The Family Album/Easter Sunday Recalls the Romantic Episode Concerning the Reluctant John

by Arthur Baer

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EASTER SUNDAY RECALLS THE ROMANTIC
EPISODE CONCERNING THE
RELUCTANT JOHN

WELL, well, Easter Sunday always reminds me of the time when I was a girl. They call ’em flappers now, don’t they? Girls nowadays are terrible. They’re like Easter eggs. Hand painted and hard boiled.

If I got a buggy ride and a piece of sponge cake on Sunday my heart would beat so hard that may two false teeth would rattle. But these flappers want automobiles, flowers, caviar and everything.

That picture there is John. He was my first sweetheart. He was good-hearted but awfully stingy. Pop used to say that John would give you two feet for a yard any day.

John invited pop over to his farm one day. Pop was hungry, and John said to him, “Do you like terrapin consomme?”

Pop’s mouth started to water like the plumbing was busted. He said, “I like it so much it hurts.”

Then John took pop out to the rainwater pond and pointed out a big turtle. Pop looked at it enviously, and John said: “Well, you know that turtles live to be a thousand years old?”

Pop shook his tongue in the affirmative.

Then John said: “When he dies we’ll eat him.”

That made pop just as happy as a lark with a broken leg. Then John showed pop a century plant and told him it bloomed once every hundred years. Pop came home and told me that I could expect a bouquet in the near future.

A woman’s idea of beautiful Easter music is the squeak from a new pair of shoes. But if I had married John I’d been running around just as barefooted as a pet cat. He was so stingy that he wore his pajamas in the daytime for underwear.

Of course, I don’t think a man should waste his money, but there ain’t no law against a man being generous on holidays. John asked me to marry him, and then he took out a Staten Island ferry schedule and said: “Where will we go on our honeymoon?”

I always wanted to see something of the world so

Then John took Pop out to the rain water pond and pointed out a big turtle

I thought that Cuba would be a good place. But John said Bermuda.

I was against Bermuda for a wedding trip, because I didn’t want to go there on an onion-moon.

We got quarreling over the trip and John suggested that we turn it into a bicycle race.

He saved everything and has still got a ticket for the Ferris Wheel at the Chicago world’s fair in 1892. He chased the mice out of a nest, stuck a feather duster in it and gave it to his sister for a new bonnet.

He wore a rubber collar and used a carpet tack for a back button. Once he went across the river on business. At that time, telephone calls cost ten cents. John wanted to speak to pop. So he sent pop a telegram collect.

The telegram cost pop twenty-eight cents before he realized the contents. The messenger boy wouldn’t let pop open it first. You know curiosity killed the cat. But realization brought it to life again.

Pop paid the money and then read the telegram. He turned white with condensed rage.

Pop got so mad that he called John up and asked him what he wanted. John told him he had never talked on the telephone before and wanted to see how it felt in his ear. Pop reached way down into his vocabulary for some new blistering words and told John what he thought of him.

John hung up right in the middle of some valuable profanity and the made escapade cost pop thirty-eight cents in ready cash.

So he broke off our engagement until John paid the money back. That was twenty-two years ago and it begins to look like a bad debt.