I don’t know if I told everyone this story in bits or pieces, but this was one of the first times my father (the charming man but big fat liar) and his lies made me out to be a fool. Not wrong, just a fool.
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So Ed and Lynn and I are watching “Hello Dolly” on video, and the song “It Only Takes a Moment to Fall In Love” comes on. That same song is now known by the world as it was included in Wall.E to great effect. Thinking I have something unique to share, I do what I normally do. I pipe up to share my vast fount of knowledge.
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“Do you know how long a Moment is?” I ask. Now, I am quite satisfied with the answer because most people assume that a moment is some indeterminate length of time. But I know the truth, and after a moment of hesitation by them, I say, “A Moment is EXACTELY 2 minutes.”
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Lynn and Ed calmly (and more politely) call bullshit on me. And so I am forced to explain to the poor saps. “No really. When I was little…”
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It is at this point in the story I realize I am well and fully screwed. After all, if I heard it when I was “little”, I probably heard it through my father. But like a cornered rat, I prattle on – now knowingly bluffing, “…when I was little the commercials would come on TV and say ‘We’ll be back in a moment’. And I was told that a moment was EXACTELY 2 minutes and you could tell because they showed four 30 second commercials.”
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Ed pounces on the weak link in my story, “Told by who?”
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Being wrong, I get defensive...“Not everything he said was a lie. He said the last title before a movie starts is the ‘Directed By’, and he was right there.”
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There is general arguing before we turn back to Hello Dolly – but it is not forgotten. The next night, on return from the desert Ed has to look this up in the dictionary, like, 2 minutes after we are in the door. He is right and I am wrong. He IMMEDIATELY calls Lynn
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He starts the conversation without even so much as a hello...“I looked it up. You know what the dictionary says a Moment is?”
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He then hands the phone to me and says, "Tell her!"
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And since I had the phone I did. “The dictionary says a Moment is exactly 2 minutes.” And I hung up.
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Ed called back immediately. Ed and Lynn laugh and everyone has a big laugh at my expense. And I vow to always count internally to 10 before I repeated something my wonderful lying father told me - just to do a quick saniety test.
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