Snake Day At Mel’s House

Image above generated by GEMINI artificial intelligence… no living or dead people represented in the image.

When I was a kid — a young, snotty-nosed asshole of a kid —I did a lot of foolish things and this is the story of one of them:

Mel and her husband owned a five and dime operation in our small country village when I was about 12 years old and she had a toy department in that place too.

Mel was one of the town’s best gossips.

I am telling you that if she heard something at Noon, it would be complete and totally enhanced by the grape vine and would arrive at the other end of town within the space of one telephone call, amplified and enhanced by all the other gossip mongers in town … a matter of minutes. Pony Express has never been as fast as that gossip delivery service.

But she had a good heart and her son, (Name With Held) was one of my closest play mates.

This meant that I had unrestricted access to all the best that was Mel …. including the fantastically delicious cookies and candy that she made.

But Mel had a mouth on her … she could whoop and holler and cuss like a sailor when she got mad– and she got mad at me a lot because i acted like a total asshole most of the time.

But when times were good, my friend, her son and I would spend leisurely hours laying in front of their television set watching “Superman” or “Dragnet” or stuff like that.

So one day when I was in a bastardly mood, I decided to put a very realistic-looking rubber toy rattlesnake into a cigar box and took it over to the variety store to tease Mel with it.

When I arrived at the store where her and her husband and son also had an apartment, she was in her kitchen in the middle of baking cookies.

When I arrived, her attention was immediately drawn to the closed cigar box which i held suspiciously under one arm.

“What’s in the box?” She asked.

“Ahhh, nothin'” I replied.

She kept wheedling me about what was in the box, growing more incensed with each passing moment that i refused to tell her.

Finally, red-faced and puffing wrath, she screamed, “What’s in that G*d-d**ned” box?

Handing the closed box to her gently, I said, “you had better not open it.”

Those were wasted words.

She did open the box, stood there for a split second, screamed a shrill ear-piercing scream, throwing the box across the room and calling me the foulest possible names she could think of all the time.

“You little bastard,” she raged… “If you ever do anything like that again I will kill you!”

Mel was always going to “Kill” me over something that I did or the other but she never really got around to actually doing it.

Did I mention that I went home without any cookies that day?