Family reunion

I just got back from four days with my family. I normally go to a reunion every two years, over in Idaho, the meeting of my mother’s side of the family, but this reunion was specifically my mom, my brothers and their families. Twenty people crowding two houses on a golf course. It was wonderful!

The first night my nephew and I were kicked off the golf course. We waited until all golfers had gone through and took a couple of clubs out on the fairway right behind the cabin. It turns out the course has a monitoring system, we saw later the camera mounted on an electric pole, and within ten minutes a gruff fellow drove up in a golf-cart and told us “pick up your balls and get off!” How impolite of him, he didn’t even say please.

I got to play golf twice, it was heaven, I was submersed in golf and actually responded by playing quite well. But there was something for everyone, white-water rafting, fishing, horseback riding, a parade, massage and swimming. Of course it all cost money and none of us is rich, but by cramming so many people in we made it cheaper. The good thing is all the money spent by everyone there stays right here in the State of Oregon, unlike if we’d gone to Disneyland.

My older brother was going to tow his boat over from Ontario (which is on the Idaho-Oregon border) to our Central Oregon meeting-place, but decided not to, which turned out to be a smart thing, there was no parking available for boats and trailers. But he did bring poles and his exceptionally well-stocked tackle box. We decided to explore renting a boat at Lake Billy Chinook. My brother cracked me up when he said, “Why don’t we see if we can’t rent a boat.” I replied, “Why don’t we see if we can?” I recognize the word construction as one my mother always used, among many, another example being “your room needs cleaned.” Maybe it’s German, or more likely just a Midwest thing they picked up in Nebraska, but I find it curious.

My new son (I’d call him a son-in-law but he’s turned into a full-fledged son) had never been fishing. He grew up in Southern California, in Altadena, which is definitely in ‘Hood country and fishing wasn’t on the list of things he and his homeys did. But he was jazzed to go fishing and being his dad (he’s never had one, at the wedding he whispered to me how glad he was to have a dad now), anyway, being his did I had to take him fishing and with my expert brother (and his magic tackle-box) he caught his first three fish, scrappy little small-mouth bass. Unfortunately we didn’t keep any of them, my daughter is pregnant and isn’t allowed lake-caught fish in her diet, altogether we caught about two dozen, about half-a-dozen big enough to filet.

My new daughter, my oldest son’s new wife, had never played golf, so I played with the two of them. She loved it, is talking about watching it on TV and getting golf magazines. I think we’ve created a monster.

My oldest son organized the whole reunion, booking the houses, organizing the activities, etc., and he was happy as a clam the whole time, it was a resounding success and one we’ll continue on a regular basis.

Today I leave on the second leg of my vacation, I am going out to camp for four days at the Oregon Country Fair (google it). Somebody’s got to be the grasshopper, why not me?

 

John Day country

Just got back from a two-day road-trip over to John Day country. In the process I crossed three sets of mountains, and drove for miles through the sage-brush desert and rimrock country.

Oregon is a state blessed with many different aspects. The western side is thickly forested from the coast up to the ridgeline of the Cascade mountains and is classified as a rain forest. Once you get over the Cascades the trees change species from Douglas Fir (primarily) to thinner stands of Ponderosa Pine trailing down to Junipers and sagebrush as you go into the desert.

Anywhere there is water and bottomland in the deserts of Eastern Oregon people grow hay and livestock. You drive through an area where there’s desert on one side of the road and dark green alfalfa on the other. I call it the Magpie desert. Magpies love a freshly mowed and windrowed field of alfalfa or grass hay, there are quite a number of small rodents and snakes mangled in the process and carrion is the prime food for Magpies. They also have learned to use the road to their advantage, they don’t have to follow it very far before they’re blessed with some ground squirrel, marmot, or rock chuck who inadvertently ran under the wheels of a passing car.

I have some history with the John Day country but I hadn’t been over there for twenty years. I was looking forward to having a beer in the Corral Tavern there in John Day, I remembered fondly the sawdust and peanut shell floor covering, the friendly folks, the “characters” that always seem to gravitate to a tavern like the Corral.

So after checking in to the motel, I walked on down town to where I thought I remembered the Corral being. It’s called something else now, the new name didn’t stick in my mind. I walked in but nobody noticed me, they were intently watching the Oregon State Beavers from Corvallis in the final game of the College World Series. I came in just as the Beavers were pitching the last inning to the North Carolina team. All these Oregon boys needed were three outs and they were the National Champions, I’m sure all over Eastern Oregon the bars were full of people rooting for the home team. As the plucky center fielder hauled in the third out, the place erupted, all us Oregonians whooping it up and high-fiving like we’d won the World Cup.

I sat down by one old boy and allowed as to how I hadn’t been in this place for twenty-odd years. He told me they’d changed the name thirteen years back. That let me know he’d been there a long time so I asked about an acquaintance, the local barber, Joe West. It turned out Joe had died only three weeks ago, “he got the cancer and went down quick.” I remembered Joe letting my girl-friend and me pick vegetables in his dad’s (and his) garden. His dad, Con West, leaned over the fence and said howdy and later told Joe about seeing his “girl friends.” I had to laugh about that, seeing as how I was a long-haired hippie back in those days, thirty years ago. Now Joe was dead from “the cancer,” I guess I was three weeks late.

The reason I went over to John Day country was to look at bidding a job over there and if we win it I’ll spend a couple of months or so in that area. I’ll probably remember the name of the tavern that used to be the Corral if we get the bid, that and quite a few others, plus every restaurant’s menu fifty miles in each direction.

It was a nostalgic trip. Thirty years ago they were unboarding the Kam Wah Chung Company which had been boarded up for forty years. It was in the heart of what folks still call John Day’s Chinatown, although there haven’t been any Chinese there for half-a-century. Now the old building is a full-fledged museum, with an attendant Visitor’s Center and everything. I’d been lucky thirty years ago to be able to go inside and see what it looked like. It amazes me to think how long that Chinese mercantile had been boarded up and nobody had broken in to loot anything. The museum folks had pretty much just left everything as they found it.

The local Chinese (back when there were a couple thousand in the area) would come to Kam Way Chung because of Doc Hay. He’d been able to amass quite a number of herbs from the Chinese pharmacopoeia and although he wasn’t a ‘real’ doctor he could diagnose and treat folks pretty successfully. He’d also burn the joss and tell your fortune. Pretty soon white folks came to him too, so he set in a store of white folks’ medicines. It was also a combination dry goods/hardware store.

Over the years Doc Hay was paid by check by a lot of local residents. He figured it was as good as cash, so he hid them all under his bed. The bad thing is the banks they are all drawn on collapsed during the depression, I don’t think Doc Hay ever knew that and died believing he had a fortune under his bed. The museum displays all of them, some twenty thousand dollars worth.

As nostalgic and interesting as the John Day country is, I don’t think I’d like to live there, I don’t like being that far from the ocean and I like the green of Western Oregon too much. Plus I think I’d get tired of the folks over on the east side, they’re honest and open, which is good, but they’re also a mite hidebound and conservative for my taste.

But the drive over and back was worth doing and I enjoyed the hell out of it. I remember driving east and looking up at a rimrock that looked for all the world like huge, decayed, fossilized teeth sticking thirty feet in the air, I wish I’d taken a picture of it. Maybe the fact I didn’t get a shot of it is so I’ll have to go back again sometime. Maybe so.

 

A month or so ago I saw an ad on Writing.com for a poetry contest with a first place prize of ten grand. I thought, why not?

So I submitted a poem I liked with fewer than 20 lines ("Invalid Item" ). I submitted it to someone calling themselves the International Library of Poetry. It turns out the organization is associated with poetry.com and if I had known that I wouldn’t have submitted anything.

Right away I won something, I guess, and will be published in a beautiful coffee-table book, finely bound, full of poetry, and lucky me, I can get a copy of it for only sixty bucks.

Then they named me some kind of ambassador of poetry and have a nice certificate with my name on it, but there’s more, for forty bucks I can have a gold-colored medallion on a chain, like an Olympic medal, which I could wear proudly to ambassador meetings and such.

Next I was informed my poem was so good it was going on a CD, read aloud by a professional voice, and they needed me to verify any unusual pronunciations in the poem, offering it to me for a rock-bottom price of thirty bucks or so.

But the capper of the experience has to be the letters and emails they’ve sent me encouraging me to go to the big conference in Las Vegas at the end of July, not too many places are left for this gala. The latest email told me I was going to receive a crystal trophy, at least and to leave room in my luggage for this 300 dollar value. I don’t know how much reservations for the convention cost, I’m sure if I click the reservation link in the email I’ll find out. But it sounds like money well spent!

At the convention we’ll be treated to a real star of stage and screen, Tony Orlando (they don’t mention if Dawn will be with him). He’s a great poet, Tony, I guess. Did he really write “Tie a yellow ribbon (round the old oak tree)”? Was it his genius that gave us “knock three times on the ceiling if you love me, twice on the pipe if you’re not going to show”? I feel awed by such immense talent.

Several years ago I remember folks talking about Poetry.com and what a nightmare it could be if they get their hooks in you. I thought the Storymaster was keeping them out of Writing.com, but it looks like they’ve found a side door.

 

A local soldier has been charged with desertion and put in the county lockup. She had one tour of Iraq under her belt, they were going to send her on another, so she went AWOL. Her claim is she was repeatedly raped by her patrol leader over a several month period, subjected to sexual harrassment, and didn't care to endure anymore such "friendly fire" at the hands of her fellow Americans.

An interesting sidenote is two women here in town are finally behind bars again for identity theft. These two have been at it for years, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars defrauded, the money used to buy crank. One of them was caught earlier but then released due to jail over-crowding.

If it were my choice which prisoner I'd release, I'd sooner release the victim rather than the victimizer. Which one poses the greater threat to the community? If they let the meth freak out she'll start stealing again and go on the lam, if they let the deserter out she'll just go home. It doesn't appear she tried to hide from the military, she just went home, if they need her for some reason they'll know where to find her.

I'm saddened by the news of two American soldiers captured, tortured and beheaded. Al Qaeda believes the American public has no stomach for such barbarity and this pusillanimous attitude will force us to leave. I think they're right to believe like they do, I'm really sick of seeing the faces of more and more American servicemen killed in this war. It's a cumulative effect, I am currently sick to my pusillanimous stomach about the whole misbegotten enterprise.

I listened to the President's press conference after his surprise stealth mission to Iraq. Great minds think alike, the Prime Minister of Iraq agrees with Bush that rebuilding the infra-structure is their most pressing need. In the press conference Bush repeatedly mentioned the two top infra-structures to rebuild, the oil industry and electricity. This makes sense, I'm sure the oil must be pumped using electric motors. Other infra-structures, like the educational system, water, safe roads to transport food and goods, sewage treatment, hospitals, etc., will just have to wait.

The President also said over and over how the Iraqi people owned the oil, what he didn't say is which oil company will make the money selling Iraqi oil around the world. I think I heard Shell Oil has been granted the concession. The Iraqis may own the oil, but Americans are going to skim some profit right off the top.

Is this war worth continuing so Shell Oil can finally get their promised reward? How much will they have to make before we can get the hell out of there? Are we fighting to give the Iraqi people their freedom, or fighting to preserve Shell Oil's freedom to make a profit?

How much longer must we fight a war based on lies and misinformation? I wonder how many more soldiers must be tortured and beheaded before the American public requires the real criminals here to be put behind bars?
 

A previous blog entry of mine playfully examined atheists and the end-times, I even went so far as to suggest cats might be atheists. Thank goodness a couple of readers pointed out how wrong-headed I was, that my claimed ignorance of the end-times was proven and that God loved cats since in scripture He loves lions.

In an effort to educate myself I took to Google to find out more. I examined the Christian version of the Apocalypse, as well as read many other accounts from as far back as Assyria.

Christians win it hands down! They have more predictions of the end of the world than all the other religions put together. The one thing all these predictions have in common is they were wrong, which doesn't stop new nutballs from pushing the date further into the future like clockwork.

What I would call fringe elements of the Christian nutball parade are the day-counters. In Genesis (the first book of the Bible to the uninitiated pagan) God not only created the world and universe, but also clocks and calendars. Each day God cranked out something remarkable, perhaps inventing the first time-clock, punching in and punching out and finally taking the weekend off. Since then folks have been counting off the days until God decides to close the exhibit. Day-counters make their predictions by counting closely all the days and years each Bible luminary lived, throwing in an interpretation of Revelations and then mixing liberally. They'd have more success if they made cookies instead of half-baked predictions.

The Mayan account has us hanging around until the year 2012, the end of the Age of the Jaguar. It shows one thing clearly, the Mayans were more successful in predicting the end of the world than they were predicting their own demise. At the same time I'm kind of irked they would choose the end of the world during a time I might live, since there is a good chance I'll still be alive in 2012.

Christian predictors, on the other hand, really want the world to end during their lifetimes, as it increases their chance to see the Rapture up close and personal. It makes me feel sorry for all of them who've already died and gone to heaven, I'm sure the seating up there for the event must be limited given the huge numbers of dead Christians over the last two thousand years. I think the prime motivator for the Christian predictors is they want the world to end the way they think it should as a form of vindication, they can then thumb their noses at the other religions and pat themselves on the back for being right about the whole God thing.

As for cats, even if God supposedly loves them, they are pretty close-mouthed about predicting the end of the world. But I would like to amend my earlier entry. Cats may not be atheists after all, they're probably just agnostics.
 

Our bully President

I see that President Bush is going on the attack again, this time he is defending marriage. He is going to mobilize the wheels of government, take up Congress’ time with the issue, cost the networks millions of dollars while every talking head talks their head off about it, and ultimately fail.

Because I’m of a cynical nature I suspect this anti-gay marriage initiative by the President is designed to bolster support for his lagging popularity. It will work, his constituency loves nothing more than to bash gays. The Bible shows us God doesn’t like gay people so they’re an easy target. The other thing about gays is they won’t fight back, arm themselves, blow up churches, etc., so it’s also very safe to attack them, unlike those pesky freedom-loving Iraqis, who continue to bite the hand that beats them.

Although I’m not married, I sympathize with those who are, it is not an easy road to follow. Statistics seem to indicate that something like 50% of marriages die on the vine and people like me who’ve never had a successful one drive the percentage up. I’ve given up. To paraphrase Chief Joseph, “I will marry no more, forever.”

Marriage is a sacred state, most of the time it is performed with religious overtones, in churches, by preachers. Yet marriage has seeped into laws governing society as well, married people get preferential treatment, tax-breaks, Social Security perks, even hospital visitation rights. You can see why the gays would like it, marriage is a legal formation of family, and once the law recognizes your family then that family can stand to inherit, visit you in the hospital, share your insurance coverage and even adopt children more easily.

Civil rights have done a lot to shape marriage laws. By recognizing that black people were also humans and citizens, laws had to be changed to allow black and white people to get married, laws written by people with narrow definitions. I think that’s the key, we shouldn’t narrow our definitions. The path toward civil rights for everyone is broadening or getting rid entirely of definitions leading toward discrimination.

Because I see the gays as being discriminated against, not to the point Blacks, women, Chinese, Irish, Scandanavians and Indians were discriminated against, but still the objects of discrimination. Gays represent the next push toward intelligent civil rights evolution, the granting of citizen benefits to everyone, like Equal Opportunity laws have done in the workplace.

The attempt by our nincompoop President to deny gay people citizen benefits is delaying the inevitable. It is foot-dragging which will slow down the process, but I think ultimately gays will overcome, discrimination is discrimination, and the progress of our laws has been motivated by ending discrimination.

Perhaps it’s time to scrap marriage as a legal institution, not limit the definition to further discriminate against people for political ends. But the bottom line remains that marriage is not under attack, gays, polygamists and people who live together are. The President’s focus in defending marriage is typically wrong-headed, but what else should we expect from someone who hasn’t got one thing right yet? I hope the one or two points of approval rating he gets from the bigoted, hide-bound religious nutballs for bullying gay people will give him great satisfaction even if it does smack to me like the sheer desperation, the grasping at straws, so to speak, by someone who has a hard time making friends.

 

Recently fellow blogger ES Morgan complained about chain-letters, specifically one sent to him by someone who has a history of doing so even when asked not to. So I’ve been thinking about chain letters.

Chain letters are like spam email. Originally they were sent by post, spam snail mail, like circulars, credit card offers, car insurance offers, etc. Now I’m sure chain letters are sent via the web, like multitudes of other spam offers for penis enhancement, cialis, penny stock get-rich-quick schemes, etc.

But if you stop and think, the original chain-letters had to have a stamp on them, meaning someone actually believed enough in the foolishness to go and buy stamps. That’s an investment in hope (well, and a little bit of fear, since if you broke the chain bad stuff was due to happen to you).

I suggested to ES Morgan that he was just angry at chain-letters because they require you to do something and if there were some kind of rhetorical chain-letter that required you to do nothing, he’d be okay with them. But I’m not so sure even a non-participatory chain-letter would be okay to someone who has admittedly broken Aretha Franklin’s hit “Chain of fools” just to be the kind of person who makes a practice of breaking chains.

So here’s a chain-letter he doesn’t have to answer in any way:

You have not received this chain-letter and you will not send it to twelve people who will no longer be your friends, relatives, acquaintances, etc. if you do send it. Nothing bad will happen to you, maybe. In the event of lightning-strikes, being hit by a bus, or the inevitable collapse of your relationships, don’t blame me for writing this chain-letter, it has nothing to do with your run of bad luck. Conversely don’t give me any credit if you hit the lottery, find a dime on the street or hit a hole-in-one, I had nothing to do with it.

If you send this chain-letter to anyone you will break the chain of apathy and you deserve whatever happens to you, good or bad, as a result. Non-action is required here. In fact you shouldn’t even read this chain-letter because it might tempt you to do something like read on to hear my extravagant claims about what’s happened to others who were moved to do something after reading it.

Someone, somewhere, is driving around in a shiny new BMW because they wrote a chain-letter and those receiving it sent him ten dollars. Then he got ten dollars from the folks those original people sent it to, etc. All tax-free money. His Beamer has a lot of extras bought by ten-dollar contributions, I urge you to use your imagination here, just think of all the neat stuff he was able to afford for his shiny new car because people believed that soon they too would be getting ten-dollar bills in the mail.

You won’t get ten-dollar bills from this chain-letter. That’s not part of the deal. So what is the deal? You just need to send me ten dollars. See how simple it is? You don’t have to send this on, all you need do is stuff a ten-dollar bill in an envelope, put a stamp on it and send it to me. Hey, send me a twenty if you don’t have a ten, I’m okay with that.

Think of yourself as being really lucky just to read this chain-letter. The fact I took the time to write it should be worth at least ten bucks, don’t you think? Nobody else deserves ten bucks more than me. I’d like to be the guy in the BMW. Can you blame me?



 

My new job took me out of town for about a week. A week where I was incognito about everything except for working hard to build a home in a week.

It went well, and the rest of the world went on without my comment, which really isn't strange since even with comment it does what it wants. But I feel better being outside, not knowing anything but the work at hand and getting to know the people I worked for.

We were fed a most satisfying breakfast, lunch and dinner, not to mention after-work libations. And after a week there were walls up and beautiful exposed beams with a roof on and caulked fore and aft, what they call in the trade a "dried-in structure." Our customers were quite happy and saw to it we shared their joy.

I didn't just do a house-raising, I became one of their relatives, and I am very fond of the folks whose house I helped erect. There was a revolving door all week circuiting in this son or daughter (as well as significant others, children of friends, etc.), an adopted troubled man-child (whom I couldn't help but like and dislike at the same time), but through it all was a welcoming glue of love and acceptance, of joy and dreams fulfilled.

I got paid well for doing this, it's my job. No one could ever pay me for the enriching side benefits. If this is to be the job for me I look forward to all the relatives out there just waiting for me to come and meet them. I met a passel of them this last week, and now they're kin I need to go back and visit them as often as I can.

As for the rest of the world...from the sound of things I didn't miss much, it looks like it's still heading for Hell in a hand-basket...
 

Atheists and the end times

I got caught today behind a woman in a Ford Escort, with a bumper-sticker reading “Pay no mind to the car, my other treasure is in Heaven.” Which made me think of similar bumper-stickers telling me “In case of rapture, this car has no driver.”

Frankly this worries me. 144,000 folks (according to Revelations) will be ‘taken up’ if the rapture goes off as predicted. Now I think having a bumper-sticker advertising the driver of a Ford Escort, or any other model car for that matter, as being one of the ‘elite’, one of the 144,000, is pretty optimistic, even egotistical given the number of humans actually living and the small percentage 144,000 represents. But what if it happened and 144,000 cars suddenly were going blithely down the road without benefit of human drivers? I ask myself, is that what God intends?

I won’t be one of the 144,000, the gross of Christianity, I’m pretty clear on that. I had a chance to be (haven’t we all?), but other things came up, sins and so forth I won’t go into in this forum. But I can’t help but wish the whole thing had gone off back when folks rode horses. A horse without a rider still has a great deal more sense, innately, than does a Ford Escort without a driver. Sure the horse will realize right away that nobody is kicking him in the ribs on the road to Bethlehem and why not enjoy some of the grass before we get there? A Ford Escort will just keep going until it plows, willy-nilly, into a Starbucks.

But the point is I am woefully under-educated about end-time predictions. I know the Mayans have weighed in and their calendar is about to come to a screeching halt. I’m sure Jews and Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, etc., all have their own calendars screeching to a halt as well, but I find myself blissful and ignorant in the face of all these worldish short-comings.

I had a friend who believed UFO’s were hiding in the big round clouds and soon they would come down and harvest 144,000 or so of us. Good people, who didn’t eat too much meat, and thought good thoughts a lot of the time, even if they have an addiction to hazelnut creamer in their coffee. She hoped they would also take her cat too, although maybe animals have a different number from 144,000, so maybe they wouldn’t subtract some worthy human just because a cat was superior. But she didn’t want to go without her cat (and by the way the cat didn’t weigh in publicly on either side of the predicted rapture).

Recently a study was published in Minnesota showing atheists were mis-trusted even more than used-car dealers and insurance peddlers. I’m not an atheist, but I’m close. I wonder if cats are atheists? Why are the atheists not publishing their own end-time predictions? 144,000 seems to be a popular number of believers saved from natural disasters, wars, famines, etc., do you suppose there are more atheists than that? I think it would only be appropriate if the atheists followed along and predicted something in that number. Would atheists start sporting bumper-stickers to the effect of “God didn’t take the driver of this car, I left of my own accord”?

Again I’d probably be left out. At least there’ll be some company to share the unspeakable horrors predicted for us left-behinders, I was never that strong in math, but I have to think there are a great deal more cars driving around than 144,000. And if the end of the world comes, I can’t believe it could be much worse than the current man-made destruction of habitat, wars and natural disasters sweeping the world, but then again I’ve always been an illogical positivist.

Maybe I should get a bumper-sticker reading “In case of rapture, God will tell me so I can park this car first.”

 

Alert reader ES Morgan notes I've been beating a lame duck by choosing to keep smacking the dead-horse Republicans and Bush Administration.

I must apologize and offer something different for a change.

Here is a scene from a radio theatre program I'm writing. It was inspired by the movie Grizzly Man. I give you Pooh Man.


Pooh Man

Announcer: And welcome to another audio movie. Tonight we present “Pooh Man” a troubling story about the destruction of dreams, even to the point of the destruction of the dreamers. When we last saw Christopher Robin, he had failed to get the part of Alistair in the BBC production of “As time goes by.” Perhaps as catharsis, Christopher audiotapes his return to Hundred Acre Wood. Audio director Falke Groener has taken Christopher Robin’s audio creations and put them together to give us a chilling account, showing us all too clearly how A. A. Milne watched the trees, while the forest had quite a different agenda.

Falke: (in a German accent or at least something like German) Audio is a reluctant and sometimes unfulfilling mistress. I’m not sure why Christopher Robin chose audio over video to chronicle his return to Hundred Acre Wood, but I do know this, if he’d chosen video Werner Herzog would have gotten this gig instead of me. Be that as it may. He chose audio and so, here I am.

Christopher Robin: (English accent, forest noises background, birds, etc.) I’m not sure how to proceed after talking with Owl. Hundred Acre Wood won’t be the same without Piglet, Rabbit and Eeyore. The whole place has an ominous feel, I must find Tigger and Pooh, I hope they’re okay.

Owl: You won’t have to find them, they’ll find you.

Christopher Robin: I can’t wait to give Pooh a great big hug and hear him laugh again.

Owl: Oh, he’ll hug you all right!

Christopher Robin: And Tigger! He was always so much fun hopping about as he did.

Owl: He hopped on Piglet, but I’m not sure how much fun Piglet had. There’s been too much hopping as far as I’m concerned.

Falke: That’s it in a nutshell. Things have changed in the Hundred Acre Wood. Tigger has grown into a full-sized tiger with an appetite to match. Little Pooh is now a cantankerous grizzly bear as big as a Volkswagen.

Pooh: (forest noises again, rustling of grass, he is hiding, in a cartoon Pooh voice) I do believe it’s Christopher Robin, hoo hoo hoo, and he brought me a jug of honey too! I can’t wait to hug him and eat him and have honey for desert!

Tigger: (in a different part of the forest, in a Tigger voice) Pooh won’t get this one, woo woo woo. Good ol’ Christopher Robin! I’ll hop on him and eat him for days!

Christopher Robin: (walking noises, forest) Pooh! Tigger! You silly creatures! Come out, come out, wherever you are!

Announcer: And so we leave this week’s Audio-movie episode hanging. Tune in next week for the exciting conclusion of Pooh Man.