Part 6: Anticipation
Filed under cartoon by author, Eleanor and Rose, Story by author
Part 5: The stakes (but not steaks) are raised.
Filed under cartoon by author, Eleanor and Rose, Story by author
Part 4: Looking our best when looking for clues.
Filed under cartoon by author, Eleanor and Rose, Story by author
Part 3: The chase always begins with the right suit of clothes, at least for Rose.
Filed under cartoon by author, Eleanor and Rose, Story by author
Part 2: Eleanor and Rose prepare for the chase.
Filed under cartoon by author, Eleanor and Rose, Story by author
Part 1: Eleanor and Rose are catching some Zz’s as our story opens.
Filed under cartoon by author, Eleanor and Rose, Story by author
The jackass and the giant were outside chewing the fat. At a time when Christmas decorations were the focus of buyers, they were barely tolerated by the shoppers and passersby.
“Do you ever miss it?” the jackass asked when they were alone.
“Oh, sometimes,” the green giant said. “Particularly now that I’m working on my memoir. Brings back a lot of memories.”
The jackass and the green giant were outside chewing the fat.
“I didn’t know you wrote. Didn’t even know you knew how.”
The green giant blushed slightly red on the green. Made him look a little orange in the face. “Taught myself on the sly. Had to. I wanted to prove I wasn’t just another alien here to take their money and take a job away from a local.
“Then my contract came due and since I could now read, I could figure out that was working for beans. So, I demanded more money and they didn’t renew the contract.”
“They fired you?!” the donkey asked, his eyes wide.
“Pretty much.”
“They can’t do that.”
The green giant smiled. “They found somebody who would do it for less.”
“Why, those corporate mules!”
“Something like that.”
The jackass kicked back a hind leg and almost broke a door.
The green giant didn’t say anything more.
“You’re shorter than I expected,” the jackass said. “I thought you’d be taller.”
“A trick of modern film editing.”
“So what’s your memoir going to be called?”
The man smiled. “The memoir of a has bean. How I sold my soul a little green, but got stuck in the brown.”
The jackass nodded. “Catchy. ‘Specially that stuck in the brown part.”
The blathering idiot stood in line to sit on Santa’s lap.
“Do you really think this is a good idea?” the young mother asked of the man standing with her as they tried to control three squirming kids dressed in wise men outfits.
The man grunted.
“We can always stop.”
The young woman was very pregnant.
The man grunted again.
For some wishes there isn’t enough magic in Santa’s cap … or lap.
The blathering idiot had never sat in Santa’s lap when he was a kid. Since losing the election for the highest office in he land, he decided he would do some of the other things in life he had never done before. Sitting in Santa’s lad was the first thing on his list.
He did not tell anybody: not Zoey, not Xenia, not Lydia, not anybody.
One of the kids in front of him squirmed away from her parents and was toddling away. The mother ran after her. The mother had to pick the daughter up and bring her back, kicking and screaming all the way. It was then that the blathering idiot realized all three of the kids were girls. Still, they looked as if they had been dressed to be miniature wise men.
“Are you sure?” she asked again.
She was staring hard at her husband.
He stared back. He did nothing to help control the kids.
The blathering idiot could detect a cold silence between them as the line crept forward.
As they neared the head of the line, the kids increased their antsiness.
Then they were next in line. It had been almost thirty minutes.
The boy on Santa’s lap burst into tears. After two attempts to calm the young man down, Santa looked at the mom, who, slightly red in the face, stepped up from the other side of Santa’s thrown and retrieved her son.
An elf in a pea green costume with bells on the ends of his up curled show tips and a five o’clock shadow across his downturned chin, stepped up to the red velvet rope and unhooked it from one of the poles.
“Last chance,” the woman said.
“Next,” the elf said, stepping back, clearing the way up the two steps to the dais on which Santa sat.
The man hesitated, then surged forward.
The mother and the three girls followed. They walked up to Santa, the squirmy one still in her mother’s arms, and the other two fidgeting as they moved. Then, they walked past Santa as the man, the husband, the father sat in Santa’s lap.
Seeing the man plop himself into Santa’s lap and Santa struggling to handle the size and the weight, the blathering idiot no longer had a desire to sit in Santa’s lap.
“Santa,” the man said, “I want you to bring me a baby son for Christmas.”
Then the blathering idiot suddenly felt antsy. He couldn’t remember what he wanted to ask Santa for.
Filed under blathering idiot, Christmas, Photo by author, Story by author
“None of the girls wants to get boy cooties,” my daughter said.
She was explaining why the girls were making the boys hold their sleeves instead of their hands when the boys in the 4th grade class and the girls in the same class performed a brief dance number as part of the class’s participation in the school Christmas show.
Their hands only touch briefly and for three, maybe four times, the teacher explained. Still, it had not stopped a fourth grade boy from writing a note to the teacher saying he didn’t want to participate because he could get girl cooties.
Christmas time is often about fixing things as well as getting or giving new things. And while some of the things being fixed aren’t trains or tricycles, doll houses or even decorations, they are still important to nine year olds.
Fortunately, I came upon a solution: gloves. They were already supposed wear scarfs as part of their costumes. What was more natural than gloves to go with the scarfs? I purchased six pairs of inexpensive bright pink gloves and proposed their use to the teacher. Each girl would wear a pair to practice and maybe even at the performance, insulating them from the dreaded “boy cooties.”
My daughter was immediately taken with the idea, and once the teacher approved, the problem was solved. Or, at least, I hope so. The performance is still a week away and who knows what viral debasement those young boys may yet let loose upon the world of girls. There mere existence is proof of an aberrant decline of fourth grade, if not all of humanity.
Unfortunately, the other challenge I’ve been asked to fix may not turn out as well.
I have taken a vow of silence — batteries not included.
I came home from work last night to find a stuffed dog in a striped winter scarf sitting on the sofa in the foyer. He held a note that read: “I need help please fix me!”
From what I can gather, his push button voice module was no longer working. How long had it been non function my daughter did not know. She possesses quite a collection of stuffed animals, ranging from finger puppet stuffed animals to a pink unicorn large enough to use as a pillow.
The dog could have recently gone mute. Or he could have taken a vow of silence many months back in protest to being ignored. The “you won’t speak to me, so I won’t speak to you either approach to communication.”
I have opened up the dog, inspected his battery cage, which appears to have a missing on/off switch, and I have followed the wires from the battery cage to what I believe is the voice module. It is inside a white sack sown snuggly around the module.
I have checked the batteries, tried jumping the connection to bypass the switch, and have even mostly freed the module from it sack in order to try to examine it.
It is a cramped space inside the bear and my fingers are not the type with tapered types. About as wide as they are long (from the base of the hand to the tip of the middle finger), they are more suited from tracing around to make hand turkeys than they are for operating in a confined, stuffed dog, chest cavity space.
I could slice the dog open, but I am not sure that would fix anything or make me any the wiser about the operation of the voice module.
I will take another look at the dog, but not tonight. He is still a viable stuffed dog, even if mute.
He may have to remain that way.
I guess I could always buy him a pair of gloves.
Filed under Christmas, Photo by author, Story by author
The blathering idiot saw Lydia enter the room where he was being schooled by the consultant and was relieved when she walked up to them and asked to speak to the blathering idiot alone for a few minutes.
Even the consultant appeared eager to give her that time. He leapt up from his chair and was tripping the light fantastic as he stepped out of the room. Or so it appeared to the blathering idiot.
“How goes it?” Lydia asked.
The blathering idiot shrugged. “Seems like I gotta play dumb to get elected.”
“Surveys show time and time again that people want to elect somebody just like them.”
“Then why don’t those people run for office?”
Lydia smiled and then laughed. “You do have a way about you.”
“And what does that mean?”
She sat down in the chair the consultant had been sitting in. She placed a hand on his knee. She looked directly at him and he at her. He thought maybe this was the moment he had been waiting for, the moment when she would ask him what he was doing tonight, would he like to come over for a home cooked meal and they could discuss campaign strategy and other things.
He half closed his eyes in dreamy anticipation.
Instead, she said, “Let’s just say you’re weird, but in an endearing sort of way, and that’s what we need to capitalize on in this campaign.”
The blathering idiot opened his eyes wide. Weird? Endearing? How did that stack up with being someone just like everyone else? Would you want to have a beer with somebody weird but endearing?
He thought about that last question for a minute. Would he have dinner with somebody weird, but endearing?
“Here, let me show you something,” Lydia said.
She stood up and offered her hand. He took it and followed her out of the room, out of the building. Once outside she led him over to a vehicle.
“Our budget is tight, but we got what we could afford, within the consultant’s guidelines, for your official campaign vehicle.”
“It’s … it’s a … truck,” the blathering idiot said.
“Not just any truck,” Lydia said.
“Yeah, it’s an old truck.”
“Politicians have traveled on trains, in cars, even in trucks before when campaigning. We thought this truck would speak of a connection to the past of this great country, add a sense of history to our young Pro-Accordion Party.”
“Will it make it? After all, it looks pretty well used … and rusted in spots.”
“That’s the other beauty of it,” she said. “That patina of wear gives us that underdog touch, that little engine that could meme.”
“Meme?” the blathering idiot asked.
“I’ll explain later.”
The blathering idiot nodded, but he doubted the explanation would be over a homemade dinner.
Campaigning on a budget: the blathering idiot’s official campaign wheels.
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