There are days when I have an idea for my evening blog posts from the minute I wake up. Stories simply too good to keep to myself. Then there are days when I have nothing. The pockets of my clown pants of tales are empty. I'd pull them out to show you, but some lint might escape. Today was almost lintworthy.
I was on the way home after taking my mom on an outing to pay my house bill. Yes. I'm a good daughter like that. Mom had only been out of the house once since the "big" storm hit last Thursday. I didn't want her to succumb to a bout of cabin fever that might progress to stircraziness. So I swung by out-of-my-way to pick her up. A good time was had by all. Mom was so grateful that she paid me $8.00 for my trouble. Yep. That's the going rate of good-daughterness in Backroads today. You would think that's enough of a tale in itself. But that's not the story.
I attempted a short cut to avoid two traffic lights. As Even Steven would have it, my haste was wasted behind a chap with the audacity to drive the speed limit. Not that I'm averse to law-abiding. I'm not. But this chap continued to obey the OLD 30 mph law even after we passed into the 45 mph law. A large white SUV came roaring up behind me. Feinted as if to pass. PUH-LEEEZE! Who do you think you're foolin'? as Paul Simon might have sung if he was being tailgated by a large white SUV while chugging up a 35-degree incline on twisting two-lane blacktop. So close was that large white SUV that I could not even see the brights of its eyes. THATCLOSE! Perhaps I've mentioned a time or two hundred how much I detest tailgaters. But even vengeful Val would not want that large white SUV to receive its comeuppance in the form of a head-on crash. And neither is that the story.
Our convoy, rolling through the evening, had just crossed back into a new 30 mph law inside the outer city limits of Backroads. We bumped over the railroad tracks. Coasted down the hill beside the lovely lake that most municipalities would call a pond, and then it happened! THE STORY!
On the jogging path, blocking a lithe shirtless shorts dude and a plugging sweatpantsed weightloser about fifty paces behind, was A GORILLA!!! Right there on the blacktop jogging path around the lake. Right beside the parking lot. Just across the street from the nursing home that used to be the hospital where I was born. A GORILLA! And it WAVED to me!
It was not a standard black gorilla with shiny hands and face. It was a brown gorilla. The shade of brown that looks really bad in a suit on a TV meteorologist. Kind of a gingerbread hue. I would love to have taken a blurry picture with my phone camera, but there was that messy business of the large white SUV crawling up my back hatch. My resident captive photographer, The Pony, was away at an academic team meet. So I was unable to bring you, in all its glory, the brown furry gorilla that waved to me from the jogging path of the lake that Backroads built.
You know how a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, today you get the thousand words. Not even that. How about 591? It's still better than clown pants lint, don't you think?
Ha ha. years ago Burger King was doing apromo fro the King Kong burger. There was aguy in a gorilla suit on the street corner and my ex said, "If that gorilla jumps on my hood, I'm hitting the gas."
ReplyDeleteOh, your mama loves you. She loves you. She probably got down on her knees and hugged you, right?
ReplyDeleteIf there was still some kodachrome available, you might have been able to take a picture. It would have made all Val's world a sunny day, instead of (kind of) a scary day, due to that white SUV...
Val had an actual Bigfoot sighting? That's it. I'm certain. I heard they're lurking along the back roads in rural Missouri. Of course, I watched the movie Battleship last night, so that might have influenced me to be accepting the existence of ETs, Bigfoots, and the like.
ReplyDeleteYou are such a good daughter. I bet your mom appreciated being able to get out after the nasty weather.
Linda,
ReplyDeleteAt least it wasn't that king dude with the humongous head, leaning over you after you dozed off in front of the TV. Bouncing the remote off his gargantuan noggin would not quite be as persuasive as ramming him with an automobile.
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Sioux,
Thank goodness I didn't meet my old lover on the street while Mom was along for the ride. That might have required a new plan, Stan...like dropping off the key, Lee. We won't even go into that incident with Julio down by the schoolyard. Or the time I was underage in this funky bar and stepped outside to have myself a "J". I'm sure she's looking forward to our next mother and child reunion.
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Donna,
It was more like a Statue of Liberty tax service sighting. The wave was the same. I have no idea what that ape was thinking, just hanging out at the lake, obstructing the jog path, waving like a maniac. But the shirtless shorts dude could have used some fur.
I AM a true eight-dollar daughter.
Wait...only 591 words? You mean I'm going to have to use my overactive imagination to visualize Val and her mom in the Tahoe in middle of a convoy waving at a gorilla that probably escaped from the nursing home?
ReplyDeleteMaybe the gorilla was really a beautiful baboon blowing bubbles biking backwards right there with Billy Bunny's breadbasket and Brother Bob's baseball bus and Buster Beagle's banjo-bagpipe-bugle band. What about that part of the story?? hmmm?
Leenie,
ReplyDeleteSometimes, a gorilla is just a gorilla suit with a skinny man inside. Sometimes, the rest of the story is not forthcoming because, as we remember from A League of Their Own, a lady reveals nothing. I'm sure you don't want me to reveal more than already meets the eye.