Vinny the Night Terror

Vinny the night terror because Vinny had night terrors.

If you spent a lot of time with Vinny as a child and probably as an adult, you became one of the unlucky ones to experience a night terror (especially if you were in a confined space like a tent).

This may not be funny to some, but as a sister spending so much time with him through his entire life, I feel I have earned the right to laugh at his issues just as he did mine. Some of these stories were and are the subject of many retold tales at Pease family gatherings.

My mother went away when Vinny, Zac and I were 8,3 and 7. Molly and Stacey were in charge of watching us. Stacey had started dating David Botley, the father of her children, and decided we should all go camping at his family's lot on Pitcher Pond. David worked at Moss tents at the time and had this beautiful state of the art tent that he, Stacey and I stayed in. The other tent is something you would envision in a Charlie Brown cartoon. Very small, triangular shaped and kind of sloping in so it was difficult not to touch the sides when you were on the inside. Well, Molly, Vinny, Zac and Aaron were in that tent (not the ideal set up for them but typical Stacey fashion). Did I mention that David and Stacey had recently taken Vinny and me to see Gremlins? That might have been the start of his night terrors. Sometime in the middle of the night Vinny sat up suddenly in some type of panic. Molly quickly sat up to see what was wrong. Vinny looked at her and said, "GREMLIN" and punched her square in the nose and took off into the pitch black woods through the front of the tent. Molly was left on the brink of passing out, while David ran through the woods chasing Vinny. Vinny, of course, was sound asleep and doesn't remember a thing.

Part of the Pease family happily headed down to NH for our first family camping trip. I remember Vinny and I riding in with my grandparents in my great grandfather Hunt's camper. I remember that because my grandfather wouldn't stop to let us go the bathroom. We finally got to the campground and got set up. My grandparents were staying in my grandmother's father's camper they borrowed. Stacey, David and their kid (Rye was the only one born then) were staying in their state of the art Moss tent. My mom, Larry and Zac were staying in a decent tent they borrowed from Stacey and David. Vinny and I were staying in our chocolate brown tent that one of us probably got as a gift. I was probably 9 and Vinny 10. We all snuggled in that night in this family campground in NH. A few hours later our site was woken up by Vinny's screams. Like I said, Vinny and tents don't really mix. I woke up to Vinny punching wildly around me saying, "Momma, help! They're going to kill me!" I managed to dodge his punches until someone was kind enough to help Vinny wake up. David thought it was a great idea to take the fly off the tent so Vinny could get more ventilation. That worked for maybe an hour and the same thing happened. "Momma, they're going to kill me!" This was not a faint or quiet scene. Finally, Vinny was moved to the large tent my mother and Larry were in and he seemed to be okay. No one wanted me to be alone, so my grandmother decided to sleep with me in the little brown tent. I guess David and Stacey had a few good laughs that night because they heard the distant thunder and decided not remind anyone that the fly wasn't on our tent. I slept through the first few minutes of the torrential down pour. My grandmother didn't want to wake me up??!! I did wake up to mouthfuls of water because our tent had managed to hold a few inches of the rain. They dried me off and I also slept in my mother and Larry's tent. We went to bed with lots of lovely neighbors in this very friendly family campground and woke up to none. That's right. I guess the "Momma, they're going to kill me" screams were enough to clear out an entire NH campground.

Vinny did this to our uncle Vick and David on their hunting and fishing trips up north, but I guess they developed a method of slapping him across the face really hard to wake him up.

He did it in his teen years when we went camping with our grandparents and David and Stacey up in northern Maine. We all stayed in my grandparents' camper. He got up and started screaming and someone told my grandmother (the closest person to him) to slap him across the face. That would have never happened for two reasons. One because Vinny was always her favorite and two because Vinny was practically a grown man and could have killed her with one punch.

When he did his field tests in the army, they had to put him in a special place in the tents.