My Aunt Karen was crazy.  I can say this for two reasons, the first being that she is now dead, and the second being that she was in fact crazy.

When I was 15 she told me I was handsome and that if I was a little older she would chase me around.  I think she meant it as a compliment, but I can tell you for certain that I did not want to be chased by Aunt Karen, partly because I wasn't interested in her gender and partly because she was crazy.  There was a guy in my gym class that I really wanted to be chased by, a big football player whose name I don't remember.  Thoughts of him absolutely rocked my world, except that as a Witness I knew that such thoughts made me equally crazy.

In any case, Aunt Karen wasn't my real aunt.  She was my step-aunt.  Her sister Fluffy was my stepmother and the two of them were raised as Witnesses.  Somehow, Aunt Karen fell out of The Truth when she was in her twenties.  She smoked and had bad hair, and her leaving might have had something to do with the fact that she was a little off center.  Or it might have been because she was able to see through things that didn't make sense.  I don't really know.

Aunt Karen lived in a little yellow two bedroom house right smack in the middle of an orange grove in Fillmore, California.  She only lived there because she had an enormous Great Dane named Thor and none of the apartment buildings in town would let her keep such a huge beast.  My dad always said that Thor was dumb as a fence post, which was absolutely true but not a fact you wanted to share with Aunt Karen.

When I was ten, Aunt Karen got a letter from Satan.  She freaked out and cried and called our house, so my dad and Fluffy rushed over to her little yellow house and stood around her little kitchen sink and tried to put the letter on fire.  They couldn't get it to burn which is how they knew it was from Satan.  So the elders came over and they all stood around the sink and prayed to Jehovah and told Aunt Karen that if she came back to The Truth and devoted her life to serving Jehovah, she wouldn't get any more letters from Satan.  For weeks after, the whole congregation whispered about it.

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