Live Blogging
By Grape Areeww
As Feldenstein Calypso noted on an earlier post, I was
invited to guest blog for The Clerk Manifesto over 30 years ago, while he and I
skinned a rattlesnake in the bathroom of my parents’ home (the smell was
delicious, a mixture of strawberries and walnuts and chocolate cake mix) and my
grandmother asked us through the door in her thick Boston accent why we were
taking so long and why it smelled so nice. We said something about inventing a
new cologne and, after decapitating the snake and scraping the innards from the
skin, we cut the rattle off. That left us with the rest of the snake to dispose
of, and that’s where my memory fails me. Maybe Feldenstein Calypso recalls what
happened.
I do know one that Feldenstein Calypso took the skin home to
dry in the sun. Grape Areeww kept the rattle. All was well until Feldenstein
Calypso called the next morning.
“I have some bad news,” he said.
“Oh, no!”
“Our handyman’s rabbit chewed up the snake skin.”
“Dios mio!”
Later that day we went bowling and discussed what we had
left of the snake. In a few short weeks I would be off to chiropractic school
and Feldenstein Calypso would begin his training as a line judge at Wimbledon.
“The rattle!” we both said.
“We could cut it in half,” I suggested.
“Or bury it somewhere,” said Feldenstein Calypso.
“That’s a good idea. That way we’ll always know where it
is.”
“Hmmm....” said Feldenstein Calypso.
“What?”
“I think I have an even better idea!”
“What is it?”
“It’s a good one!”
“I’m so excited to hear it!”
“I can’t believe I thought of this! It’s perfect!”
“Wow! I can’t wait!”
“So, how about—man, this is such a neat idea!”
“Yippee!”
“Okay…so…how…about…we…”
“Yesssss????????”
“Share the
rattle?”
“Share the rattle?”
“Yes! How about you keep it for six months and then mail it
to me, and we’ll keep doing this until the day we die.”
“That’s a million dollar idea!”
“Why, thank you!”
“A zillion dollars!”
“Thanks!”
“But one question,” I said. “The person who dies first—does
he get buried or cremated with the rattle, or does the survivor keep it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s think about it. I’m sure we have a lot of time before
one of us dies.”
“I hope so!”
And so it was settled: Grape Areeww brought the rattle to
chiropractic school, and in six months time he mailed it to England, where
Feldenstein Calypso kept it, and so on, until this day, where it sits here,
right now, on this desk, ready for a new journey to an unnamed Midwest
town. It has been in every continent of
the world and even for a short time in the micronation of Asbamaslovendad.
Here, dear Readers, is the rattle:
And so, um….Where was I?
Oh, yes! I am live blogging here, blogging about what’s
going through my mind right now, this day, and how deciding what to blog about
isn’t as easy as it seems when you don’t blog regularly, and how blogging live
this morning just felt like fun, and then I started describing the origin of my
promise to Feldenstein Calypso that led up to it.
I see the fates have played a lovely joke on me: I have live blogged!
I am left with only one thing to do: I must pack the rattle
in a secure way. It is Saturday here in Guadalupe del Los Arboles, 12:45 in the
morning, and the post office is only open on odd hours.
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