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.