Many years ago, Uncle Ted fell from the sky.

Good news is he landed smack dab in the old grape gondola. Bad news is that Da had let it fill up with rainwater for about ten years, which was about when he’d pulled out the grape vines and switched over to farming servers with the occasional goat thrown in for old time’s sake. Mosquitos had laid their eggs in the gondola for decades, and since it was late Spring, it was also full up with tadpoles.

Uncle Ted was unconscious, obviously, because falling from the sky, especially into a body of water (no matter how small and filled with tadpoles and mosquito eggs) will take a lot out of a person. So once the tadpoles got over their shock, they decided to investigate the nooks and crannies of the new object in their home.

So our family’s first introduction to Uncle Ted was the screaming man running through the back patio during dinner, ripping his clothes off and flinging them about willy-nilly.

No one knows where his shoes ended up.