Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: October 12th, 2014
When I was quite young, pop used to tell us stories and when Aunt Mamie and Uncle Heini visited us or we them, Aunt Mamie would tell stories. Often her stories dealt with the family and her own growing up, but she also told some stories that were ostensibly true. Here are a couple of them. When Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden, all the plants and animals turned away except a group of small, blue flowers. Each of them called out, Forget me not, as Adam and Eve left and they have been called Forget-me-nots ever since. Another one was about this couple who had a little four year old boy and they were taking care of the wife’s old father. He was old and his hand was shaky so he made a mess when he ate. They made a little trough for him to eat and put him at a separate table. Once, they saw this little boy working like crazy on a project and they asked what he was doing. He said he was getting ready so that when his parents got old and he had to take care of them, he would have a trough for them. They were so ashamed that they brought the old grandpa to the table and didn’t worry if he spilled his food a little.
Pop knew many of the fairy tales of Grimm and Andersen. We got the usual stories about Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel with all the gory details, but he also liked the Andersen fairy tales. Mom did not let him tell those stories until we were fairly old, but then we got the little match girl and the ugly duckling and the emperor having no clothes. Those were neat stories although the little match girl and the little mermaid were pretty hard to take. But then we had a disaster. Little Laurie (now called Dory, but Phyllis was not yet born and so Dory was not yet Dory but Laurie) one morning looked out and saw this black dog. I have never seen a dog that was so black. It was about the size of a medium sized labrador, but so black and shiny. Dory was really curios about that dog. It came back several times and because it was so black and shiny, it looked like its coat was navy blue and Dory called it her blue doggy. It kept coming back for about a month and then it disappeared, we never saw it again, but Dory wanted to know about it and that is when pop came up with the blue doggy story. So, Dory wanted to know everything about it. Well, according to the story it was lost and Bob, Louise and I found it and brought it home and we all made a special bed for it and Dory fed it milk out of a bottle and saved its life and it was grateful and never forgot us. It felt so warm and cuddly in that little bed, but it finally grew up and decided to go look for its mother to let her know that he was still alive and well cared for, so it went away and after sometime, came back and it would run down our road and around the house. Dogs can’t talk of course but it was his way of letting us know that it had found its mother and it was so happy and we should be happy, too. Then one day it was gone. That is because it had found another blue doggy, a little girl blue doggy and they loved each other and went off to have their own family, but in doggy talk, they could still tell their own little puppies about being rescued and how baby Dory had given it a bottle to eat and so saved its life. So, that was the gist of that story. It had many, many variants. Eventually, Dory got older and other kids got to be the saviors and so on. Some times the older children had rescued the dog from being drowned in the bay and so on. But the fact is, we never got another story after that. It was always a blue doggy story.
Another story that I got was when I was going to get my tonsils out. That was pretty much routine in the good old days. Pretty much everybody got their tonsils out. They did not seem to be worth anything and you just got diseases from them so out they went. I tended to have quite a bit of infections in my tonsils so when I was in the first grade, I was scheduled one vacation to have them out. I ate a lot of jello getting ready for the operation. It thickened your blood. I was wheeled into the operating room. The nurse administered the ether. I had a little mask put on me and she told me a story. It was during the Christmas time and the story was about two little boys, the night was coming on and as they looked up, they could see this sleigh coming in toward their house. They quickly jumped behind a rock wall to see what was going to happen. Then I went to sleep and never got the rest of the story, but for seventy years, I wondered how that story ended. The nurse by that time had married Dr. Ennis Keizer (Dr. Johnson had done the surgery, but Elizabeth was the nurse that they both shared) and then he died an so she was a widow. She had become a Catholic and so I asked mom to find out how that story ended. She laughed and said there was no ending to the story. She always told little kids stories like that but they dropped off before she could ever get very far and so it was with me.
But we loved the stories. Mom was great telling stories about her family and pop, although he did not tell too many bedtime stories about his family, those stories came usually after supper, but he told the stories. The ones he liked best before the blue doggy stopped all stories were stories that were rather tear jerkers. It was a little like those old songs, Father, come that was about little Mary asking her father to leave drinking in the saloon and tend to little dying Ben. Yes, we were great on the tear jerkers. But we heard others, too, and we loved the stories.