I should clarify that my family usually enjoys arguments. I know you see all the memes about board games tearing apart families at Christmas or whatever, but for us, it’s all part of the fun. We get into blazing rows, boards are tipped, pieces are flung out the window, but it’s all actually in the spirit of good fun. Dinner table conversations quickly dissolve into what would seem to an outsider like a verbal bloodbath over political views, or whether Week of Our Lives is in a new golden age or trashy TV.
But it seems like property law has finally ended it all. The traditional Klein holiday home has, as is tradition, been owned by us all. Anyone can go on holiday there at any time, so long as you book it in the sacred calendar (which is now an online document to stop people from overlapping). Everything changed when Uncle Herb went and found himself one of Melbourne’s top property solicitors and called a clan meeting. Turns out that, after all this time, the property was actually in his name all along. Of course, that does make sense…legally, it HAD to be owned by one of us. Poppa left it to all of us when he died, but you can’t spread ownership over twenty or so people. We just always thought it was a Klein unspoken law to never speak of the true ownership, because it was owned by all of us as an inheritance.
Well…Uncle Herb wants to sell it and establish a new holiday home on the Sunshine Coast. That set off Aunt Val, because three of her ex-husbands are from there. While we were trying to calm her down, Uncle Dan tried to assert his authority from the year-and-a-half of law school he completed sixteen years ago and challenged the property lawyer, who I sort of feel sorry for, for getting caught up in this.
It was not to be. Uncle Herb has consulted with the best business lawyers in the Melbourne area, and it was done. The Kleins have officially had their first argument. For us, that’s basically the apocalypse.
-Kelly Klein