“Your father was really proud of this pipe,” my mother interrupts again. “He’d smoke it all night while he studied, and sometimes—“
“Look, Ann, do you want to tell the story or are you going to let me finish?”
“Sorry, Dad. Go ahead.”
“Anyway, this poor fella—he was another African students, wasn’t he? Fresh off the boat. This poor kid must’ve been impressed with the way Barack was holding forth with this pipe, ‘cause he asked if he could give it a try. Your dad thought about it for a minute, and finally agreed, and as soon as the fella took his first puff, he started coughing up a fit. Coughed so hard that the pipe slipped out of his hand and dropped over the railing, a hundred feet down the face of the cliff.”
Gramps stops to take another nip from his flask before continuing. “Well, now, your dad was gracious enough to wait until his friend stopped coughing before he told him to climb over the railing and bring the pipe back. The man took one peek down the ninety-degree incline and told Barack that he’d buy him a replacement—“
“Quite sensibly,” Toot says from the kitchen. (We call my grandmother Tutu, Toot for short; it means “grandparent” in Hawaiian, for she decided on the day I was born that she was still too young to be called Granny.) Gramps scowls but decides to ignore her.
“—but Barack was adamant[8] about getting his pipe back, because it was a gift and couldn’t be replaced. So the fella took another look, and shook his head again, and that’s when your dad picked him clear off the ground and started dangling him over the railing!”
Gramps lets out a hoot and gives his knee a jovial slap. As he laughs, I imagine myself looking up at my father, dark against the brilliant sun, the transgressor’s arms flailing about as he’s held aloft. A fearsome vision of justice.
“He wasn’t really holding him over the railing, Dad,” my mother says, looking to me with concern, but Gramps takes another sip of whiskey and plows forward. “At this point, other people were starting to stare and your mother was begging Barack to stop. I guess Barack’s friend was just holding his breath and saying his prayers. Anyway, after a couple of minutes, your dad set the man back down on his feet, patted him on the back, and suggested, calm as you please, that they all go find themselves a beer. And don’t you know, that’s how your dad acted for the rest of the tour—like nothing happened. Of course, your mother was still pretty upset when they got home. In fact, she was barely talking to your dad. Barack wasn’t helping matters any, either ‘cause when your mother tried to tell us what had happened he just shook his head and started to laugh. ‘Relax, Anna,’ he said. ‘I only wanted to teach the chap a lesson about the proper care of other people’s property!’”
Gramps would start to laugh again until he started to cough, and Toot would mutter under her breath that she supposed it was a good thing that my father had realized that dropping the pipe had just been an accident because who knows what might have happened otherwise, and my mother would roll her eyes at me and say they were exaggerating. =============
It's supposed to be an anecdote about something that happened in the sixties, and there it is, word for word in a book published in 1995, and it works magic. Stanley Ann Dunham becomes both Ann Obama listed in the Polk in Honolulu in 1961, and ANNA Obama listed in the Polk in Seattle in the same year.
TOOT is a bonus. That covers the story out of Kenya from 2004 that the kenyan student had written home to tell the clan he had married a woman in the US - named ANNA TOOT.
Quite a clever writer's trick, if it wasn't so obvious.