Sonic Pirates, the saga continues...

The latest bedtime story installment for two little boys, one with chocolate eyes and cinnamon hair and the other with blue eyes and blond curls... See here for previous chapters, as well as explanations for the members of the dread crew.

It was a cold, gray, cloudy day in the month of April. The ocean mirrored the sky and the air was still. No wind to fill the sails or make waves. The two pirate ships, captained each by a Captain Brown-Beard-Peg-Leg was drifting at the very edge of Ocean Number Two.

Suddenly, the lookout, Captain Skelty yelled, "Arrgh! Ahoy! Seaweed, dead ahead!" The pirates scrambled but it was too late to change course and both ships sailed straight into the giant bed of muck.

The seaweed on the surface was almost invisible, matching the color of the ocean and sky. And if you know anything about seaweed, if you see a little bit on the surface of the water, there will be vast rope-like streamers hanging way down into the depths. Under the water, however, the seaweed was purple, and green, and black with sparkling gold diamond sparkling shimmers, because it was magic seaweed.

This particular bed of seaweed marked a lair of the Sea Witch, who sometimes lived in a cave on the bottom of the edge of Ocean Number Two. She had been waiting for this day--for both pirate ships to sail into her trap. She had prepared by attaching bells to the ropes of seaweed outside her cave and by putting a spell on the seaweed to ensnare the pirates. When the bells started ringing, she cackled with glee. The seaweed started growing (because of the spell) and wound around the bottoms of the two ships, their rudders, up the sides and over the decks. It climbed up the masts and wound around each pirate in its path, first one leg and then the other leg (unless it was a peg leg and then it wound around the wooden leg), around one and then the other arm, the head, the face, eyepatch and mouth of each pirate. They were stuck! What would they do?!

The spell of the Sea Witch, however, only covered the ships and the pirates she knew: 7 Captain Crackerishes, 2 Captain Brown-Beard-Peg-Legs, an astro-tot, 2 Captain Skeltys (the skeleton pirate who was electricified), Frye the pirate pet ferret and Limey, the pirate parrot, and an alien pirate. What she didn't know when she cast the spell was that two new members had joined the crew: a squid and a starfish, so the seaweed did not wrap around them at all because they were not included in the spell.

Captain Skelty yelled (as the seaweed was blocking his mouth):
"SQUMMM! STARFFFD! WRMM IFF UUGGH, AARGGFFHH!"
(Translation: SQUID! STARFISH! WRAP IT UP, AARGH!)

So Squid and Starfish used all their arms/legs to wrap up the seaweed into a ball, superfast, quick as a flash, lickety-split and throw it overboard. Once Captain Skelty's mouth was cleared, he yelled, "AARGH! over you go too, and PUSH!!" So Squid and Starfish jumped into the bed of seaweed, that had no effect on them, and started pushing the boats out of the seaweed as fast as they could. A strong wind blew across the water and lifted the sails and they zoomed away.

Down below, while the seaweed wrapping was going on, the bells by the Sea Witch's cave were ringing like crazy. And then they stopped. The Sea Witch came out of the cave and shook the bells to make sure they still worked, and they did. She then turned on her jet air packs and shot straight to the surface and popped out of the water just as the pirate ships were sailing out of view. The Sea Witch yelled, "Ohhh, meeee, I have lost! Again!" and dove down to her cave to hide for six days.

Meanwhile on the pirate ships, there was much singing and dancing, "Ahoy, Aaargh! We got away from that old Sea Witch. Now let's have some soup! Aaargh!" So the pirates were served soup from the new soup machine delivered by the lego mars mission crystal leaper crew. Each pirate ate three bowls of soup, burped three times and then ate three more bowls, each. Then they went to their bunks to sack out and dream of another day when they could defeat the Sea Witch for good.

THE END.

Posted by The Editor.

The People on Your Street

We moved to our olive-colored house during my last month of first grade and we didn't move from there until the year before I graduated college. Some of the neighbors were there before we came and may be there still. We invented fanciful names for all of them and sometimes exaggerated stories. You have already heard of Paty, who lived right next door on the corner. We were the second house on the right, with a big pine tree in the front yard. Third house, on our other side, was a family of four, and the dad drove a Mercedes, which was a big deal on our street. We called them (secretly), the dad: MercED, the mom, MerceLINDA, the elder son, MercErry, and the baby, MercASON. The dog was MercIGGSY. You may have realized by now, we made up our own fun, a lot.

The other side of the street on the corner were two brothers who always wore diapers with cowboy boots (when they were toddlers!!). Straight across was a newspaper editor and his wife, he would come home and have a beer and pretzels and share with us, the pretzels, I mean, not the beer.

Next to the newspaper man, a sea captain and his wife moved in and put in a pool (also a big deal on the street). We tried to make friends so we would get invited to swim, but somehow, she never wanted two pestery little girls in her backyard, so we called her Mary and did endless imitations of her squatting to water the lawn (why they put in a pool and not sprinklers, I don't know)...the funny part was imitating the cigarette she was always holding (no smokers in our family, it was taboo and therefore instantly funny) and her gravelly voice when she would yell at her dog, Skipper, when he would try to run out of the yard, "Skaaaaypaaaah!"

Next to her was Uncle Sam, who was nice and always brought us fresh plums from his tree in season. Just like we would share our bountiful harvest of oranges every year from the tree in the backyard. Uncle Sam had several high school age children, one son, Chris, who I thought was my true love and caused much embarrassment for me on several occasions.

Further down the street, it gets a little murky, because we weren't allowed to play out of Gigi's eyesight or range of her voice. There were a few other people, Merona and her sister on our side, four houses from the other end, and Karen across from them, who went to school with Paty.

We also had a lady mailcarrier for awhile, which was foreign to us, all our childhood books clearly showed that was a man's job(!) So, we were convinced she was an infiltrator, especially when she parked her mail jeep in front of Paty's house and she got out and sat in Paty's yard with a brown paper bag and cracked something on a tree trunk in code (later inspection after she left showed it was just hard-boiled eggs for lunch).

Such was our childhood cast of characters.

Then, Busy Body reminded me that:

I forgot Jimmy the milkman, Richard who stepped on my kite (the one I got as a reward for reading at school, blue, with a green gingham tail), in the houses behind ours: Brian R. and Becky M. (who was Mormon and couldn't have caffeine), Terry who ate dog food on a dare, Kelly G. who was wild and nasty (according to Paty) and therefore forbidden as a friend, the perfect Cathy O. (seriously, she always looked like a barbie or a mouseketeer), and of course, Jo and Danny--the developmentally-challenged girl and the bully whose dad was meaner than a junkyard dog...OK, maybe not, we never really met him, but his front yard looked like a junkyard. There was also that little kid who lived at the end of our street (between Paty's and Trevor's) whose grandpa (the neighborhood molestor) sat in his pickup truck all day long. And that little boy, Mony, who moved in next door to Jo and Danny--which I bet gave them the shock of their lives!

Remember Mary and her daughter Sandy were going to take Jo in and "fix" her and then Danny threw his skateboard at Sandy's car and there was almost a riot on the street because the Junkyard Dog-dad had to come over to talk to Mary about it? Also, don't forget when two sets of step-brothers and sisters moved in next door, peeping tom-ed into busy-body's window every night while blaring music to profess the eldest brother's love for her, and then the eldest sister stole half of our lemonade stand money when she just sat in the lemonade stand all day and contributed nothing.

Did anyone else grow up in such a colorful neighborhood? Or did we just have overactive imaginations?

Posted by The Editor.

Here is a little mouth to kiss

“Here is a little mouth to kiss; here are two more feet to make music with their pattering about my nursery. Here is a soul to train for God, and the body in which it dwells is worth all it will cost, since it is an abode of a kingly tenant. I may see less of friends, but I have gained one dearer than them all. Yes, my precious baby, you are welcome to your mother’s heart, welcome to her time, her strength, her health, to her most tender cares, to her life-long prayers! Oh how rich I am, how truly, how wondrously blessed!”

~ Elizabeth Prentiss’ Stepping Heavenward

Marlo just turned 18 months. (How did that happen? I remember being a kid and the summers seemed so LONG. We always found plenty to do, but inevitably, there were always a few days when we got bored. Now I cannot find enough time in my day. Bored? Never. I can always find more than enough to do, and then some.) I just don’t know where the past 18 months have gone. In celebration of her half birthday, we put a pink candle in her ice cream after dinner and sang Happy Birthday to her. She tapped her toes and bobbed her head side to side. I think she spit the candle out and then ate it. (Wax can’t hurt you, right?)

I celebrated this milestone by looking back at all of the pictures we have taken of her, from the day she was born to today. How lucky I am to have this perfect little person in my life. How lucky I am to have been blessed with such a treasure. She has always been completely her own little person. I cannot wait to see what she will do next. In the musical “Annie”, Miss Hannigan sings, “Some women are dripping with diamonds, some women are dripping with pearls. Lucky me, lucky me, look at what I’m dripping with—little girls!” She sings it sarcastically, but I sing it sincerely.

I am truly blessed to have Joy and Marlo—the little sweeties of my life!

Posted by The Editor for Busy Body.