My uncle’s favourite pastime was building cars out of noodles.

There was a noticeable gasp and everyone turned their attention towards me, as I sat in the back of a large ornate conference room of a law firm we had all been summoned to. I shrugged my shoulders feeling embarrassed. I didn’t know what was expected of me. Should I stand up and say hooray I won or just hope the floor would open and swallow me.

The attorney who had summoned us sat at the head of a long mahogany conference table facing my entire family. As there were only enough chairs to accommodate 99.999% of my family, and as I was deemed to be the least influential and most likely not to succeed in life, I was relegated to a broken chair brought into the room by a janitor who had showered or bathed sometime in the last century. I could tell because where he had grabbed the chair, there were distinct marks, brown marks left by his dirty hands. And I was supposed to sit on that.

The attorney thanked the janitor profusely for pushing the chair into the room delicately and managing to only bang into the ornate conference room door once, and the table a few more times leaving marks but not destroying the room entirely. He pushed it at first into the centre of the room, where no centre existed. Then finally, after the attorney yelled at him, he pushed it into the far corner and left it their facing the panelled walls where the chair had made a life altering gash.

But it was when the janitor was leaving that I noticed his outstretched arms and realised he had no alternative but to bump into things and destroy all that was in his path, because he was blind. Once I realised that, I was in awe of the man for achieving so much in such a short space of time. I applauded. But seeing that I was the only one who did, I stopped after clapping twice. The janitor whose name I never learnt was pleasantly surprised that he had received a short round of applause. However, before he could do more damage, the attorney’s secretary who at that precise moment entered the room, yanked him out by his collar in what I thought was a very cruel and mean fashion. Once the chair was placed in the distant corner of the very large room, it was as if a whistle sounded and everyone ran to their seats except for me. I knew I wasn’t part of that crowd. I lived on the very edge of my family, because of my scientific experiments which had caused great harm to society as a whole and my family specifically. Some had sustained lifelong injuries. Fingers missing, toes bent out of shape and scars on their faces from misfired rockets which I began to assemble even before I got my grown-up teeth. That was when I was banished to the basement of our small mobile home. The last straw was when I had tried to see if I could generate electricity by rubbing both my sister’s cats together. I succeeded and both cats went up in flames. Who knew cats were highly combustible. Anyway, I’m digressing, but only slightly.

As I was growing up, my Uncle Joe was my favourite family member, even though he was really not a blood relative. Nobody in their right minds would claim to be a blood relative to a bunch of low lives who didn’t work for a living and felt it was the government’s responsibility to take care of them. But my uncle was different. He had been, before he retired, a science professor at the local technical institute and it was from him I learnt all things science, though I later discovered that his type of science was frowned upon by the rest of decent society. He loved building things that exploded. That’s probably why on his business card his name was written as Joseph ‘Bang’ Walter and nothing else. The Bang part was in quotation marks, so I assumed it was something he had bestowed on himself and was naturally very proud of.

Now we were all in an attorney’s office where we had been called because we were named in his will. The attorney was very diligent in reading the will out aloud, stopping occasionally to take a sip of what looked like water, but judging by how he began to slur his words the longer we were there, it could’ve been either vodka or gin.

We all knew Uncle Joe didn’t have much money. He lived in the trailer next to ours and judging by the appearance, he probably couldn’t even afford that so, we didn’t expect very much and as the list was read out that’s exactly as it was. My mother got a dead rose in a flowerpot with instructions to try and resuscitate it because she was so good at resuscitating her husband, my father, every Friday night when he came home from the pub dead drunk. Then there was my sister who got a roll of toilet paper. I have no idea why, and this is how the next half an hour went. No, there weren’t that many members of the family. It’s just that as the attorney kept reading the more his words were slurred, and in order not to sound too unprofessional, he began to read slower and slower.

And then the time came. The attorney looked up and his secretary stopped him from rolling onto the floor, he hiccuped and asked, “who’s Jeff?” I raised my hand. But because of where I had been banished, he couldn’t see me. “Ah yes,” he hiccuped again, “and to you,” he continued very slowly, “I give Jeff Ambrose my collection of cars.”

There has a gasp. No one knew he had a collection of cars, let alone one car. Yes, he was a professor at the local technical institute. But that was attached to the back of his house, so he didn’t need to drive there and there was never any car parked in his short driveway. There wasn’t any room because of the garbage that piled up over the years. With that pronouncement, the doors to the conference room swung open and in came a procession of people dressed very formally and then one by one, they placed toy cars on the table. Everyone was stunned. I certainly didn’t know that my uncle’s favourite pastime was building cars out of noodles. But yet again, it must’ve been because there they were. A procession of cars though no one knew what makes, made from bucatini, rigatoni and macaroni. And with each car came a small write up on it. But then came the kicker. Some museum in a European country I had never heard of, wanted them to be a part of their permanent collection and had offered to purchase them for 1 million dollars. Expensive pasta. As soon as the last noodle machine was placed on the table, the attorney sent over to me by way of my family, a cheque in that amount.

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Rosa’s Birthday Party