Suspicious Sean

In early April 1976 Mom came home from the Leaf Rapids hospital with my little brother in tow. Witness my stunned expression at this sudden turn of events, and the suspicious look my new little brother is giving me. While it's true I would allow Sean to eat a cigarette and trick him into eating peppercorns some years in the future, I had as yet done nothing to warrant Sean's youthful wariness. Indeed, in the beginning Sean tricked me more often than not. Once, while I lay reading on the very couch pictured here, Sean climbed onto the backrest and leaped feet-first onto my ribcage, driving the wind from my lungs!

In the extreme foreground of this photo you can see the central component of a set of three matching glass-topped coffee tables. Sean's love of climbing onto things and jumping down very nearly had tragic consequences, for not long after jumping on my chest he decided to dive from the couch onto one of the glass side tables. The impact shattered the table, and Sean landed in a heap of jagged shards of dark green glass. Fortunately he was unharmed, and Mom evicted the tables immediately.

The couch lasted much longer than the tables. It moved to Leduc with us and resided in the family basement for decades. Eventually we had to recruit a bunch of my largest friends to remove the couch, for it contained a ludicrously heavy hide-a-bed. (Actually, my memories are mixed up - we actually hauled it away as detailed in this post. I must have been thinking of another piece of furniture.) I'm sure that couch would have stopped bullets.