Avery and his daddy
Pete and Repeat were in a boat. Pete fell out, who was left?
Mine is a family of repeaters. For whatever reason, we tell the same jokes, laugh at the same stories, find catch phrases in our routine. My mother leaves the exact same voice message every time she calls: “Hey Laur, it’s just mom. I’m just calling to say ‘hi’ and to see how your day was…” No joke, she says this every time she leaves a message. My sister and I tell stories of other people’s stories: “My father used to say ‘Have some bacon, Bobby!’ at meals because his cousin once ate a lot of bacon”. We tell this story constantly even though we don’t know Bobby and the whole idea of him hogging the bacon isn’t particularly that funny. But we as verbal packrats tuck our lame stories in our back pockets and pull them out as frequently as engagements allow.
These stories are still entertaining to us, no matter how many times we hear them, and we rarely even notice we are on the 156th telling of the story until someone outside our family reminds us they’ve had enough.
But nothing makes a repeater feel more at home than living with another repeater. Sean doesn’t tell stories really, he throws phrases around during daily activity. It’s taken me a few years to realize the extent of how much of a repeater Sean is, but now I wait for him to say his catch phrases before he says them. It’s as if I am sat in a theater watching a favorite movie and waiting for the punchlines before they hit.
When Sean fast forwards commercials, he says “Right to it, Peach!” or when we walk past the soup isle in the grocery store, he asks “Do you wanna get some nice soups?”. Nice soups. Always. Never just soup. At night he asks me, “Do you know where the remote is?” even though I never have it, and when we cook beans he always asks me if I’d like the fat because he knows how much it grosses me out. He says “A little scratching maybe?” whenever he’d like a back scratch, and “I might go…(Insert action)” before he does absolutely everything. “I might go make a burrito. I might go put on some socks. I might start a fire. I might go for a bike ride”. He’ll say “I might go up to bed.” and two minutes later will say “OK Love, I’m gonna go up to bed.” He is as predictable as I am.
Alzheimer’s runs in Sean’s family and I know he worries about inheriting the disease. Heck, last night he couldn’t remember the name of the first female supreme court justice (Sandra Day O’Connor btw), and immediately said maybe the Alzheimer’s is coming.
But Sean’s memory is fine. We are just repeaters by nature. And wouldn’t you know it, he fits right in with my family and never complains when my sister comes for dinner and exclaims, “Have some bacon, Bobby!”
