A story from Elna Baker - 2/14/2015

so I come from a family of five kids and every member of every family you know you have your respective roles but in my family this is the breakdown my older sister Tina is the pretty one I'm the funny one Julia's the sarcastic one Britain's the boy and Jill's the baby and you know we're all capable of being many things but in general these are the roles that we play and my parents were young when they had kids 20 and 21 and when you grow up with young parents you're not so much kids as you are an experiment you've been there some so I remember growing up my dad came home from work one day and he said do you guys know what serial killers are and we were like no and he said you guys are serial killers and he piled us in the van and we drove to the grocery store and we got to pick out whatever cereal we wanted and squirt guns and masks and we proceeded to drive to all my parents friends houses and ring the bell and when they opened it we would hold up our cereal and our squirt guns and say put your hands up we're serial killers and then we would go inside and force them to eat cereal and that was just normal with my family but then something happened when my older sister was 11 our lives completely changed my dad got a job that moved us from this small town in Washington state to Spain and my parents had never left the United States and they were thrilled they wanted to see as much as the world as they could possibly and it didn't matter that they had five small children who could care less I one summer we went to 25 countries and at the time one of the kid catchphrases was not another castle and at the the thing I loved about my parents is they were really committed to each of us figuring out how to be our own person and one summer we took the ferry down to Morocco and they took us to a carpet factory where all these children were working and they paid the Gorman to have us work for a day so they dropped us off at a factory and I worked an assembly line and at the time I didn't get it I just thought like this is a really bad day but what I realized was that I couldn't take my life for granted because other kids didn't get to have my life and yet in the midst of all of this we all still stuck to our respective roles my role being I was the funny one and the reason I was the funny one was because I was chubby and so I needed you know to use my sense of humor to get attention and I think that role really was cemented on that trip to Morocco we were walking down the street and this man stopped my parents because he'd noticed my older sister and he said to my parents your daughter is so beautiful I will give you one thousand camels for her and my parents were like no thank you and then he looked at me and looked me up and down and said I'll give you a hundred camels for that one hey and I was like 900 camels there's a 900 camel difference between me and my sister and honestly the rest of my life can be described as a pursuit to be worth more camels but you know as I got older I was still chubby at my heaviest I was 265 pounds so not chubby clinically obese but semantics and then in my mid-20s I went on a diet and I lost all of that weight and I was living in New York City at the time and my family didn't see me over the course of this entire diet and it was a huge transformation I went from a size 20 to a size 6 and you know one thing I noticed immediately was how differently people treated me you know I went from being treated one way to a completely different way and as exciting as it was to get attention or to be treated well it was also kind of a jaidynn experience because i knew i hadn't been treated that way before and so in the midst of this kind of identity crisis i got a call from my parents that we were going to go on a family trip to cyprus and i thought yes this is exactly what i need i need to see my family and i need to reconnect with who i really am and I was like flew on that airplane I was suddenly struck by this wave of anxiety because I thought what what if my family's like the rest of the world what if they treat me differently now that I look differently and I stepped off that airplane and all six of them were waiting and their jaws dropped like I thought that was just an expression but their mouths were wide open they didn't even recognize me and for the next hour I mean they were my family but my family at a distance and I watched them watch me you know and think like okay that's Elna and when Elna does this that's how Alma looks when she does it as if they were recalibrating their mind to recognize me and then we got in the car and maybe an hour later I was drinking my water and my dad made fun of me for drinking like a fish and I was like that's just how I drink and then I spilled water all over myself and they all started laughing and just like that the spell was broken and I was back to being treated the way I had always been treated which is what I thought I wanted it wasn't I wanted to be the pretty one now and this became very clear on the first night of our trip we went to a restaurant and we're having dinner and in the middle of dinner the restaurant owner came up to our table and he looked at my sister and he said wow you are so beautiful and for a second I thought he was pointing at me and then I realized it was my sister and I was like oh and then he walked back to the back of the restaurant and returned with a gold necklace which he presented to my sister and it was hideous right I mean it was ugly I don't but I was filled with jealousy I just kept thinking that necklace should be mine I'm like at least 750 camels 900 with makeup I mean I deserve that necklace and we walked out of the restaurant and as we were walking away sarcastic sister turned to me and said well I guess Tina will always be the pretty one and I in a voice that's so much resembled frankenstein's turned and said no I am Britain now and that was just the beginning the second day of the trip we were driving and my dad was talking about elephants and I you know I piped in with a joke I was like elephants or Ella funny not not funny right not really not the best joke I've ever told not funny at all but sarcastic sister turned to me and said Elna you're not funny and I started sobbing because I was like she's right I'm not funny but I'm not pretty so if I'm not the funny one or the pretty one then Who am I and I just started bawling loudly crying and crying and my dad in the front seat turned around it was like Elna it's okay you're funny you are hysterical and then it was the third day of the trip and meanwhile you know I had been on this diet the you know entire nine months and on my diet every day I ate lunch at one o'clock so at 1 o'clock I announced to my family it's one I need to eat at one but we were driving to this other town and we had to get there and by the time we got there it was too and I said it's too I need to eat at one so we started looking for restaurants and everything was closed there was no food anywhere and I in a hangry meltdown sat down in the middle of the street and said I needed to eat at one no one listens to me I'm not moving until you listen and my family left and I waited for about 30 minutes and eventually my brother returned and told me that they had found a Kentucky Fried Chicken and I was like oh great cuz that's on my diet Kentucky Fried Chicken but I followed him and you know in the Kentucky Fried Chicken sitting in a circle was my family and an empty seat with the plate of fried food and so I sat in the seat and I you know took napkins and sort of dramatically patted the food down and then took a fork and moved it around trying to find something I could eat and from across the table my dad looked at me and said good job which to his credit apparently he meant good job you know trying to stick to your diet even though you're starving but what I heard was good job you throw a fit we stopped everything and so I took the plate of fried food and I shoved it across the table at him and I said no one listens to me I I've changed I'm a grown-up now and when I say I eat at one I eat at one and lunch was ruined and we got back in the car and my father was furious and everyone was tense we weren't talking we just wanted to go home but we still had to go to this place called Aphrodite's Rock but my mother was navigating and if she has a role in the family it's a bad at navigating so she navigated for two hours to this other destination called Adonis's bath and we didn't realize it until we were almost there and my parents started getting in this fight you know should we go shouldn't we go and they're in the front arguing about this and you know we're driving along the side of this steep cliff and from the front I guess my dad could see a very very steep drop to a dirt road and a sign that said Adonis's bath but in the back we couldn't see any of this so they're arguing and he just says okay fine have it your way and steers towards the cliff and all five of us in the back genuinely think dad has had enough he's driving us off a cliff so we scream at the top of our lungs No and then you know we clear the cliff and we see the steep road and we're all laughing and screaming and we just keep screaming for fun and we're like we thought you were gonna kill us and my parents start screaming too and they're like they thought we were gonna kill them and we're whipping around corners like it's a rollercoaster screaming the entire way and we get to this place called Adonis's bath and it was beautiful it's these pools of water with waterfalls that go down into more pools with floating flowers and rope swings and we spent the debate the rest of the day there as a family just playing in the water and you know I stopped trying to figure out who I was or who I was supposed to be or how people saw me because I was with my family you know these people I'd been with my whole life and I could be whoever I wanted to be and at the end of the night as we were leaving my dad said to the man who ran the place he said you should really put this in a tourist book it's the best thing we've done in Cyprus and the man said to my father you can't put paradise in a tourist book you have to discover it and to end this story in our basement we have a couch called the Sharpie couch it's a white leather couch that you write and sharpey when you feel like writing because why not and the most famous thing on the Sharpie couch my brother wrote when he got back from the trip we walked through the door he dropped his bags picked up a sharpie and in giant letters wrote top three things never to say to Elma one Tina's the pretty sister to you're not funny and three good job miss Ella Baker ladies and gentlemen more story

Channel: Radio Heartland

Views: 18,646

Keywords: Prairie Home Companion, A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor, Radio, Public Radio, Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald Theater, Chris Thile, Elna Baker

Id: gH_bkxGdO-Y

Length: 12min 57sec (777 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 14 2015