For my birthday, my grandmother sent me a jar of persimmon jelly which she said had been harvested by monks from an island monastery where the persimmon trees were watered exclusively with champagne. The monks may also have been forbidden to speak or bathe or something similarly esoteric, but my grandmother was pretty old at this point and the phone connection to her mausoleum was bad. Come to think of it, she might have been dead. But she sent the persimmon jelly and we were all grateful.
My father insisted that jelly this special could only be eaten for a special occasion. I argued, rather convincingly I feel, that there was no occasion more special than my birthday, but my father had something grander in mind. Discussion produced no resolution. If I remember correctly, it was my mother's idea to set up the tontine.
A tontine, for those unfamiliar with the term, is an easy term to look up on the Internet.
The reason I don't remember whether the tontine was my mother's idea is that the discussion was fairly heated when it was suggested, and it might have sprung from my general insistence that I would see everyone dead before I let them decide when I got to eat my jelly. What can I say? I'm not proud, but as my mother was threatening my father with a broken bottle at the time, I was not the only one to regret their actions that day. My family takes their jams and jellies seriously.
At any rate, after looking up "tontine" on the Internet (which I cannot stress too highly as an option) the pact was sealed, and we all set about preparing to kill one another. In retrospect, perhaps a three-person tontine isn't the best way to solve anything, particularly if all participants live in the same house.
I suspected that my mother and father would collude, at least long enough to get me out of the way. When they tried to get me to ride on the roof of the car, I wasn't fooled. In any case, I had stockpiled canned goods in case of emergency, as I obviously couldn't trust my mother's cooking.
I hired an assassin, one Godfrey Poltroon, or so his business card stated. He tried to make it look like an accident at first, but they kept on surviving. In the end, after even poison darts and shotguns failed, he gave me my money back. I didn't blame him. My parents are wily people.
In the end, we sort of forgot about the jelly. Then my Aunt Gladys ate it when she was house sitting for us while we were on vacation to Borneo. Anyway, the following year my grandmother sent me a zebra for my birthday, which was far more interesting than persimmon jam, though far less responsible. Where a dead woman got a zebra in this economy I'll never know.
