My wife and I were both at a garage sale in the cul-de-sac
kitty-corner behind us, where an elderly couple with a lot of history between
them were lightening their load. I snagged
some very cool hand reamers in sizes I will probably never use, but they were
so cheap, and some also very cool extension points for my lathe tailstock in
graduated sizes, so I went away happy.
When you work with machine tools all your life you get where you just
like to handle them and admire their precision and heft, all the more enjoyable
knowing you don’t have to sweat and grunt over a T handle and actually use
them.
My wife came home with a stack of old cookie tins, some quite
faded and scratched up. “Whatever
possessed you to buy these?” I asked. “Don’t
you already have more than we need up on that shelf in the kitchen as it is?” She laughed.
“You can’t have too many cookie tins, you know, and, besides, these have
a cool story! Apparently, they were
among the residue of our elderly neighbor’s equally elderly Great-Aunt, who
emigrated from the Old Country, and they’ve been kicking around ever since she
passed. She’s never even opened them,
and some of them have stuff inside!”
I picked up the biggest one and shook it. There was something inside, all right, but
the lid appeared to be sealed with wax, and was resistant to being opened. I took it out to the shop and clamped it down
to the milling machine table with angle clamps, then proceeded to warm the rim
with a heat gun until the wax liquified and I was able to gently pry the top
off to reveal a very old, hand lettered diary, the text of which I now reveal
to the world:
Jack and the Beanstalk: After the Fall
Jack Spriggins is my name, and the following is a true and
forthright account of what happened to me after I became famous following the
chopping down of the giant beanstalk and resultant death of the giant himself,
for which I was held liable.
I gotta be honest.
Some of those story-telling types made me out to be some kind of hero,
where I called for my mother to toss me the axe, then chopped the beanstalk
down just in time to throw the giant to his death. Actually, I got away with the golden harp
clean, and he didn’t find out it was gone for some days after I got home. What happened was, I was outside one morning
the next week, and I noticed that the beanstalk was shaking a bit on a regular
basis as some very large feet were stepping carefully down what to him must
have been a very shaky ladder. That’s
when I knew I had to chop it down, and it took most of the morning and into the
afternoon, because the base was so thick.
The neighbors sawed great lengths of it for lumber, later, and when the
giant fell he landed in the next county, so I wasn’t there for that. Squashed a barn, he did, and two horses
inside.
The beanstalk itself, as you would imagine, caused a lot of
damage when it landed, wiping out fences and roofs for miles in a straight
line. When the shirriff followed the
trail of destruction back to my place, there I was, with the axe in my hand,
figuratively.
So a lot of the gold coins I got away with went to patch up
the neighborhood, and a fair bit of it seemed to fall off into the hands of the
various councilmembers and politicians in the process, but that was hardly a
shock. I did get to keep enough of it to
pay off the farm and set my mother up for the rest of her life, and allow me to
keep a wife and raise a mess of children over the years, so I guess you could
say it worked out well. I had to hire a
team of soldiers to beat off the constant stream of shirt-tail relatives,
scheisters and thieves, all coming at a run with their hands out, but that died
down after a few of them lost parts of their bodies in the process, like the
ones above the shoulders.
Then the Duke heard about the harp, and word quickly came to
me that it would be a very good idea to grandiosely donate said harp to the
Ducal Endowment for safe-keeping, which worked out well for him, until the Earl
heard about it, and thence for him until the King got the story. I was out the harp in any case, with no
return beyond a few minutes of fame at a feast at the palace where I told my
story in the short version before being escorted out the back door during the
performance. I was glad to leave with
both ears.
And, of course, the Goose that laid a Golden Egg was
not. Not a Goose, that is. It was a hen.
So the eggs were maybe a tad bit smaller than you would think they
should be if it really was a goose. Most
of those were sold on the sly to a French family, the Faberges, and I never
heard what they did with them. I did get
some pretty good money out of them, anyway, at least until the hen stopped
laying, because it turned out she only did because they were feeding the
chickens Golden Corn, and once that supply went away and the gold in her system
was used up, the eggs were just decent brown eggs, like any other. So one day we got hungry, and that’s what
hens are for when they stop laying, right?
So, all in all, you might say I did all right because of the
adventure. I can’t help thinking about
that place up there, and all that Golden Corn.
The giant must have had some relatives, because I understand one of them
passed himself off as Jolly, and started a food company, but none of them have
come looking for me, and that’s the way I like it. :-{)}
