"Tell me a story" asked the little boy.
"Why?" I replied, reasonably. "You are not my little boy -- I haven't any. They are all grown up."
"Because . . . no one else will ever listen to your stories again?" he asked slyly.
He had me there. Still, telling a story is a serious thing; one should never go into it too lightheartedly -- the consequences can be sinister.
"I won't tell you a whole story" I finally said. "But I will give you a fragmentary account of something curious."
The little boy frowned, but he sat down on the rug and waited for me to begin.
"A snake was once found in a well, and this snake could sing a song; a song so powerful that whoever heard it went to box the gloves of the nearest person he could find" I began.
"Box the gloves -- don't you mean box the ears?" quizzed the little boy, who was neither cute nor respectful. He looked like he'd been dragged through a coal chute, face down.
"No. Boxed the gloves -- you know, boxing gloves" I said gravely. Then I waited for the little boy to acknowledge my peerless humor. But he just sat there, silently contemplating me like a bug hunter contemplating a praying mantis he is considering impaling and adding to his collection.
I am old and thrifty, so I no longer become impatient when my whimsy is slow to be recognized. I never waste words trying to explain it. I went into the kitchen to pour myself a glass of lemonade, and decided to have a stick of mozzarella string cheese as well. When I came back the little boy was gone. I never saw him again.
I knew his mother slightly. She rented out leaf blowers from a kiosk in the parking lot of the convenience store down the block from me. When I went to the convenience store from time to time to buy latex gloves, she would wave to me, and I would wave to her, and sometimes we told each other what a beautiful day it was even though the acid rain and radioactive lightning were destroying the mums that fall. Lying to a stranger doesn't feel like lying at all.
I needed a lot of latex gloves for strangling the skinks that kept invading my basement. You can't kill a skink by chopping off its head -- it just grows a new one. They have to be strangled and then run through a paper shredder, which often gets clogged with their green blood. Professional exterminators will not make house calls for skinks. Too endemic. (Besides, the skinks have a very powerful lobby in DC.)
The reason my boys had all grown up and didn't want any more stories from me is that I lived a double life while they were little. They thought I went to work in an office each day, but in reality I was a professional exterminator who specialized in earwigs. They eventually found out my briefcase contained pyrethrum and not pie charts. Their mother forgave me for the deception after a time, but it was harder for the boys to let it go. We finally went into counseling, the boys and I. Their mother wouldn't attend -- she thought it some sort of new age voodoo. In counseling I learned how much it hurt my boys to have a father who killed small inoffensive bugs instead of dictating to a secretary in a plush office. Feeling so let down by their father, they had all turned to a life of crime -- holding up banks and hijacking fire trucks. This life of crime, I learned in counseling, they hid from their wives and children, who thought they all worked together running a lumber company. With tears in my eyes, I begged them to come clean with their families and not make the same mistake I had made. But they refused to listen to me, and our counseling sessions came to an end when they hijacked all the furniture from the counselor's waiting room. When they were caught and jailed I posted bond for them, for the sake of their families. But they fled out of state and I lost the bail money.
That's why I have to live on nothing but lemonade and string cheese. Their mother still thinks the skinks got 'em.
