My dad is sarcastic and loves to joke around. I think I got my sense of humor from him as well because it is so easy to joke around with my dad. Sometimes I can tell just by looking at him what he is about to say. Those are great times.
When I was a kid we used to try and have a family activity each Monday night. It was called Family Home Evening, and we would read a scripture, have a prayer, sing a song, have a short spiritual lesson, then an activity and lastly we would have dessert. It always started out well enough, but inevitably somewhere someone would make some sort of joke which would cause my dad to laugh and then everyone else would burst out laughing and the jokes would start flying. I think we all figured that if my dad was laughing then it was truly funny and nothing else really mattered. Well, as you can guess it almost always ended with someone upset and then the spirit of Family Home Evening would pretty much be destroyed and some of us would get in trouble. But I thought it was worth it if it got my dad laughing. He has a good laugh.
In church he liked to say he would help hold up the hymn book so both of us could read the words and sing. Without fail he would shake the book to make it hard to read the words. Or, it would be in the middle of the hymn and he would suddenly drop his side of the book backward to where you had to lunge forward to keep it from crashing into the person in front of you. He always got the biggest kick out of doing that, and I must say I've done that very same thing to my husband a few times in church myself.
When I was younger, we had this yellow Volkswagen bus that I hated with a passion. I was always worried about cars breaking down and getting in an accident. I don't know why I always worried so much about this since I wasn't in my first accident until I was 15, but that's beside the point. My dad loved that bus. When I was a young kid my sister and I used to pretend we were the Dukes of Hazard and we would jump through the windows to get into the bus. My dad didn't like us doing that, but we thought it was awesome. He was always working on our cars and was very good at fixing problems with them. One time I remember that the clutch broke as we were driving down the road. My dad stopped, grabbed some rope from the back of the bus and somehow tied up the clutch so he could make it work enough to get us back home. I will never forget seeing the road whiz by through the hole in the bottom of the floor where the clutch was and praying to God that the rope wouldn't burst into flames or break and we would get home safe. I still remember my dad with the biggest smile on his face, not bothered by the situation at all.
My dad loved scaring the crap out of us, too, especially in the bus. We used to live up in the mountains of Southern California and there was this really high and long hill we had to travel down to get into the main part of the city. Whenever we had to go anywhere at night, we would all load up into the bus and my dad would start to drive down the mountain. Once he got to the road, one of his favorite things to do was turn off the headlights, floor it down the road, and scream a blood curdling scream at the top of his lungs as we careened down the road. It was pitch black outside, the bus was loaded with all the kids and my parents, and we were flying down this super tall road at top speed. Of course we all screamed for our lives! Sheer panic are the only words I can think of to describe those times. We were little kids, too, and there were practically a million of us. Can you imagine, just for a second, what a Volkswagen bus full of small kids screaming for their very lives sounded like? The bus was almost gutted out on the inside, so there wasn't any padding to insulate the screams from all our little lungs. This joke by my father would ALWAYS end up with at least half of us crying, some laughing hysterically, and my mother being vehemently angry with my father. This is a memory I will never forget. Many years later the bus finally died. I know my dad misses it, but I was so happy to see it go. What prompts my dad to do stuff like that I may never know, but I can assure you that growing up was both fun and petrifying. :) I love you, dad!
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