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Veteran's Day and an Etiquette Question
2003-02-19 - 10:30 a.m.
A Rumor gone bad
I had posted another entry today, if you want to see it, click here
Bryce's brush with death recently brought back a memory for me; too.. something similar happened to me when I was a teenager.
I was 14 we had been living here in Richmond (moved from Suffolk) about six months when I got woke up from a deep sleep by mother to take a phone call. I was home from school because it was Christmas vacation, I believe.
It was an old neighbor from where we used to live. I was half asleep and trying to understand what was going on. I wasn't having much success. This person, who was close to my family in Suffolk was calling to give me their condolences on and telling me how sorry they were to hear about my "condition". They asked if there was anything they could to help me. I was dumbfounded and couldn't figure out what was going on. A few minutes later there was another one, pretty much the same; followed by another and another and another. By that afternoon, I'd heard from at least 20 people and managed to get the "whole scoop".
It seems that someone (may they rot in hell) decided to start the rumor that my parents had died in a horrible car crash and that I was alone and pregnant at 14 (you know... moving to the City will do that to a young girl... it's a regular den of iniquity up there in Chesterfield). The people calling were people from our old church who had heard the rumor and thought it was true. Even though my mother was the person who originally answered the phone and then handed it to me, none of them thought to ask who the first person who answered the phone was. (Turned out, they thought she was our maid.. wow.. they must have thought we were doing well in the big city).
I ended up going to a friend's house while my mother handled the phone calls for the rest of the day. My mother called my brother to find out if he was okay (in case they got the names confused... my father and brother had the same name); he was fine.
I, on the other hand, was a bit of a basket case. My parents were a lot older than the parents of most kids my age. My biggest fear growing up was that something would happen to one or both of my parents and I would end up an orphan. My sister at the time, lived in Mississippi with her own new family and my brother was a Marine, hardly a place for a 14 year old. I used to worry about that so much, I made my brother promise that if anything happened to our parents before I grew up, HE would take care of me. I knew my parents were fine, but it still did a bit of a number on me.
Anyway, when she told him what had happened, he decided to come home to visit for the weekend and he brought a few of his friends with him. They stayed for the weekend, we all had fun and they left Sunday morning to head back to North Carolina. On the way back, so the story goes, they made a few stops in our old neighborhood and did some digging and found the little twerp who started the rumor. We have no idea why, it seemed like the thing to do at the time, I guess.
My brother and his friends went to great lengths to impress upon that person (he was an adult... actually 3 years older than my brother. His family and mine were close friends, but this "favorite son" of theirs had a screw loose.) the fact that what he did was wrong, caused our family untold grief and that making their (his friends visited us quite a lot and consider our family their family away from home) little sister out to be the town slut was NOT in his best interest.
The twerp had a brother who was my brother's age and a bit better built. Once he found out what his brother had done, he sat there and watched while my brother and his friends "talked".
All in all, I'm glad everyone in my family was okay and the twerp got what was coming to him. Rumors are never good; but I'm glad that Bryce's wasn't so bad...
Does the fact that Bryce is now alive count as one of his three miracles for sainthood?
Please don't forget to answer my survey... it's research for a small business idea... all comments appreciated, no reasonable offer refused!!! It won't take five minutes, I PROMISE!
