All In The Family

A lot of people think I have a cool family. They don't know the half of it. This email was forwarded from my uncle to my dad to me, and I think it's hilarious. The writer is my cousin Kyla, a college freshman and a very interesting individual.

daddy: so sunday night, we got in a minor car accident, and me being the only minor, the insurance people left a note saying they want me to call them and that i should tell my parents what happened, possibly to call you. how silly. anyway. here goes. we were in ellicot city, drinking coffee and smoothies and such on sunday night, and it was rainy and drizzly and somewhat miserable, so wandering around looking at shops and things became boring, especially since it was sunday night and most weren't open. it was me, sarah buchanaun, tessa, and robin, who was driving. robin's real name, for those crazy insurance people, is "katherine." i'm not sure what the last name is. it sure is something. anyway, so we're going back to campus from ellicot city, i have sugar-in-the-raw packets from the coffee shop and we're talking about idle things when we turn onto rolling road, which is a residental road that goes "straight" to campus inasmuch as that it never goes straight. in fact, directly in front of us is what is nearly a ninety-degree turn. so we are doing our driving thing, and it is dark and raining, and we see headlights in front of us. what happened was that a car that someone identified as a p.t. cruiser (i do not know what this means and am merely repeating the name i was told) went around the corner at high speed and ended up completely in our lane. robin reacted with robin's amazing spidersense and robinreflexes and swerved off the road, into a ditch, and came to a stop in front of a roadsign, which robin did not hit, for robin is just that talented. unfortunately, as tessa, sarah and i jumped out into the rain to examine, the ditch was about two feet deep and very steep, robin didn't have four-wheel drive, and only two wheels of the car were actually touching the ground. the back driver's side wheel was two feet up in the air, and half of robin's car was sticking out into the road. the front passenger wheel, the one competely in the ditch, wasn't doing much either. the car behind us, which had slammed to a stop and not gotten hit, went ahead and parked in a driveway and the girl who had been driving it ran over to try to help us push it out of the ditch. unfortunately, the car was not going anywhere. we went back to the sidewalk to stare at it, and all of a sudden another car came driving along, realized that robin's car in fact was not on the road nor moving far too late, swerved, and hit the back bumper (which was more than waist height to me), freaking out robin still in the car and shattering their passenger side headlight and startling the driver into driving into the equally steep ditch on the opposite side of the road. the police and tow trucks and whatnot were called, and they collected robin and the other lady's insurance, and our ids, and got our phone numbers, and all that jazz. tessa's boyfriend pod came and took us all back to school, and robin's car turned out to be perfectly drivable today, although somewhat in need of realignment. so no-one was injured, although we got soaking wet after spending two hours in the rain, and everything seems okay, except the insurance people aren't entirely sure who to blame. we say that you blame the silly person who refused to stay in their own lane. damn people. but anyway. this is my story. i have concluded and now will go to bed, for it is three in the morning. kylara.

I'm looking forward to seeing all these nutty folks in a few months when we have a family reunion in Puerto Rico, where we have a lot of roots on the island, including our slave-owning great-great-greatuncle, our two great-uncles (the Brothers Behn) who built the famous Dos Hermanos bridge, which was the first big connection of the island of Viejo San Juan to the main island, where they made a fortune on the land they'd bought on the cheap before building the bridge. They also founded the 5th radio station in the world on the island, founded ITT, gave lots of money to the university, and all kinds of stuff. It'll be fun!