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Shoo!
By Jonathan
Shipley
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Her bed of dahlias was her true love. She had a full garden filled with all
sorts of flowers—black eyed susans, snapdragons, several varieties of lilies
(oh how she adored their fragrance)—but her dahlias were her favorites. Their
size and dizzying array of color astounded her as she tended to them every
morning before retiring to the greenhouse with a glass of iced tea to tend to
her budding orchids (she had three and they were delicate little things).
She would do all this each day except Friday when she'd drive herself to the
synagogue for prayer and worship. She loved God and she had always taken a shine
to the rabbi, Rabbi Adam Stern, his sermons always enlightening and emboldening
her to continue on with her life happily without her dear husband Eli who passed
in 1998. She had so much to look forward to! Like her flower beds and greenhouse
work.
That is why she became alarmed when she saw a wasp in her greenhouse. She flew
out the door and said to it with stinging words, "I don't want you around
here! Shoo!" The wasp, however, stayed in the greenhouse.
Her rhododendrons actually won first prize in the town flower show. She received
a big ribbon and a fifty dollar gift certificate to Olive Garden. She took
Mildred with her and ate more soup and salad then she could remember. And the
bread sticks! The fertilizer for her rhodies were in the greenhouse so she went
inside, the following day, and noticed four other wasps in the far corner. This
would not do.
"You are not welcome here!" She yelled. "This is my home! You
scat now!" But scat they would not do. "Very well."
She went to the local nursery and bought a can of wasp killer. "I hate to
do it," she said to the clerk, "but that's MY greenhouse. I don't want
to be run out of my own greenhouse."
That night, when the wasps were slumbering, she snuck out with her spray can and
flashlight, flung open the door, illuminated the wasp nest, and fired the spray.
"HEY! What are you doing?!" They howled and the white Anglo Saxon
Protestants got into their BMWs and drove away.
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Jonathan Shipley is a cardinal, a senior
ecclesiastical official in the Roman Catholic Church, ranking just below the
Pope. He also is red and has feathers and is allowed to roost in the eaves of
Saint Peter's Basilica. When he is not roosting he is updating his blog (http://www.jonathanswackyworld.blogspot.com/)
and reading the texts of Pope Sixtus II.
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