my little cousin sammy is an ICU nurse up in seattle in the covid trenches as i've mentioned but one thing i just found out is she carries our late grandpa john's stethoscope from his pediatric practice with her to work, it doesn't work anymore but she takes it for good luck

grandpa was a dr, in fact we didn't even call him grandpa we called him "dr john" and his wife was a nurse and they'd just be absolutely bustling at the seams with pride if they knew their granddaughter was fighting a pandemic, they'd hire a skywriter, they'd build her a monument

they were such a hilarious couple but i've told tons of stories about them before, the spray paint floor before the party, the wrist rocket thing, accepting payment in chili rellenos. instead of a story about them here's sammy and me

i wish i'd got that painted cabinet instead of my aunt but jokes on her, i got the nicest thing in the whole house: the Panamanian mahogany table carved by our great-great-grandpa which she tried to sell with the house and i stole in the night at the last minute

he didn't attend any births of his own family even tho he was the main women's physician in our small town. he attended the births of all my friends but he called in a pal for any relatives. too fraught. when they handed me to him in the hall he said i was "pink and juicy"

in fact the dr on call when my mom went into labor was named "dr gilbert" but by the time he got to the room she was already super stoned and thought he said "dr yogurt" and she spent the entire 50 hours of back labor intermittently laughing about the name "dr yogurt"

when sammy and i were small, along with our 36 other cousins, our favorite game to play was "fashion show" which is where we'd get our hair wet and comb it in weird ways and then run around the house dripping everywhere

our other favorite thing was Scary Story Night which was of course any night a lot of us were together and expected to sleep in the same space so pretty much 35x a year. this is where my uncle charlie was a champ because he invented an entire genre of family lore called...

CARLOS: THE WEREWOLF HUNTER

every story was a classic horror story retold in some goofy way but he'd gather his various dipshit nieces and nephews still with dripping heads into sleeping bags in some timber-clad barn or forest service hut and begin like this:

"waaaaaaay back in the day" (and here imagine, a sea of wide-eyed strangely tall irish american children grown vigorous on salmon and sea air, by lantern light yelling back the punchline) "BEFORE... I EVER... MET... YOUR MOTHER"

carlos went on the most amazing adventures all around the world. in reality charlie owned a record store that sold bootleg tapes and was frequently cited by the FCC and hadn't paid taxes since 1976 but in his stories he was the hero of werewolf ravaged villages worldwide

once carlos was surrounded by baying werewolves in a lonesome cabin on the peak of a frigid mountain in Romania where he'd led the pack with a torch so the villagers and their children could escape. he was out of silver bullets but what did he do?

he melted down his St Christopher mediallion that he wore around his neck and forged it into a primitive bullet using tools he found in the hut and ZAP he got the King Werewolf right between the eyes. he was so brave and strong the pope replaced it for him... and here it is now

as i got older i felt the need to contribute to Scary Story Night beyond the usual recitation of random half-remembered urban legends we all did between Carlos stories. so Sammy and i hatched a plan

she would tell an elaborate story about a killer of some kind who had a large knife and while everyone was RAPT i'd sneak away "to the bathroom" and steal a knife from the kitchen and from the balcony room above (a very 70s house) i'd project it with a knife across the wall

of course the first thing that went awry is that Sammy is an awful story teller and nobody was paying any mind to her rambling saga that somehow incorporated hand-hook-man, evil china dolls, green ribbon neck girl, the lot. she was slapping them yelling "listen!"

the next thing that went wrong was of course the godforsaken trundle bed was made of wrought iron and in trying to sneak away i stubbed my toe on it and ripped it all to hell and had to be treated in a brief teary interlude in the hall by my drunk dad w a wilderness first aid kit

so finally i limp down the hall bleeding everywhere and go and steal a 3 inch steak knife with a plasticine blade and limp back like a TINY PSYCHOPATH and i hold it up before the dim glow of my hand-crank torch and create a terrifying visage of naught

absolute naught, it's out of focus and the knife doesn't show at all, it's just a blur on the wall and my older cousin Meghan yells "who's shining a light from up there?" and sammy instead of salvaging it and saying "oh it's the flashlight ghost" immediately yells ITS ELIZABETH

anyway that's my story about how sammy and i ruined scary story night, one of many times we did so but this time it wasn't by pissing our sleeping bags or anything like that, it was by tomfoolery

our other favorite thing in the world, me and sammy, was a game we called "the Secret Joke" where we'd just tell a story along the lines of "deep into the night, we were going potty" and a bunch of potty words? and laugh hysterically but never tell our big brothers what was funny

we also thought it was great that the american girl doll samantha looked like me (elizabeth) and the american girl doll elizabeth looked like her (samantha) once when it snowed she sledded right into a pile of my puke. i pushed her off a lower rung of a radio tower

years later i was on a camping trip with her when i got a call telling me they'd finally found my friend mike's body and i turned to her after getting off the phone and she just handed me a gallon of HRD and said "i bet i can swim across the estuary faster than you"

anyway let's please be kind to nurses, and i don't mean in the applause sense, i mean in the very good pay and workplace protection sense, as one of them i like very much, and all of them i like some

oh my god i can't believe i forgot the funniest sammy story of all time. so my mom and dad and i went to stay up with them all for a week or something when i was about 6 and they lived up by Pomeroy

uncle Chris her dad was at that point not in charge of basically all of the washington forest service as he is today but was a lowly park ranger of some description complete with disreputable wreck of a truck reeking of diesel and camphor

and they all had to live in government housing because of his job so it was like six kids and four adults packed into a tiny little shingled cabin with a sink the size of an ice cube tray four hours from town etc

so we're up there and samantha has this baby doll we're both in love with where if you press the button on its tummy it goes "mama! i love you! hahaha!" and we joyfully play with it in the duff under the fire in the sunshine with the ladybugs

and we don't even know and don't find out for years later that there was a big big bad fire raging RIGHT over the ridge and both my mom and my aunty were staying up literally all night listening to the radio to know if we'd all have to evacuate

so anyway we go to bed one night and my mom tells me she heard this absolute wailing from sammy's room which, be fair, was a closet with bunk beds stuck in, she hears me screaming like i've been attacked so she comes running all four steps

and in the night the batteries of the doll had died almost all the way but not QUITE all the way and sammy and i had been sleeping together on the top bunk rolled over on it and it said in the lowest most demonic loathesome voice

MAAA MAAA iiii LOOOOOVE yooouuu, haa. haa. haaaa

and we'd FLUNG the thing!!! as far as it would go down the corridor and there we were clinging to each other like we were drowning clinging to a ships rigging

as the ash of a smoldering inferno settled over the roof of our tiny tin house like snow in a far-away land called 1993