A Whale of a Tale
by Sherri Walter
I was raised by a liar. The best liar. He told me a whopper that was so obvious I should have spotted it.
I didn’t.
I was a grown woman before my husband spotted it for me. And had great fun pointing it out to me. To this day, it is one of “our” stories. Every couple has those stories you pull out at parties when you want to be entertaining. Because the truth is, it is down right funny. Laugh out loud funny. Hysterical, really. Even I have to admit it. Even though it makes me look like a ditz.
Here’s the deal. I grew up a very rich kid. And I didn’t know it. Had no idea. Because Dad lied. I believed a whopper the size of a whale until I was a grown woman. I defended this lie vehemently because I believed in it so much.
all started when we were having dinner with friends. I was telling our friends at dinner how much fun we used to have as a family living in Southern California going to Catalina Island for the weekend. In our boat. My husband was interested in the details. Where did we sleep? On the boat. He is thinking ski boat, where the seats pull out into beds. No, I tell him. There were beds. Real beds. He thinks there is a small cabin below deck. I tell how my dad was an amazing boat driver. Mom used to bring her card club friends out on the boat when it was her turn to host. Sometimes one of the cards would float away in the breeze. Dad was such a good boatman, he could get close enough to the card floating on the water so that mom could lean over and pick it up. My husband is not interested in Dad’s captain abilities. He is stuck on card club.
“How could they play cards on the boat?” My hubby wants to know. “On their laps?” he asked. No. Folding tables. We set them up on the deck. My dad was crazy, amazing piloting that boat. My husband is not interested in Dad. He says, “Did you say tables? As in plural, more than one?” He is annoying me with his attention to trivial details. Yes, there was more than one. Three, maybe four. I don’t really remember. He interrupts me again. He feels three or four card tables on the deck means this is a really big boat. It was seafaring. It was bigger than a ski boat, but not huge, I tell him.
I have moved on to telling him about the time we saw whales on the way to Catalina. Now my husband wants to know what we did if we had to go to the bathroom while we were making the trip, or in the middle of the night. The boat had a small bathroom. I try to get the conversation back to the whales. “Boats don’t have bathrooms. I think it was a yacht.” My husband has a thing about interrupting good stories. Little girl that I was, I thought the whales were small islands. I spotted them first and pointed them out to my dad. They were big enough you could walk on them. Dad was kind of nervous about the whales. “What about eating?” He was interrupting again! Annoying much? The whales weren’t eating. They were just swimming. “No, what did you eat on these weekends to Catalina?” he wanted to know. Abalone. My dad and his friends loved to catch them and cook them up fresh, but I thought they were rubbery and gross.
“Where did they cook them?” Now we were getting to what my husband was driving at. “Was there a kitchen on the boat?” Of course not! There was, however, a small sink, fridge and stove that Mom and Dad called the galley. “That’s a yacht!” My husband is persistent. I explain the technicalities as Dad explained them to me. The official length for a boat to be a yacht is 43 feet. Our boat, The Ranger II, a top of the line Hatteras, was 42 feet and therefore under the legal limit to be considered a yacht.
That’s a whopper.
A whale of a tale.
I bought it hook, line and sinker. I guess Dad thought that snooty girls who knew the truth were worse than down to earth girls who were gullible. So he lied. And I believed it, well in to my twenties.
Come April 1 to How Big Was That Fish Day and share your whale of a tale.
I promise to believe you.
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