What a day

I went down to visit the cake factory today. I was supposed to go down there this mornin to pick up a cake for my aunt Rita’s 88th birthday. We never thought she’d live to 88, especially after she lost her legs to that deer back in ‘85, but that’s a different story. Like I said, I was supposed to go down there and pick up Rita’s birthday cake. My sister Frank told me she’d called the factory and had them set aside a cake special for Rita. Frank likes to get birthday cakes from the factory because you can get them irregular cakes, you know, like cakes that aren’t exactly round, but are kinda round. She says they taste the same as regular round cakes, but aunt Rita keeps tellin her she can tell the difference between a circle cake and an oval cake. They ask me what I think about it, but I know enough to keep my mouth shut in that fight. Our family just calls it the round vs. oval war and we try not to get involved too much.Well, anyway, Frank calls me up and tells me to go down to the factory and pick up the cake she’d reserved so that she could have times to try to squish it into kinda a circle, but not a real circle, so that she can prove to aunt Rita that Rita can’t taste the difference in 2 degrees of roundness. She’s been trying to test Rita on smaller and smaller margins for the last few years. Three years ago, it got to the point that she had to special order a cake protractor from a company here in town that makes protractors for kids to use in their math classes. She spent $500 on that cake protractor so that she could prove aunt Rita wrong.

Well, she never got her chance because Rita had a minor run in with the law and hasn’t been with us for her birthday party in the past couple years. I’ve never been to clear on the details, but there’s something about transporting endangered species across state lines or something but like I said, I was never too clear.Frank had told me that I was to have that cake to her house by 11 am so that she’d have time to round out the cake by the time the party started at 2. I didn’t know it took three hours to round out a cake. At 8, I’d been up a couple of hours and my finger was plumb tired from whittling so I decided I’d stop by Rita’s on the way to wish her a happy birthday without all the hemmin and hawing you gotta do at a party. So, I stop by Rita’s and she asks me where I’m goin. I tell her I’m just drivin around. Then she asks me if I was on my way to get her cake. I tell her yes’m and then she asks me if I’m gettin her one of them oval cakes. Well, this is my aunt I’m talkin to, so I gotta fess up and admit I am, in fact, buyin her an oval cake. All in all, except for the tears, the yellin and the coffe cup she threw at me, I’d say she took it pretty philosophically. We sat for a time debating the merits of oval cake versus family obligation and she told me that, if God had wanted her to eat oval cake, he woulda made her throat oval. I wanted to point out to her that she ate toast every morning, but it didn’t seem like the right time.After I left Rita’s, I was drivin around, doin some thinking about Rita and Frank when I felt a little tickle behind my ear. Well, I swat at it, thinkin it’s a horsefly or something like that. This time of year, horseflies get mighty big around here. Last week I saw a fly swoop down and steal a kitten right out of a little girl’s arms. The girl cried and cried, but the fly only took the kitten for a ride and brought it back to the little girl along with a balloon. It was the darndest thing you ever seen.

Well, after seein something like that, I was on edge with the horseflies so I reach into the glove box and get my fly spray. I start spritzin the car real good and I hear screaming. This wasn’t your normal, thumb caught in a vice, kinda scream, but a I’m big and bad and I will eat you kinda scream that you hear at the zoo.I turn around in my seat and see there’s a damn monkey in the cab with me and he’s been ticklin my ear with his tail. I guess that’s just monkey for hello or somethin, and I’d just gone and maced him. Funny thing about monkeys, somethin I’d never known before, is that monkeys look cute and everything, but if they open their mouths right, like they’re about to bite three of your fingers off, you can see they got some pretty sharp teeth. Like I said, this is something I learned about monkeys just today. Now, some of my teachers used to say I was a slow learner, but that was mostly with numbers and things. I can learn about teeth right quick. I took that can of fly spray and stuck it in that monkey’s mouth just as he was about to bite down. Well, he bit into that can fast and hard and punched six of seven holes in the thing and he released all the pressure in that can. He started bouncin around that cabin like he was some kind of superball or something. On one pass, he reached his little hand out and almost caught my ear. If he had, I’d probably be missin my sideburns right about now. Well, after flyin around that way for some time, he finally his my passenger window and went right through. My eyes was all covered in fly spray and stingin like the dickens, so I didn’t really see where he landed, but it sure sounded like it was pretty far away.

Right about this time, I hit the tree.If you got anything to say about hitting the tree, I would like to see you drive 65 with a cabin full of fly spray and a damn monkey bangin around your cabin and keep YOUR eyes on the road. That’s what I thought. Anyway, it was more of a sapling, and so it just sort of bent when I hit it. It folded over under the truck and the sprung back straight, puttin my truck on its roof. It didn’t seem to hurt nothin because it was still runnin when it was upside down, and it sounded like the problem I’ve been havin in the idle fixed itself. I’ll have to get Douggy to come out there with me tomorrow and see if we can flip it back over.I had to call Frank to come get me, and she was right mad about all this. Especially since we had to spot at Wal-Mart and buy Rita a square cake. I don’t know if I shoulda told her, but it looked like the square cake went down just fine.