One December my family sat in the dining room, enjoying our Christmas dinner. I was probably nine years old at the time. Unbeknownst to me, I was also the object of a sinister conspiracy cooked up by Dad and my sister Kerry. Kerry was a gifted knitter who would later become a surgeon. Over the years, she’d made beefy wool sweaters for everyone in the family. Most of us had managed to shrink our gifts beyond repair in the washer and dryer in the basement. Just prior to our holiday gathering, Kerry had finished knitting Dad a beautiful blue-and-gold Icelandic-style sweater. As we progressed through a meal of undercooked beef and Yorkshire pudding, the conspirators unleashed their deception.
Dad was in the middle of telling a story when suddenly he stopped and put his hand on his forehead. He sighed and pulled away his hand to reveal a stricken look on his face. He looked over at my sister Kerry in shock.
“I put the sweater in the dryer…I forgot to ask you, is that okay?”
“Oh, nooo,” Kerry bellowed. “That wool shrinks like crazy.”
She looked back at my dad, aghast.
I was still too young to pick up on the bad acting. It wasn’t Academy Award level, but it was good enough. I suspected nothing.
Dad looked across the table at me.
“Tom, quick…go grab the sweater out of the dryer.”
I jumped out of my seat, zipped through the kitchen, and bounded down the stairs to the dryer. I yanked opened the door and looked down at a sweater that would perfectly fit a Barbie doll. I grabbed the sweater and ran back upstairs.
You’d think that experiencing years of my dad’s gags would’ve alerted me to the scam. But the sweater was a perfect match of the real one, down to the smallest detail. It had a thick but tiny collar. The miniature cuffs were beefy. The only thing that could have improved it would’ve been a tiny coffee stain.
I grabbed the sweater using two fingers and bolted back up the stairs. I jogged toward the dining room and halted at the door. I looked over at Dad and said, “You are not gonna like this.”
When I held up the tiny sweater, the room erupted into laughter.
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