My family tree is chock full o'nuts. I have an aunt who eats with her hands (I guess she doesn't believe in eating utensils), an uncle who had a yard full of desert tortoises he obsessively collects (never mind that it's highly illegal) and a cousin who insists on taking photographs at funerals.

I've bared my shame. Now it's your turn.

-- Brad (brad@scriptbrads.tv), March 27, 2001

Answers

Before my grandmother died, she began seeing and hearing things that weren't there. People would talk to her from the television (even though it was unplugged). Stuff like that. She was finally diagnosed as suffering from paranoia, and we looked back and realized she'd always suffered from it, we just hadn't noticed before. LOL!

Anyway, when she thought somebody was threatening her, she would call on her bodyguards. She had two of them. Tony Dorsett and Herschell Walker. They stood behind her chair. And when somebody was trying to make her do something she didn't want to do, or she felt threatened, her eyes would narrow and she'd say, "Don't make me let Tony and Herschell hurt you."

One day she was sitting in her chair by the window with her cane in her hand, balanced in front of her like a baseball bat. She called my mother into the room and told her that Larry Parrish (whom she called "double-ought") was outside the window and wanted to talk to my mother. My mother, of course, refused to go over to the window, even though (especially though!) my grandmother kept insisting that she needed to go over to the window -- and bend over. (Cane balanced like a baseball bat in front of her, as she prepared to conk my mother in the head.)

This may sound dreadful and scary, but actually we all found it majorly amusing. I mean, if you're gonna lost it, you may as well be entertaining!

People have always said I take after my grandmother.

-- pooks (TexasTrish@aol.com), March 29, 2001.

Okay, I have a couple of relatives, one from each generation, as a matter of fact. The most recent generations:

Uncle Jim was actually sent away for years to the state mental hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia. As far as I've been able to tell, he was just a little...over the top. Spontaneous. Okay, the example being, when he was sent to the hospital, my great grandfather, was one of the biggest landowners in the county. Several miles from the big house down to the river, all land that they owned and farmed. Well, while Uncle Jim was in the hospital, my great grandfather lost everything in the Depression, gave one sane son the order to "save what you can, and sell the rest" and headed off to Texas.

Nobody told Uncle Jim, so when he was released a few years later and came home, he was hunting (yes, in rural Georgia everyone has a gun, crazy or sane!) on the farm and heard the sound of a sawmill running down on the river. He took off down there and shot the operation up, holding the men at gunpoint for hours because he thought they were trespassing on his father's land.

Now see, that's not crazy to me. That's just a misunderstanding. But apparently the authorities were impressed enough with the hostage situation to send him right back to Milledgeville. *sigh*

That was my great uncle. My actual uncle (father's brother) used to see monkey's dancing on the headboard around three a.m. at night, and he tied my grandma up and threatened to set her on fire, once.

Understandably, my father gets a little edgy when me or my sister have a little mood swing.

-- Wendi (Kellerfan@aol.com), March 29, 2001.

We have nutbags in my family, but none of them ever seem to get locked away where they can't hurt themselves or others. The most interesting is my grandmother, bless her heart, gets hysterical at the least little thing, and regularly has conversations with her dead parents, her dead sisters, her dead grandson- if you took her word for it, she has a regular communion of the spirits in her bedroom.

Of course, she's also the one who said that her (even then, deceased) mother came to her on television (during, I believe, Ed Sullivan) to tell her to quit drinking or she was going to die. She did quit, though, so I guess that one was worth the hallucination.

-- Saundra (headspace@anywherebeyond.com), April 03, 2001.

I swear, reading about all your crazy relatives, makes me cringe with shame. How could I even think mine could compare?!

There's an indie film somewhere in here, based on these characters. Pooks, if you haven't written grandma into a script yet, I suggest you do so.

-- Brad (javagirl@scriptbrads.tv), April 03, 2001.