off to the funeral. No games today. I had to get all dressed up and go to a funeral.

Dammit.

I'd had the best plan for winning lunch too: I was going to turn my head at the last second so all the juicy bits went in my hair. No fair. And this, the total opposite of lunch games, being told I had to sit all quiet in a church for hours after driving miles and miles and miles with a boring old War of the Worlds music tape. They said sorry, they said I could have stayed if they could have found a babysitter, they said a two year old was too young to go to a funeral anyway so I had to be on my bestest behaviour, but this is how it had to be and I could play on my spacehopper for as long as I wanted later.

So that was that: off we went.

But I had had a hard day. Too much running, too much giggling and bouncing. I fell asleep on my mum's lap for the whole service. Probably my first ever experience of church, and I slept through it.

Don't think I missed much though. I probably missed lots of speeches from people who knew my great auntie. I missed some songs. I missed the Rabbi talking about death and what a lovely person he'd been told a few minutes before my great auntie was, and whatever else Rabbis do.

I didn't miss the coffin moving though. I woke up for that bit. I didn't miss the curtains pulling up and the coffin gracefully sliding through into the darkness, because as the curtains fell, covering the coffin conveying my dead great auntie into the great dead kiln, I cried out at the top of my little giggling lungs: "All gone!"

That side of the family still don't speak to us.
(MrOli is ugly, but in the morning you will be sober, Thu 26 Mar 2009, 7:40, 2 replies)

This is why I love kids.
They always find the most inappropriate thing to say for every occasion.
( girlinthehole, Thu 26 Mar 2009, 8:28, closed)

Really
That is one of the many reasons I can't stand the little shits.
( gareth_alien will be human again at, Thu 26 Mar 2009, 9:22, closed)