| Just waiting for the phone calls |
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| Written by Wick Fisher | ||||||
| Friday, 12 June 2009 14:52 | ||||||
 I waited in feverish anticipation for that darn telephone to ring. “Maybe they don’t have my number,” I thought. After all, I hadn’t seen any of my dozen cousins from Winner, South Dakota in over forty years. Most of them had long since moved to the Puget Sound in the state of Washington. All but one, Cousin Larry, and I was sure he was the $232 million Powerball winner from Winner. No such luck. Congrats to Neal Wanlass, the 23 year-old cowboy who recently had his trailer repossessed and whose family were in arrears on their taxes. Hey Neil, if you are related to my deceased Uncle Bunny and Aunt Marion Hines who lived in Winner, long ago, don’t forget about me, their nephew who may have been your second cousin’s ex-wife’s former boyfriend in the sixties. The contacts I did get this week from old relatives from the past involved a cousin from Houston who proudly claimed he had gotten his first driver’s license in over twenty years. It seems he liked to drink; basically all day, every day and didn’t trust himself behind the wheel of a car. He finally landed a job that required driving inside the plant grounds. He got a license, quit day-drinking and so far his life is good. “Hope to see you in Chamberlain for the class reunion” he tells me. “You haven’t heard from Cousin Larry down in Winner, have you?” I ask with a hint of desperation. I received several more phone calls this week from friends from the past. They all concerned my story about Arnold, the Budweiser-drinking Pig. “You didn’t tell them how I got sick at Arnold’s pig roast!” Bart exclaimed. “Remember, I puked all over the place from an undercooked pork chop?” Yeah, right, Bart. Are you sure it wasn’t from a combo of too much pork chop and excess beer? After all, none of the other pukers at the party blamed the pig. Another friend mentioned about how lucky I was that my editor even allowed me to write a story about obvious animal abuse. Wasn’t he afraid PETA would come after me and the newspaper? I figured there’s got to be a statue of limitations on serving beer to a minor pig, besides Arnold swore he was twenty-one. Another person mentioned the day Arnold got ‘pumpkined out.’ A neighbor went overboard on growing pumpkins that year and still had a pickup-full left over after Halloween. Not one to waste, he thought of me and my pig Arnold. “Sure, I’ll take them. Unload them in the shed next to Arnold’s pen over there.” We gave Arnold one of the smaller pumpkins first just to be certain she would eat them. (Oops! The secret is now out. Arnold was a girl and always had been. I’ll probably get phone calls about that next week.) Anyway, Arnold made short order of that first pumpkin and started begging for more. I figured a pumpkin a day was enough to keep the doctor away and any more than that would be unhealthy so I closed the door to the shed and called it a day. The next morning when I called out “Arnold” from the back porch, I knew something was amiss. Instead of her usual greeting of standing on her hind legs with an “oink, oink, oink,” I heard a low moaning sound. I went out to her pen, only to discover it was totally shattered to pieces as was the door to the shed. There lay Arnold in a huge pile of half-eaten pumpkins, all pigged out. The last person to contact me about Arnold greeted me with “Boy am I angry with you!” “What’d I do?” I innocently asserted. “You killed him! And then you ate him. No happy endings to this story. I’m reading along all about this great story of your pet who made all these friends and did all these tricks and then in the last paragraph, you killed him.” Yes, I killed her, but that was the plan all along. We didn’t plan on falling in love with her. My wife and I did our best to find a home for Arnold, but who was willing to take on a three-hundred pound pet pig? So we did the next best thing; we ate her.
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