My Uncle Mike, whom I mentioned briefly in yesterday's post, has always been a prankster. He's the guy who slaps your back at Christmas and leaves a huge gift bow in place. At the beach, he's the guy out with you in the ocean who dives under when you are not looking and grabs your leg, pretending to be a shark.
A few years ago, he and and my aunt (his wife), were out in the ocean body surfing. There were not many good waves, so they ended up just floating around for a good while, laughing and talking. All of a sudden, Mike stopped talking mid-sentence. My aunt looked up, and he was no where to be seen. She just assumed he was playing another one of his tricks.
Then she saw something dark and large moving behind her in the water. She hightailed it towards shore, where she saw Mike way ahead of her, yelling and running towards the rest of us like a lunatic.
It turned out that the big dark shape was a sea turtle. At our beach, sea turtles come up every year to build nests in the dunes and lay their eggs. It's an incredible sight. Months later, watching the hatched baby turtles coming up out of the nest and waddling toward the water is one of the most awesome things I have ever seen in my life.
Anyway, Mike had seen the dark object, and instead of playing white knight and dragging my aunt out of there, he left her there as a sacrifice so he could get to shore safely. This is a story he will never live down. We remind him every year. I guess that's what you get for being the prankster of the family!
(BTW - Daily Post Prewritten - I'm on Vacation!)
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