Big Stories

Originally posted 8/22/07

My favourite post from the old SH.

I was just talking with a friend about Greece and was reminded of something about my sister Cathy whom some of you may know. What you probably don't know, and it pains me to have to say this about her, is that she tells lies. I'm not talking about little white lies either. She tells

G R E A T B I G W H O P P E R S

like the time she visited England and, on the way home from the airport, she told us about a huge forest fire they had had in Greece.

Apparently, so the story went, in the aftermath of the fire a body was found in the middle of the burnt out forest. What was strange about this body was that it was, she claimed, dressed in scuba diving gear and nobody could work out why.

Eventually someone came up with the only possible theory that would fit the facts. The only way to deal with this kind of fire is to dump water from the air. The aircraft used to do this have huge scoops which they use to scoop up seawater to drop on the fire and it was one of these planes, she told me, which had scooped up the diver and dropped him on the fire.

Needless to say I was equally amazed and, sorry folks, amused by her story and said so. And that was, I thought, that.

About a week later Cathy's husband arrived. Sitting around the house on his first day there I just mentioned in passing that Cathy had told me the story of the fire. "Fire?" he asked, looking puzzled.

I began to relate to him the story Cathy had told me. As I went on a smile started to spread across his face (anyone who knows him will tell you that this is in itself unusual) until I got to the part with the diver. By this time the man is positively apoplectic, rolling around laughing his head off. That was the moment when the penny, as we Brits say, dropped.

I glanced across at Cathy and the big smug grin on her face told me I'd been well and truly had.

You might think then that the following year when I was in Greece I'd be a little more skeptical about the chickens.

Cathy had bought a couple precooked birds for our supper one night and I was wondering why they were pretty much flat. "Well, that's because of the way they slaughter chickens over here," volunteered my big sis.

"Wringing their necks is considered barbaric," she told me in that very convincing way she has, "so what the Greeks do is they drive a little tractor into the pen where they keep the chickens and they chase them down and run them over. And that's why they're flat." Cue earnest look on big sister's face.

"Oh really," said I, "that's interesting."

Yep, she got me again. She's a sneaky one I tell ya.

Apparently this nasty Greek way of humiliating people that my sister has acquired is called Telling Big Stories.

You have been warned.

UPDATE: She's incorrigible. Within hours of posting this I spoke to her and she told me that she had just gotten back from a hospital visit where she swears she saw a man leaning against a tree smoking with his intravenous drip draped over a tree branch. Like I'm going to believe that!