The Curmudgeon
Nobody had heard from Curmudgeon for a few months now, and while investigations into his disappearance had been made, nothing was forthcoming.
Mail had piled up in the PO Box up at the corner and Ferd, the local postman, had diligently collected it and left it at the postal box in the General Store, not to mention that Mrs. or Mr. Storekeep had checked his house every day since he had suddenly departed.
“Should we be doing more?” asked Cityfella.
“I, for one,” said Mrs. Storekeep, “think he’s been driven off by the change in Raleigh’s approach to the general style of living and he will, I trust, suddenly show up at any of our front doors, hat in hand and happy to be home again–and knowing his general distrust in official areas of local government would be none to delighted to find his whereabouts had been reported to the FBI. You should all remember that he’s done this before–in fact gone for two months–when the final results were tabulated in the Presidential Election that defeated Al Gore.”
“But that was years ago,” chimed in the Newsman who at the moment was moving some of the newspapers around to cover up the lack of sales for the magazine on the rack, one devoted to the nightlife of Asheville.
Silence fell and thoughts turned to a number of active imaginations when suddenly, beginning with a thump at the store’s front door, to its opening with a burst of air, a flutter of papers, and the falling of an old and tattered suitcase that was immediately kicked down the floor by the size eleven feet of Curmudgeon himself.
“I am sorry,” he said, “to do this to all my friends and last night my Raleigh relations threatened to call the State Troopers if I didn’t get in touch with all of you and head home to the mountains, my explanations in hand. So I drove all night on the infamous I-40, dodging semis, including a lot of smaller trucks and a Ford Escort belonging to the small police force of Valdese–“
“Well, who cares about that,” said Mrs. Storekeep, “you’re home again.”
Silence abounded and echoed off of the store’s old polished floors, made some eighty-five years ago by the hand of the original storekeep and one Herman Heinle who had come over from the old country during World War Two.
“I missed you all,” murmured Curmudgeon, “and my mission back began by reading an article in the Science Times of the New York paper while attending a meeting of some defrocked–a personal act on their part, not state-wide–some disgruntled college professors who are angered by the latest move of the backward-leaning party that now rules our old Home State. The very ones appointing a sage of the No Child Left Behind laws to head up the state education group and throwing a twister at the halls of academe.”
He stopped and accepted with dignity a hot cup of coffee presented by Mrs. Storekeep, then taking a sip, continued:
“It was an article about how plant cells, in this case chloroplasts–the cells that convert sunlight into sugars that help plants thrive and grow–may occasionally malfunction with the threat of destroying the plant until it was noted that other cells in the affected plant with a imaginative tag that in essence reads: Danger here, this cell must go!
He paused for effect then continued:
“And suddenly I had visions of the time we were going to construct a huge balloon, and on a sunny day with a good wind blowing east make an attempt to fly to Raleigh and drop water bombs on all the errant politicians who collect like flies in the various council chambers. If a small plant can protect itself from crazed members of its own cellular structure, why couldn’t we fair-minded citizens do the same?
After another pause for effect he continued:
“Then I realized we could, so I hurried home to ask friends and family to think about possible actions we could take to bring justice back to North Carolina.”
— to be continued
Peter Loewer has written and illustrated more than twenty-five books on natural history over the past thirty years.