We all know life is like a highway through the mountains, with twists and turns – terrifying cliffs on one side, a body of water on the other, both beckoning you to your doom. Comparatively speaking, now that I am no longer living in a Jungle but on Momma’s bed, life is easy…e-a-s-y….almost boring in its repetitiveness. You know what to expect every day, just from how the shadows form, disperse, then gather in, to close off another night. I am not complaining but monkeys live for, die for, action.
Yes, we monkeys live fully and let the chips fall. Instead, I have turned in to a stodgy historian of sorts, telling how it was and hearing from the family pets what goes on beyond these bedroom walls….and it is not exactly tale worthy. However, you might find a lesson to be learned in this particular anecdote.
High up on the cherry wood armoire live a legion of animate yet inanimate plush souls (so far, so true) who long to be freed from their tight, restrictive quarters yet they admit it is far better than the dungeon they had been assigned to, once upon a time.
At this point in the story, Diva Calico Gen jumps in to caution Ruby, the Incredibly Wide Eyed Monkey. ‘No sad stories, Ruby or I have nightmares. I cry when I hear sad stories.’ Happy to have an audience and absolutely ignoring Gen’s logic, Ruby continued as if she had never been interrupted.
Once upon a time when Wonder Boy was a wee lad, he had a collection of stuffed animals that would rival Prince William’s, born the same year, all of which he nurtured with a passion. But time passed and his plush friends became, almost passé so to speak…a Greek Tragedy (without a Greek). So what does Momma do? She can not throw out, give away or even sell such loyal companions in a yard sale. No, she lovingly emptied an old trunk in the basement, passed down through the generations, storing Wonder Boy’s friends from ages past, large on the bottom, smaller ones on the top. It was rather confining, grumbled the plush, very dark inside that trunk but at least they were all together…again.
All was good….until the flood in the basement, that is…when the trunk rose and set sail on the impending tide, like Noah’s ark. Once again, Momma to the rescue. She brought all Wonder Boy’s once beloved stuffed friends upstairs. She washed them once….still musty from the dank water that had seeped inside the porous trunk. She washed them twice, three times, dried them on low, with Bounce Sheets….a ton of them…then Momma found them a new home, on top of the cherry wood armoire where the flood waters of life will not suck them in….unless a Hurricane Katrina passes through our Jakitaville.
So day by day, night by night they peer down at me, reports Ruby, still traumatized but beginning to tell their individual stories. Like Pa Kettle. ‘I’ll get around to it’….that is telling their individual stories as only a monkey can, part truth, part exaggeration but always with a tinge of sadness followed up with a punch line because life is pointless unless you can laugh…. at situations beyond your control, at others, at yourself. Kind of like the Irish we are, without St. Patrick to guide us because…. that’s monkeys for you!
