By The Time I Was Fourteen
- the virtuous among us
- dragged him backwards
- a number of skirmishes with Mrs Hall
- a bonny lord and a merry one
- I was fourteen years old
By the time I was fourteen years old, I was already a veteran of a number of skirmishes with Mrs Hall. But that was the year that I acquired an ally in the form of Consarn J Varmint, a valorous warrior and a connoisseur of acorns, and the swiftest squirrel on the block. Among his fuzzy tribe he was a bonny lord and a merry one. The others were inspired to courage by his death-defying feats.
Mrs Hall was probably a fine person in many regards, but her mania for tulips engendered savagely unreasonable behavior. If a ball or a frisbee overflew the flowerbeds she unwisely placed at the boundary of my back yard, requiring me to overfly the same flowers to retrieve the errant missile, a half-hour of apoplexy was the inevitable result. On the rare, exceedingly rare, occasions that any flowers were in fact damaged, the screaming could go on for the whole afternoon and featured threats of police involvement.
So, Consarn’s appetite for her bulbs gave me a tremendous joy, which the virtuous among us will not condemn even though it came at another’s expense. Mrs Hall turned out to be inhumanly quick, and one day caught hold of Consarn by his proud, bushy tail. She dragged him backwards through her beloved flowerbed, and I was aghast, until Consarn got sufficient traction on the lawn to arrest his retrograde movement. He sped forward as if shot from a cannon, dragging Mrs Hall up the side of an oak tree behind her garage.