He started it with Bulgarian folk songs. He should have known better! Tip loved jokes – even those on him.

This is a fun story – typical of the great sense of humor that was “purely my Uncle Tip.” It’s the record of a long-running practical-joke war between Tip and me. It began with music: a love of Brahms and the Chicago Symphony, a gift of records, and a deadpan reply that sent me off on weeks of bewildered listening before I learned I had been had. The retaliation that followed is preserved below — a fake letter and an elaborate gold-sealed certificate from the wholly invented “Cajun Vacations” of Port Sulphur, Louisiana. They are exactly the sort of too-good-to-be-true scheme that would set a sharp old stockman’s teeth on edge, and they did their work. The account is given here in my own words, with the original documents shown just as Tip first saw them.

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When Tip was visiting me in Chicago, I took him to hear the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play Brahms’s First Symphony. He loved it. He was an opera and classical man all his life, and to sit with him in that hall and watch him take it in was one of the good evenings.

The Chicago Symphony had recorded all four Brahms symphonies — the set won a Grammy — so a little while later I sent him the recordings as a gift.

I thought that was the end of it, a nice thing between an uncle and a nephew who both loved the music.

A few weeks after that, a record arrived from Tip. The message with it was that we modern people don’t appreciate music enough, and that I ought to listen to this and learn something.

Well, I took him seriously. I recorded it onto a tape and I played it in the car, driving to and from work, for the next several weeks, trying to understand what he was hearing in it.

It was terrible.

It was a collection of Bulgarian folk songs — shrieking and wailing and carrying on, the most unmusical thing I had ever suffered through. But I kept at it, because Tip had sent it and Tip knew music, and I figured the failing must be mine.

Finally I gave up. I told my mother — Tip’s sister, Helen — how I didn’t appreciate good music. I felt that my opera-loving uncle had sent me music I simply could not understand, and that I didn’t know what to tell him. She said she would mention it to him the next time they talked on the phone.

She called me back laughing. Tip had said it was a joke. He’d gotten a good laugh picturing me out there in the car, week after week, dutifully listening to those Bulgarian folk songs and trying to find the genius in them.

The joke was on me, and I had fallen for it hook, line and sinker.

So I decided to get him back.

I cooked up “Cajun Vacations” by inventing a company in Port Sulphur, Louisiana — a president named Luis Detoitoisse and a secretary named Henri Pierre Oliphaint. I wrote a letter, on their letterhead, thanking my mother for her generous $50,000 investment in their venture and welcoming her as a founding partner in a Cajun condo.

Then I created a Certificate of Lifetime Partnership to go with it, gold seals and all, listing the magnificent benefits she had bought: two weeks a year at the condo, a course in Cajun culture, cooking lessons from a world-famous chef, and an annual eighty-dollar credit toward the catalog.

I sent the whole package to my mother and told her that the next time Tip came to visit, she should leave it out on the table where he couldn’t miss it.

It worked!

He saw it.

He read it.

And he nearly had a heart attack. “You didn’t send the money to them,” he said. “Oh, my God! It’s lost! It’s lost!”

Here was his sister, fleeced out of fifty thousand dollars for a worthless condo in a Louisiana swamp, and him standing there unable to do a thing about it.

Then my mother called me, and I got on the phone with him, and I told him it was a joke.

He loved it. He laughed and laughed.

From then on it was the thing we always came back to whenever we got together. “You really got me,” he would say, and he couldn’t stop laughing about it.

The records, the Bulgarian folk songs, the Cajun condo — that was ours, and we kept it going for the rest of his life.

This is one of my fondest memories of this wonderful man.