It’s 1995. I am three years old and my teenage uncle is watching me while my grandma runs to the store. My uncle puts a tape into the VCR for me to watch.

Me: *Amazed* “Where it go?”

Uncle: “It ate it! Om nom nom. I’m going into the kitchen, okay? Can you stay right here for me?”

Me: “Okay!”

My uncle makes me a peanut butter sandwich and gives it to me before making his own food. He comes back into the living room and sees me sitting in front of the TV empty-handed.

Uncle: “Where’s your sandwich?”

Me: *Proudly* “It ate it!”

Uncle: “Oh, no.”

My uncle spent two days trying to clean peanut butter out of the VCR, gave up, and had to buy another one.

My four-year-old daughter needs her vaccinations finished so she can be registered for kindergarten in the coming fall. I tell her on Monday afternoon that Tuesday morning we will go to the doctor’s office to get those done. 

Daughter: “What are vaccinations?”

Me: “They’re shots.”

Daughter: “I’m going to get shot?!”

We were catching up with some friends for a chat. Being a gracious host, I offered them a drink. She wanted coffee and he wanted tea.

While the teabag was steeping in the cup, I asked, “Are you a two-, three- or four-minute man?”

I’ve no idea why his wife was laughing so hard.

This happened in my early teens. My house phone was being called dozens of times at every hour for a fortnight. The caller was some poor old lady who spoke only Chinese and was trying to get a hold of her son. She didn’t stop calling, pleading day and night to speak to her son.

My mother tried to explain to her that she had the wrong number, and that she had dementia and needed help, but she could never remember the conversation and would be back to calling and pleading five minutes later. We really wanted to help her, we really did. My mom was slowly piecing together details about her and was going to call for help once she learned who that lady was.

Unfortunately, my dad had other ideas. From the start, he dismissed this poor old lady as some sort of scammer and warned us never to talk to her. After a fortnight, he lost his patience with the whole affair and decided to fix it. He had learned from my mom that the old lady was in her nineties, and thus had probably survived World War Two.

So, one day, after she called yet again, my dad picked up the phone and went to me. He told me to yell a bunch of Japanese swear words into the phone, to someone he assured me was a friend of his and was interested in me learning a third language.

I was self-teaching myself Japanese — mostly from anime, which my dad hates and calls a waste of time — so I was very pleased that he wanted me to demonstrate my skills. I proudly yelled a couple of insults in Japanese into the phone, got a pat on the head and an extra hour of leisure time to watch more anime, and never thought about it for almost a decade.

It was only way later that I found it suspicious that the old lady stopped calling after that. My mom eventually told me what my dad had done, which he quite proudly told her after three days without a call. I’m not saying that it led to their divorce later in the year, but in the immediate aftermath, my mom did start sleeping in a different bedroom. I’m not completely sure he even thinks he did anything wrong, even now. He never understood why my mom cared for a stranger and why she was angry at him.

I really can’t forgive myself for doing that now. I really hope that I did not rekindle that poor old lady’s trauma from the war.

This is an old story my dad loves to tell. He has an old friend who is a bit of a picky eater. One night, my dad is making burgers. His friend brought his own cheese to put on the burgers — specifically, American cheese slices, which my dad personally finds to be an affront to the wonder that is cheese. 

My dad looks at him in disbelief and tells him, “Dude, that’s not real cheese.” His friend vehemently disagrees, so my dad says, “I’ll prove it. [Dog] likes cheese. C’mere, girl,” and throws a full slice of the cheese on the floor for our dog. 

It’s true, our dog loves cheese — she loves any and all human food and we frequently let her lick our dishes after meals — so she is well-acquainted with various cheeses.

Anyway, she trots over, sniffs the slice on the kitchen floor, and turns her nose away and trots back off into another room, entirely uninterested. 

To this day, his friend insists that my dad gave her some secret signal to leave the treat on the floor. Our dog was a bit of a wild one when she was a pup, but at this point, we had gotten through to her and she was excellently behaved… but there was no signal on earth that would stop her from taking good food that was placed on the floor, which was considered her domain.