Why Do They Call Me Merna?

For those of you who don't know me very well, or who don't know me as well as you thought you did, or or those of you who want to know me more than you've ever wanted anything in your life, I will explain to you why I am known as Merna.

My two best friends have always been my nieces, Jamie and Julie. One day when we were probably around 9 or 1o, we decided that we were going to come up with the ugliest names we could think of. The name I chose was Merna Caboo, Jamie was Agnes Zilch, and Julie was Joice Yuzam. My dad wanted to name me Myrna when I was born, after some old fart actress and that is why I chose that name. You may notice that Merna and Joice do not use the traditional spellings...we didn't know how to spell. At this time I would like to apologize to those of you named Agnes, Myrna, or Joyce....all beautiful names for beautiful women, I'm sure. Along with our ugly new names, we chose the ugliest colors we could think of. My color was orange, Agnes's was puke green, and Joice's was yellow. A few years later we added middle names, all of which were physical ailments or anomalies...Goiter, Adenoid, and Polyp. We had a lot of time on our hands as children. One of our favorite things to do was annoy everyone we came in contact with. The people we loved to annoy the most were the employees of the Cache Valley Mall. Back then our parents thought nothing of dropping us off at the mall for a few hours to get us out of their hair but if they had any idea what we were up to when we were there, I'm pretty sure they would have forbidden us from ever entering its doors again. First of all, we would wear the most bizarre things we could find. My mother,as the one who generally dropped us off, was fully aware of what we were wearing and said nothing. If my brother Ralph or his wife Marsha had had any idea, they never would have let Agnes and Joice near me ever again. We would find huge pieces of material in my parents' basement and "make" dresses out of them. Really we just folded a piece of material in half and cut a hole in the top and put it over our heads and then belted it. To accessorize we would add a clown wig or a white plastic cowboy hat, or something equally stylish. Once at the mall we would make a game out of annoying people. We would go to the candy counter at ZCMI and ask for one of each flavor of Jelly Belly, and then put it on my mom's credit card. We would take a jar of pennies and ask sales people to change it into quarters, nickels, or dimes and then ask them to turn it back into pennies. We made one poor ZCMI employee jump up and down so we could hear if he had any change in his pockets, which we would then beg him to give us...and he would do it! His name was Boyd but we called him Oye Oye Oye. I should be embarrassed about the shenanigans of my childhood but we had way too much fun for me to wish it hadn't happened.

This is an explanation of why I chose The Life and Times of Merna Caboo as the title of my blog...don't start calling me Merna if you have never done so before. It's a hideous name.