Tell Me a Funny Story
Stories are the fabric of our lives--what makes us who we are.
Once upon a time, as all the best stories start, my father took our family, along with my cousins, aunt and uncle, and grandparents, to dinner at the American Legion in Robbinsdale, MN. I remember it as being a nice place with curved stairs and a nice dining room with huge windows looking down onto what would have been one of Minnesota's more than 10,000 lakes if there hadn't been trees and other things in the way. I don't claim my memory is perfect.
I was twelve that year. I sat next to my cousin Sheryl at a big round table. I ordered a hamburger. It came with all the other meals. I took off the top bun to squeeze a dollop of ketchup onto the middle of the patty, put the bun back on, picked up my burger and bit into it.
Strangely....there was no patty! Just bread! I opened the bun to verify--yep, no burger! I couldn't figure this out. I had just put ketchup on a patty. I couldn't have imagined doing it. I pointed this out to my cousin Sheryl and we both started looking around--around my plate, my lap, the floor around me. Surely it must have somehow fallen out, yet it was nowhere to be found!
Our search for the missing burger patty became obvious to the others and my father was not amused that we were behaving like this at a nice restaurant. When we explained the situation, however, others began looking around the table and the floor. This burger seemed to have vanished into an alternate universe, inaccessible to the American Legion!
When the waitress came back shortly after, my dad said, "There's no patty on this burger!" She was shocked. She quickly brought me another patty. We ate dinner and I thought that was that--a mystery that would never be solved.
However, I looked down one more time--and this time I saw the Mysterious Missing Burger. The carpet in those years, was a pattern of red circles within brown circles on an overall red background. When my patty somehow (still couldn't tell you how!) managed to slide out from between the two buns, it landed upright, perfectly aligned with one of the larger brown circles so that the ketchup matched exactly one of the smaller red circles!
We picked it up, wrapped it in a napkin and brought it home for our dog.
As I write the story, which still makes me laugh today, I think it sounds like a story I would have told when I took part in Liar, Liar in Minneapolis around 2017 or 2018. It sounds implausible. How that burger fell out of the bun still baffles me. How it fell so perfectly in alignment with the brown and red pattern on the floor seems hard to believe. Yet it did. And decades later, it still makes me laugh.
It's a story that is so implausible, in the precision and perfect placement with which that burger landed, somehow without smearing the ketchup even, that I picture a God who sometimes orchestrates such moments for our amusement. And it has made me laugh for decades now. As I set the table for the burgers Chris grilled tonight, I almost used the black plates. Then I remembered that Mysterious Missing Burger and chose the red plates.
What is your funny story?
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