The Trike Returns:
Root
Bob Church
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At the Root of the Matter
Prentiss Calder Biff. The name held refined dignity. Certainly Prentiss' parents took great care in selection, given their abrupt surname. Biff didn't have the euphonic flow of McVicker, mother's maiden name.
Prentiss' father died in a freak accident during the harvest, prior to Prentiss' birth -- a combine with stuck blades, it seems, shouldn't be hammered with a crowbar by its inebriated driver.
Freda McVicker Biff's insistence on re-assuming her maiden name caused division within the family -- there was a riff at the Biff's.
The controversy raged, until one day Prentiss ran in from playing in the fields, covered head to toe in cockleburs and screaming in pain. The boy suffered mightily each time his mother extracted a bur from his blotchy red body.
After supper that evening (and several liters of elderberry wine), the boy's uncles decided that Prentiss Calder Biff was not a name for a lad who could withstand an attack of killer nettles. In a ceremony worthy of an apprentice knight, he was christened Sticker McVicker.
Cosmic kismet had spoken and the subject was not mentioned again. What goes around comes around, and a sense of humor is a lethal weapon.
~Bob Church
Bob Church is an over-the-hill husband/dad/engineer who moonlights as a curmudgeon in Topeka, Kansas. Oh, yeah -- he writes a little, too. Website. Email.
© 2002 by Bob Church. All Rights Reserved.
© Copyright 2002 by Cayuse Press. All Rights Reserved.
This page updated August 31, 2002.