When he was finished I needed a napkin to wipe the falls from my face.
"It was so hot that you could fry eggs on the sidewalks of Bombay." splashed George I.
I wondered how kids could roller-skate on those walks when people were frying eggs on them.
During this monsoon monologue George II arrived from the country with the news.
Charlie was dead.
Charlie's grandparents were the first settlers in our area. They were on their way west when they made the mistake of skirting too close to Lake Erie in Ohio and came upon a swamp they couldn't cross.
To be perfectly honest his Grandfather simply didn't want to go any further. Traveling from Connecticut to Ohio in a wagon without air conditioning, air-cushioned shock-absorbers, and with five kids and a wife who invented post-menstural syndrom for throngs of female human beings to follow, was simply, honestly, and really enough.
"Gee this looks like a good place to make a home." said Albert to his wife with his sagest expression.
"So" replied his wife Annis, "I guess hiring servants is out of the question."
The swamp that gave Albert an excuse to cease being tormented by his family lay in the flood plain of a river the Indians knew as the great Oschitt.
Years before Albert and Annis Barnhardt came to settle here the area was frequented by Wannabee Indian adolescents with way too much time on their hands.
It is said that one day as they were playing a rousing game of Catch-the-Hachet a young pale-face we now know as Johnny Appleseed happened upon them.
Now here's a guy traipsing through the wilderness with a tin pot on his head, barefoot, dressed in 2nd hand deer hide (were there anything but). The native boys (not having been born in birthday cakes, nor even knowing what birthday cakes were) knew a buffoon when they saw a buffoon.
The boys invited Johnny to dinner. Two built a fire while the others went out and gathered wild herbs, vegetables, and mushrooms that would make a nice pot of soup for the meal.
Unbeknownst to Johnny the mushrooms were of the psychedelic nature. Thus, while the native boys had a fine time after dinner waving their hands in front of their faces, saying things like "Wow! look at the colors.", and eating old oak leaves like they were potato-chips - Johnny was talking to God.
Johnny's vision of God was strangely similar that of his biological father. He was a rather slight man with thinning red hair and a lisp.He was wearing a dingy yellow dressing gown that went to his knees, and a pair of white shoes with a strange orange swoosh imprinted across the side.
God told Johnny what he wanted him to do for the remainder of his life. "As ye travel through the wilderness I want ye to take ye a paper bag and gather ye up all the appleseeds ye come across. Then will ye scatter these seeds in all areas ye take passage through."
Johnny didn't really have plans to spend all of his days scattering appleseeds in every wild nook and cranny in North America. But who was he to question God - much less his biological father? And what's with this "ye" stuff?
But thus resigned to his fateful task he fell into a deep slumber where he dreamt that his biological father had lisped,"Filler-tits is ye future."
And so he had gone in quest of "filler tits."
Maybe that really meant appleseeds. Years later maybe Freud could have made a connection. Or perhaps R.J. Reynolds.
Who knows? It was just a thought.
When Johnny woke up the next day resigned to the task God had given him he was a tad pissed. The indian boys would go on playing about in the woods while he roamed the wilderness planting appleseeds. Twas then that John put a rock in a sack along the river and waited for the boys to come upon it.
Soon the young Wannabe Bravelets came to play along the river's edge.
When He-Who-Resembles-Bear-Butt (the leader of this astute group) espied this sack he took it upon himself to kick it into a deeper part of the river. His response to this kick was a resounding "Oschitt!" that echoed through the river valley like a thousand ducks quacking or one hand clapping (choose one - this is an interactive story). And thus, was the river named.
In time Albert and Annis found a way across the Oschitt and had a trading post and farm on higher ground. Of their five children two boys were lost during the Civil War. They weren't killed. They were just lost. Let's just say they weren't the sharpest of knives on the proverbial butcher's block.
One of their daughters died of bad luck (she was doing an elderly Wannabee medicine man named He-Who-Resembles-Bear-Butt in a canoe when it tipped over and she drowned), and the remaining daughter married well. His name was, in fact, Welle (pronounced well not wellee). His first name was O.H. He was a blacksmith. Welle did well in his trade. It was the forefront of 20th century transportation technology. Welle's father was a Methodist minister. He had the first milk-bar in Oschitt (remember that and you might someday win a prize - I said this was an interactive story).
The last and youngest son in the family, Albert Jr., was a very enterprising and intelligent person. He was interested in chemistry, became Oschitt's first pharmacist, and built a store in 1916 within the little Hamlet. He was also Charlie's father.
Albert Jr. married a girl name Sophia Derby a year before "The War To End All Wars" began. On April 6, 1917 Sophia was in her livingroom eating curds and whey (it beats gruel) when she heard somebody outside her window screaming and yelling. It was one of her neighbors, Herbert Tibbles. A veteran of the Spanish American War he was dressed in full dress Army gear (with the exception of pants) and was marching up and down the sidewalk yelling, "Kill the Huns, Kill the Huns," at the top of his lungs. He was also waving a large broadsword. When Sophia stepped out of her house to see what all the commotion was about Mister Tibbles stopped dead in his tracks, his mouth fell open, he looked down at her feet and said to her, "Hey lady, you dropped something."
Birthing came quite easy to Sophia.
It was Charlie.
As previously mentioned Charlie's father was an enterprising young man. His uncle, Benjamin, had seen fit to follow his brother west and had developed a rather successful dairy farm east of the village. Albert, therefore, got a real deal on cream from his Uncle and started making ice cream in a shed behind his store. His confectionary business prospered and he added penny candy to his store. But the big seller became his cough medicine. Largely composed of codeine it came in two flavors; cherry and carp. The carp flavor proved to be a failure. Cherry was the town favorite by a landslide. And the good citizens of Oschitt suffered with a cold for the next four decades. It was a medical marvel.
Return to Home Page
© 2006 Rich Tarrant