Jackita Recalls Jack Jack

So long ago, Gen, when Moses was a pup, Momma lived on the old homestead, in the country, far away from the hustle and bustle she faces today, with her Urban Suburban life.  It was not better, it was not worse but it was radically different.  Do you have some time, you want to hear, Gen, oh, you too, Tigger and Ruby? You’ll enjoy this.

 Jack Jack was a local character,  born    in the back woods, that even today’s  Google Car would have struggled  hard to locate and map. He  was beloved by the adults and children  alike. There were so many Jack’s in  every family, Big Jack, Little Jack, Peg  Legged Jack, One Eyed Jack…you get the  picture. His fathers’s first name was  Jack so it was only befitting he be  anointed Jack Jack and so he remained  till death did he part.

A natural-born raconteur of tales, he talked a form of Gallic.  An entrepreneur bachelor before his time, he invested in a Dream Team, two horses, Nessie and Nestor, who were both large, and placid, chestnut brown coats with long, black, feathery tails and manes that gleamed in the sun.  Jack Jack went from farm to farm in the district, plowing and planting gardens, than gathering the hay, and finally cutting and storing the harvest for the long winter months ahead. The Dream Team and their owner,  just reaping what they had sewn.

They would hear him in the fields calling, ‘Gui up a ha, Nessie,  Gui up a ha, Nestor’ and the horses would respond in kind, plodding slowly but unquestionably forward, hauling plows, or what ever wagon or farm tool was needed, for the job at hand.  Come Christmas, on a moon lit night, Jack Jack would put bells around Nessie and Nestor’s necks, hitch a sleigh on his Dream Team, and take all the neighborhood kids for a ride back the snow packed alley wherein they sang all the  season’s songs, at the top of our lungs, waking the dead from their peaceful slumber.

However, just like Our-Favorite-Uncle would say, ‘There’s always something to take the joy out of your living.’  To that end, even in Shangri–La some mean-spirited person lurked, who would take a run at him, but Jack Jack would more than likely put him in his place, right smart.  Such was the occasion when Jack Jack went to the local store and the owner, Fred, decided to tease him about being a bachelor all these years, like it was a disease to be treated before it killed you, so every time he’d ask, ‘Getting married soon, Jack Jack?’  Jack Jack caught the eye of another shopper. ‘Fred’, he drawled with a dead pan face, ‘I was wondering, was there any more of those long toothed hags, where your wife came from, that I could marry?’  No one ever heard Fred ask  Jack Jack about his marital status again.

On Halloween night, after finishing trick or treating, all the neighborhood kids would go back to his house and beg him to tell ghost stories.  As they sat around his kitchen table, the candle light flickering, casting long shadows, on the oil table-cloth and the cosy kitchen, he would tell of the disasters that always occurred when any one saw the Headless Horsemen, as it galloped through the meadow to disappear in to the black of the forest.  Floods, failed crops, loss of life followed in the Headless Horsemen’s track.  It was a common denominator among them that would not go looking for any Headless Horsemen to invite havoc in an already chaotic life.

 Jack Jack recounted a legend passed down through the generations  about his Great Aunt Matilda, how she buried her pot of gold, then died the next day and to his knowledge, it had never been found.  He swore if they went back the alley, across from the Half Way Brook, in the field to the right, where they planted their potatoes, up the hill to the quarry they would see her routing around the blue berry bushes, looking for her pot of gold.  But don’t even blink, Jack Jack cautioned, because she may evaporate, before their very eyes, leaving them wondering if it was all in their imagination or maybe, just maybe, there were unknown realities that they had to glimpse, just to give them a yearning to see more.

Momma says  that they all sat there, transfixed yet addicted to the tales, knowing next year, the very same stories would leave them  wondering again if Jack Jack was not just a simple farmer, but maybe a graduate of higher learning from another dimension of the world, that they fervently believed ‘was out there‘.

Jack you were Special… We did not know it then…We’ll see you up in Heaven….Where stories never end!

 

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