How My Grandparents Met

One more pause on this past weekend, if you don't mind, which I'm sure you won't, because you don't exist, person who I believe reads my blog. So I can pause without cause and still receive no applause. (EDITORS NOTE: that rhyme doesn't make sense).

I spent this past weekend with a group of fifteen year olds at a fall camp retreat (NOTE THE PRESENCE OF THE DEEP V IN THE INSET). We were extremely bored. There are only so many games of Ultimate Frisbee a man can withstand before his index finger begins to bleed. Plus, whenever the sun goes down, there isn't much to do except for sappy stuff.

In a related story that is too long to tell today, I once invented an alternate persona named Dragon Master. I promise to one day explain it, but all I can say is that with this persona came several stories of dragon fighting honor and valour. Originally, I told these stories to put seven year olds to bed. As it turns out, it works just as well, possibly better, with high schoolers.

I told my guys the story about my grandfather, a magnificent Dragon Master in his own right, behind enemy lines in World War II taking out a nest of dragons trained by the Third Reich. Dropped into Nazi occupied France, his team was completely obliterated mid-air by flak fire (this is why the story might work better with older kids: I was able to describe in detail entrails falling through the night sky, coming out of dead floating paratroopers). With only a British sniper, Sergeant Gladstone, and a mysterious Frenchman with perfect skin who they conscripted as a guide, my grandfather found the nest and destroyed it. In the end, Sergeant Gladstone had to sacrifice his life for the success of the mission, but the Dragon Master and the Frenchman survived (who turned out to be a woman, who later became my grandmother).

I told this story in installments, culminating in a late night finale, with half of the group sleeping. When it came time for the killing blow to the primary antagonist, a dragon named Ephialtes, I had my grandfather blow off the dragon's leg by wedging a grenade between a knife and the skin of the dragon it was stuck in. After the leg was gone, the dragon was still alive, but it was laying on the explosive charges that were meant to seal the cave and trap the dragons. My grandfather raised the detonator, but when it came time to say his final words to the dragon, hopefully in pun form, I blanked. I said, "And he said," and then there was a thirty second pause, and then I said the only thing that came to mind, "Way to go." And then he blew up the dragon.