The Myth of Wile E

Kitchen Stove Time Machine

On the "sunny skies" front the plants would be disappointed, at least at first. Rain had been drumming on my roof for a week or more. The drumroll built and built, all anticipation, but there was never a final "ta-da!"-no cymbal crash, no parting curtains, no earth-shattering kaboom. Whatever the headline act was, it had decided not to show, and no one had told the orchestra. I guess that's what happened when you booked Godot on the dinner-theater circuit.

During the spring "rainy season," my hill would always turn into a muddy river, which I could never quite find the source of. It was like my own miniature Nile. And trudging up the hill to get the mail would seem like an expedition of looking-for-Livingston proportions.

When I'd finally get to the mailbox I'd ask, "The mail, I presume?"

"Why . . . yes," the mail would say, unaware that it was lost.

On the day of the cucumbers' and zucchini's kitchen liberation (which would surely go down in the annals of cucurbit history), my mail included a soggy magazine called The Writing Bug. This could only mean my birthday was coming soon. Every year Gladdy sent me a different magazine subscription. Last year was The Writeous Type, and the year before that was Practical Poetry for Fame and Profit. The first issue always showed up a little bit early, like a pilot fish that preceded the shark of my birthday.

So much rain had pooled in my mailbox that the magazine was clumped together solid. It had become more of a tablet, really. That might have been okay if the articles were written in cuneiform, but odds are they weren't. You just don't see a whole lot of cuneiform publications these days, despite all those educational reformers touting "back to basics."

I placed the tablet into the oven on low and baked it for about three thousand years, until it finally emerged in magazine form, here in the twenty-first century.