hey y'all, a friend of me and  my cousin's from high school wrote this.
it cracked me up.
love, les

Kara,

On Kyle's community web page, Ray started a discussion (melodramatically
entitled "The Mettle of Our Fathers") about how we're all wimps compared to
our fathers, or "shadows of our fathers," because they are all self-made
men, and we have advantages.  it got a little heavy and ridiculous so i
wrote this as my contribution.


THE METTLE OF OUR LLAMAS

My father was born a poor black child on the Mississippi delta.  In 1856 his
family rode into Mississippi on their Conestoga wagon and said this seems
like “a right fine swamp.”  He was put to work immediately after birth as a
doorstop in return for milk and a blanket.  Eventually, his father deemed
him too “restless” for “doorstoppin’” and Granddad started taking him out to
hunt squirrels and teach him the ways of the woods.  He’d creep silently
through the forest like a shadow, then he’d see a squirrel in a tree and
shout “go gitim boy!” and he’d grab dad out of his bassinet and hurl my
father up into the tree to try and dislodge or stun the squirrel.  Granddad
was not an educated man, he didn’t “hold” with “book learnin,” but he loved
roast squirrel.

This went on until my father was too big and could then hurl other small
children at the squirrels himself so’s they did not have to eat mud and bark
but most nights.  Eventually, he grew into a strapping squirrel, mud, and
bark-fed young man, who got a job in town hurling himself in front of
runaway coaches and carts for pennies.  Dad was ambitious, though.  By day
he hurled himself in front of large out of control vehicles, and by night he
studied and practiced his letters on the back of a shovel which he used
simultaneously to fight off angry bears that attacked his family every
night.  Despite having to study whilst fighting angry bears, he eventually
saved some money and became white.  He slept for an hour once a year.

He eventually set off from home with a stick and bundle over his shoulder.
“I’m movin to the city!” he said, but, when he got there, its ways perplexed
him.  EVERY vehicle seemed out of control to him, and people just got mad
when he hurled himself, uninvited, into the street.  They did not throw
pennies, or even slow down.  It was a harsh lesson, but he learned quickly,
after being run over 30-40 times.  Fortunately, the American Industrial
Revolution was booming and he got a job as a “Giant Cog Technician” in a
pickle factory.  This meant that when the huge steam-driven, incredibly
dangerous, cog-works jammed, it was his job to hurl himself into the works,
stick his body and limbs deep into the straining machinery, and try to free
their grinding motion.  He was crushed and pureed many times.  “When you get
pureed in the pickle cog-works you just had to walk it off,” he says.  “You
see, men were tougher back then and they grew back limbs out of sheer
old-fashioned grit and determination.”  Eventually, he owned that pickle
factory and, ambitious as always, sought to revolutionize the business.  Dad
thought to himself “What would be cheaper to use than men on the pickle
factory floor…I know!  Llamas!”  This was the beginning of the end of his
pickle business.  It turned out to be much more difficult than he first
assumed to train 110 llamas how to pickle cucumbers and operate heavy
machinery.  Despite a few promising pupils, the llamas, by-and-large, just
bit him, spat on him, and ran around the factory bleating in a bewildered
daze, hardly pickling at all.  He would return home, a shoebox he’d cram
himself into every night, covered with llama bites and spittle.  Mom would
say, “Why don’t you just go back to using men?”  He’d turn on her and yell
“Mind your business, woman!  What do you know about the pickle industry,
eh?!  Now, where’s my squirrel-steak?“  As the pickle business waned and the
Great Depression settled on the nation, he was forced to work nights for a
blacksmith holding pieces of red-hot iron with his bare hands for the
blacksmith to pound on with his hammer.

Finally, on December 8, 1941, he left the pickle and red-hot-iron-holding
business to join the war effort when “Jerry” and “Tojo” threatened his
freedom.  Dad, initially, joined the navy.  For a year, they lashed him to
the sides of aircraft carriers to keep them from grating against the pier
when they docked.  In due course, he tired of being mashed by aircraft
carriers and transferred to the marines as a Private, Second Class in the
Shrieking Giraffe Corps.  His duty was to run, screaming, at machine gun
emplacements waving big orange flags while wearing a giraffe costume.  They
never actually mentioned what he was supposed to do should he reach these
machine gun bunkers, but he had a sense of duty and did not question his
orders.  Also, it turns out, that never became much of an issue.  They told
him it was “psychological” warfare, but Dad said he never saw anyone else
doing it, and people snickered a lot when they said that.  He was awarded a
200 lb. six-foot chocolate Purple Heart for his 873 separate bullet wounds,
the largest confection ever awarded by the US government.  My parents lived
off that Purple Heart for a year.  In 1945, Pop parachuted into Berlin and
assassinated Hitler himself.  Apparently, there was some later agreement
with the Germans that Hitler would be said to have committed suicide, rather
than the grisly truth that he was garroted by a commando in a giraffe
costume.  Pop then waited out the truce posing as a Berlin zoo animal,
braying and eating eucalyptus leaves.

After the war, he returned home and attended Colorado State on a bear
fighting schoalrship, studied engineering, and went to medical school,
wherein 1970, he invented the heart.  Apparently, prior to 1970, people
simply pumped their blood through sheer old-fashioned grit and
determination.  Our generation, however, is soft and lazy, taking for
granted our luxuriously “self-beating” hearts.  We lounge about constantly,
just letting our hearts pump our blood for us all the live long day…

Sometimes, Dad gets nostalgic and puts on his medals and giraffe costume
and slow dances with my mother to “Sentimental Journey.”  I have a lot to
live up to, we all do.
