A Heartwarming Xmas Tale

Once upon a time there was a man who lived in a small town who made his living repairing shoes.  The town was not wealthy and people still had their shoes repaired rather than buying new ones and the man was able to make a modest living from his business.

The man rented a small cubby hole, not much larger than a walk in closet, in the town’s downtown, and there he sat all day surrounded by pairs of broken down shoes.

The man was not particularly good looking or bright but was a good soul whose one unfulfilled wish was to meet a woman, marry and have a large family.  The man truly loved children and wanted to surround himself with happy kids.  His problem in fulfilling his dream was his innate shyness and social ineptitude made it difficult for him to meet and woo a mate.

At around this time there was a woman who made her living walking all over town, with a small grinding wheel, sharpening knives, scissors and just about anything that needed sharpening.  As she walked through the various sections of the town she would whistle a sweet tune that would signal the housewives and business owners that she was in their vicinity in case they needed something sharpened.

The first time the shoe repairman saw the woman he was immediately smitten.  Every time he heard her whistle, he would frantically search for something for her to sharpen.  There interactions were very polite and formal and appeared on the surface to be nothing more than business transactions.

One day, when the man had everything he owned with an edge already sharpened, he, out of desperation, presented the woman with a spoon.  The woman smiled and realized the man admired her for more than her sharpening prowess. Gently, she led their conversation around to Saturday night and the man managed to mumble an invitation to the woman to go with him to a movie.  Thus began their yearlong courtship that ended with a small ceremony before the town Justice of the Peace.

The woman was soon pregnant, as the man, while not being overly bright or good looking, was blessed with highly potent swimmers.  Nine months later, a baby boy was born.  They named the baby Juan.  The man and woman lived in a small one-bedroom apartment over a hardware store and Juan slept in a dresser drawer.   As soon as it was humanly possible the woman became pregnant again and nine months later another child was born.  Neither the man nor the woman could agree on a name for the new baby so eventually they decided to name the child Two.

The man and woman were running out of available dresser drawers so alternative housing became a necessity.  Around this time the man’s only living relative, a bachelor farmer, named Eddie died and left the man a large, if somewhat rundown, farmhouse about three miles outside of town.  Uncle Eddie had lived in the farmhouse the last 25 years with his best friend Larry, who rented one of the many bedrooms in the old house.  Larry had died three months before Uncle Eddie and their misfortune solved the man and woman’s housing problem.  They moved to the farmhouse and before long the woman was pregnant again.   When the baby was born the same naming inertia happened and they decided to name the baby Three.

Life proceeded in kind, and over the next ten to fifteen years Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven and Twelve were born.  They were a poor family but generally happy as the man and the woman were kind and loving parents.  As time went on the man and woman noticed that their twelve offspring were taking different life paths.  Two, Four, Six, Eight, Ten, and Twelve were studious highly focused achievers while Juan, Three, Five, Seven, Nine, and Eleven lacked direction and, frankly, were a little odd.

Time rolled on and one by one the children left home to pursue their fortunes.  Two, Four, Six, Eight, Ten and Twelve embarked on successful careers as doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers and college professors.  They married like-minded professionals and moved to all four corners of the country.

The other children, I will call them “the odd children” not in judgment but in order to facilitate the story, had tougher, if not more colorful, paths to adulthood.

Juan had several scrapes with the law over petty thievery and had spent a few months in the county lockup on various theft misdemeanors.  His passion was taxidermy.  He specialized in recreating famous scenes from history by posing various vermin and critters he found in the woods behind his house or along the side of the road.  His best-known piece was a recreation of Lee’s surrender to Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse marking the end of the civil war. He considered a recreation of Bart Starr’s quarterback sneak at the end of the Ice Bowl to be his masterpiece.  He agonized over how to recreate Chuck Mercein, a Packer running back, who had tumbled into the end zone behind Starr, with his arms raised giving the signal for a touchdown because the critters he had used to represent the 22 players on the field all had short forelegs and were incapable of raising them over their heads convincingly.  Juan lost sleep trying to figure out how to solve this problem and complete the piece he felt would rocket him to preeminence in the world of taxidermy.

Three was an extremely shy and socially inept child who only really felt comfortable in the presence of chickens.  Every birthday and holiday he asked for chickens and before long he was selling eggs out of the shoe repair shop.  When he turned eighteen he left home and used his egg money to buy a small piece of land in the country away from humans and started a poultry farm.

Five’s only distinguishing characteristic was his uncanny resemblance to Popeye the Sailor Man.  He briefly cashed in on his appearance when a local movie theatre ran a Robert Altman film retrospective that included his Popeye movie.  Five would stand in the lobby dressed as the famous sailor and spin a corncob pipe in the corner of his mouth.  This employment was short lived and he worked several menial jobs before settling in as a short order cook in a 24-hour greasy spoon.

Seven had problems with drugs and alcohol during her late teens and twenties.  She rocketed from one shaky relationship to another, always ending badly.  At one point in her late twenties she married Homer Swans, who she believed was the heir to the Swan’s ice cream fortune. When she sobered up, after a week or two, she discovered Homer was the heir to a dilapidated house trailer and nothing else.  The marriage lasted 39 days ending in a no fault divorce.  Seven’s marriage experience represented rock bottom for her and she resolved to change her life.  She took up endurance sports beginning with mountain bike racing and expanding to marathon running, triathlons, speed walking, mountain climbing, bungee jumping, steeplechase, and giant wave surfing.  Her latest sport was long distance swimming and she hoped to swim from Florida to Cuba by the end of the year.

Nine was a joiner.  Unfortunately, she most often joined cults.  Her extreme devotion to principle and rigid adherence to every rule soon alienated everyone in the cult and she would soon be asked to leave.  Her latest obsession was linked to a rogue priest in Green Bay, Wisconsin, who advocated dancing as the cure all for the world’s problems.  Utilizing Nine as his chief disciple, the priest instituted the Mash Potato Mass during which the flock would get up and dance for an hour straight.  Any dance was acceptable and it was not uncommon to see the mash potato, boogalou, fox trot, polka, and all manner of free style twitching going on at the same time.  The local bishop was threatening to have the priest defrocked if he didn’t stop his dance ministry but Nine assured him that if he was defrocked she would continue ministering to the religiously funky.

Eleven became the world’s worst daredevil.  He never failed to clear five of the six cars he was attempting to jump on his motorcycle. He always managed to blow himself up or set himself on fire when he performed standard daredevil stunts.  He worked a regional circuit of stock car races, small county fairs and church picnics and became a local legend.  He never failed to entertain and had broken nearly every bone in his body at one time or another.  He also held the record for walking away from small aircraft crashes and had attracted a small following at the local airport where he hung out.  His latest endeavor was to form a Piper Cub (a small prop airplane) precision flying team.  They perfected one trick, which consisted of two columns of five planes in parallel lines nose to tail.  Eleven lead the other fliers in this formation, which he called “the pipe.”   They were in great demand satisfying America’s curious desire to see planes fly over sporting events and had flown over high school football games in three different states.

Time passed and the shoe repairman passed away peacefully at home.  The woman continued to live in the old farmhouse, now alone, and grew to be old and fat.  The even keeled children slowly stopped visiting home citing busy schedules, deadlines, travel distance and various other career pressures for their absences.  Unspoken, but none-the-less real, were their feelings of embarrassment at their humble beginnings, the run down farmhouse and their overweight mother.  So it was left to the odd children to make sure that their mother was not alone on holidays and birthdays.

So it was on a December 25^th morning, Juan was busy strapping a fruit tree he had dug out of his neighbor’s yard the night before to the roof of his van.  Just as he was tightening the last strap, Juan looked up and saw Three coming up the street.  Three was carrying a small cage containing two Crevecoeur chickens.  Under his other arm he carried a large Tupperware tub.  Three had contacted Juan a couple of nights before to see if he could get a ride to their mother’s house.

Although they hadn’t seen each other in over two years, Juan and Three greeted each other as if they had been hanging around together the night before.  Juan knew that Three wasn’t much of a conversationalist and the four hour drive would be done mostly in silence.

Juan took the cage from Three and put Three’s French chickens in the back of his van.  Juan asked Three what was in the Tupperware tub.  Three told him he had been contacted by Five who told him he had to work at the diner on the 25^th and wouldn’t be able to go with his brothers to visit their mother.  Five, knowing his mother’s love of onion rings, had made up a batch to send to her as a present.  Three popped off the Tupperware lid and showed Juan Five’s golden rings.

Juan and Three got in the van and were backing out of the driveway when Juan suddenly hit the breaks, put the van in park and ran back in the house.  A minute later Juan came back out carrying a stuffed bird.  He told Three he was going to attach the bird to the branches of the tree when he transplanted it in his mother’s side yard.  He thought she would get a kick out of seeing the bird in the fruit tree.

They rode in silence until they cleared the outskirts of the town.  Once out in the country, Three turned to Juan and asked him if Seven was going to be there this year.  Juan told him she wouldn’t be there because Seven Swans a’swimming to Cuba as they spoke. Three then told Juan that Nine’s laity was dancing and she couldn’t get away this year, either.  Juan told Three he had heard from Eleven and was told he would meet them at the farmhouse and he was planning something special for their mother.  Thus the conversation ended until they were about a quarter mile from the farmhouse.

As they approached their mother’s house, Juan heard a faint droning sound and spotted a series of small specs in the sky.  He pulled the van over and he and Three got out and looked up in time to see Eleven’s pipers piping over their mother’s house.

Three and Juan stood transfixed, as they were not immune to America’s strange love of flyovers, until the pipers had disappeared from view.  Juan then looked at the farmhouse itself and saw what looked like flames shooting out the upstairs windows and smoke billowing from a section of the roof. The boys jumped back in the van and raced the last quarter mile skidding to a stop some 25 feet from the front door.  Juan and Three burst from the van and charged up the front steps and into the house.  The first floor was beginning to fill with smoke and Three went from room to room calling his mother’s name.  Juan dashed upstairs and ran down a very smoky hallway where he found his dazed and disoriented mother sitting in a heap.  Juan called to Three and the two of them struggled to get their rather large mother to her feet.  Once she was standing each of the boys took one of her arms and guided her down the hallway, down the stairs, through the living room and out into the front yard where the three of them gulped in the most delicious air they had ever breathed.

The moral of the story:  Appreciate your odd children because they may someday pull your fat out of the fire.

HO HO HO!    Merry Xmas, Everyone.

P.S. Coming next, the Teacher returns.