The Family Album/Grandpop's Only Fault: He Was About 400 Years Ahead of His Age

by Arthur Baer

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GRANDPOP'S ONLY FAULT: HE WAS
ABOUT 400 YEARS AHEAD OF HIS AGE

YES, our album is the finest in the village. It has steam flower decorations with filigree hinges and a melodeon in the back. It plays beautiful music when you wind it up, but the key was lost when grandpop threw it at Aunt Etta during one of our numerous family reconciliations.

That dent in the cover is where Aunt Etta threw it back at grandpop and struck one of the twins on the other twin's head.

Grandpop was kind of a slow man, but vindictive. He lived so far back in the woods that his wife had to make omelets out of owl eggs.

He was a very patriotic man and was exempted in every war since 1848. Only last week he came down out of the woods and shot two letter carriers. He thought they were Confederate soldiers.

Grandpop was a very peculiar man and hated everybody in the world. He used to have very queer names for people he didn't like. He called the village pastor a moopus one day because the pastor asked why he didn't come to services. The pastor asked him what a moopus was, and grandpop told him it was a man who whistled at funerals.

Then the pastor asked him what that had to do with grandpop coming to church, and grandpop said that question made the pastor a gimber.

The minster was scared to ask him what that meant, but grandpop told him it was a man who talked to himself with ear muffs on.

Then he walked away, leaving everybody very much startled, because we all thought he was starting a rival dictionary to Webster's and intended to revolutionize science, education and ignorance.

Grandpop walked away with his Adam's apple chuckling to itself, because he was a man who didn't care if anybody understood him or not, because he always had plenty of explanations for the same questions. He was something like a United States Senator who clears up muddy situations by stirring them with a stick.

Grandpop came home and told us that he wouldn't stand for no doodlums, alive or dead. Grandmom wanted to know what a doodlum was, and grandpop said that it was a man who stood up in the bow of an excursion steamer and allowed the breeze to blow all the dandruff on his coat collar back on the folks in the stern.

He said the world was full of blixxes and tibbens, and that he was going back into the woods where there wasn't any gumbos. It seems that blixxes and tibbens were people who ate with their hats on. A gumbo was a lady who put bluing into everything she washed on Monday, including her face.

Most of us never heard of people who did those queer things, but grandpop was a man who did some odd things himself. He would shave in front of a mirror and put the lather on the looking glass instead of his face.

Then he would go out into the woods and talk to the ants and bees and said that he got better answers from them than he did from any blatt, which was a man who put hair tonic on a toupee.

He used to wear gloves made of thimbles and drum on kitchen tables when people were talking and claimed that he was an ipper. In grandpop's language an ipper was a man who slept with his shoes on. His explanations never matched anything that he was trying to explain and the neighbors used to put their fingers to their foreheads whenever grandpop started to talk.

Then he would stop talking and call them all lummoxes. That meant folks who had "Welcome" on their doormats and were never home. Grandpop said you were welcome just as long as you stood on the doormat and the nearest those people came to issuing invitations was when the Board of Health put up a quarantine sign on their doors.

Naturally, all our neighbors got to dislike grandpa very much. Fortunately, he lived up in the hills and only came down when he had some new words to explain about people.

A swimp was a person whose false teeth projected over into public property and who wore his napkin under his chin when he was eating and looked like he was being shaved by a barber instead of dining.

Grandpop never laughed unless he thought he was alone and then he would chuckle in his throat like defective plumbing. Some day, I'll tell you some more of his explanations if I can remember them.

I guess that make me a dabber. That's grandpop's name for a girl who is so vain and silly that she should be educated by guillotining.

Well, good-by, and don't forget to write.