Weekend Assignment #25 - Elizabethan Knight Crowned!

Weekend Assignment #25


John M. Scalzi's infamous Weekend Assignment #25: Share a favorite story that features you and a sibling. For those of you that are an only child, you can substitute a cousin or a best friend.

Extra Credit: Need I say? Pictures, baby! Pictures from the past are good, but recent pictures of you and the siblings are just peachy, too.

You can get your own Weekend Assignment by visiting John at his By The Way journal where he plies his trade as a blogging guru to the AOL Journals Community.


Dear John,

Another equinox, another hangover. Got to stop celebrating sidereal events with Grape Nehi. But I digress...

I hope you are making great strides on the Rough Guide to Science Fiction Movies. By the way, I checked for Old Man's War at B. Dalton's the other day. They are predicting availability on January 31, 2005. What's up with that? I have it at the top of my Christmas list for 2004. Should I be looking for another choice for reading material this Noel? Or are they just jerking my chain?

We've been having a great week of weather here. Crisp, clear sunny days, great sleeping weather at night. If only it could last a while longer. I got a kick out of your photo of the end of summer garden. Gardeners here are still waiting for tomatoes to turn red. It is a race against time, now. Will blossom end rot or frost be the winner this year, or will there be bushels of green tomatoes hardening off in spare bedrooms, wrapped individually in newspaper with prayers for even a partial harvest? We have had slightly more than half the sunny days this summer than we had last year, some 47% fewer days with temperatures above 75° this year than last and nearly twice the rainfall this summer as compared to summer 2003. Gardens are a disaster area, except for coolth loving greens like kale and kohlrabi, cabbage, brussel sprouts and broccoli. Other things are officially 'not doing so well.'

So you want a tale of my siblings. How about the bloodcurdling tale of the day that Ricky became a knight ... and damn near lost his ears in the process?

I have two siblings, both brothers, both younger than I. One is living, just a few miles away, in fact. He's the youngest. Then there was my middle brother. Let's call him Ricky (no protection for the guilty and the dead).

Ricky came along when I was barely a year and a half old and really upset the apple cart, you know? *I* was supposed to be the center of attention. *I* was the apple of my father's eye. But no, Ricky had to come along and have attention focused on him. On his long lashes and naturally curly hair. On his remarkable resemblance to my maternal grandfather and my mother's brother.  It was a scion of the old country, according to these first and second generation Irish-Americans, no doubt about it. I hated him from the start.

I hated him and I took out my anger on him about the abandonment I felt, real or perceived, every chance I got. I pinched and I poked and I bedeviled the little sucker until his squalling brought my poor mother running to see what was the matter. I, of course, got my little bottom paddled for my efforts. As we grew older, the punishments grew stronger in keeping with the grief I'd give the kid. Then baby brother came along and I resigned myself to having no chance of ever regaining that exalted position I'd once held. My attacks on little Ricky moderated in frequency even as they grew more sophisticated. 

We were living in Pennsylvania in a tiny two bedroom cottage named "Windy Woods." Naturally, I took him for a walk in the woods and somehow managed to leave him behind. Wouldn't you know it, Jet, the family cocker spaniel, led him home again. I figure the dog did it simply to get rid of him, he was screaming his head off so loudly at the outrage of abandonment!  Let him know how it felt, didn't I?

One late spring day, I was three going on four, we were all three of us playing in the backyard under the watchful eyes of the aforementioned spaniel while my mother attempted to get the kitchen in order or some other household chores, looking out on us now and then to be sure all was right in the world.  (This was back in the early 1950's.  It was an innocent, naive time.  The Lindbergh Baby kidnapping had been many years prior and child snatching wasn't all the rage the way it has become of late.  Kids played by themselves outdoors, without lots of oppressive supervision in those days.  It was another era, sadly long gone.)  We were playing some kind of game involving helmets and stick swords and knights in shining armor.  We improvised.  I had an old angel food cake pan form as the "King's Crown," the kind that the center cone lifts out to make it easier to extract the cake after cooking.  Somehow, I managed to persuade Ricky to allow me to knight him.  Seems this involved a transfer of the crown to his head, which I then seated onto his noggin firmly with a couple of whacks of my trusty sword.  Encountering resistance in the form of aural appendages, I hauled off and gave the crown a mighty smote with my beknighting tool and faster than you can say "Bob's yer Uncle," the crown was over the offending obstructions and gracing the neck of the screaming, crying, little pain in the... er, brother.

Sadly, the moment of my crowning glory, (so to speak) was brought up short by the not so dulcet tones of my mother inquiring as to the nature of what had befallen middle brother and how much was he bleeding?  For "surely, any kid screaming that long and that loudly must be bleeding severely and Oh my God, what have you done?"

And I had truly done it this time.  Ricky was inconsolable with his aluminum crown around his neck, blood dripping from both skinned ears and completely unable to see over the rim of the cake pan.  I'd already attempted silencing the little buzzard but all attempts at removing the offending cookware were to no avail.  It was on there, but good. 

Mother tried water. Then dish detergent (he only screamed louder, the little wuss. Something about burning...) and glycerin and rose water. No luck. The only thing coming off was my mother's belt in anticipation of whipping me within an inch of my life, not undeservedly, I hasten to add, lest you think her an ogre.  It was necessary to maintain some semblance of order.  Three boys, all with less than two years separating them from the next sibling, were more than a handful. We were a nightmare. Cowboys and Indians. Soldiers. Bomber and fighter pilots.  From dawn until well past dark, we were a boiling mass of needs and contradictions.  But I digress...

Despite her best efforts and the efforts of some neighbors, the cake tin was winning. There was nothing to it. Professional help would be required to remedy the situation. So we all piled into the 1953 Chevrolet sedan and drove into the village to the blacksmith's shop.

The blacksmith found the whole situation amusing at first. However, by this point, little Ricky was no longer just upset, he was in a rage. He was terrified of pain (with me as a brother, who could blame him) and frightened by strangers. Particularly big, dirty men with greasy black hair, a stubbly beard and broken finger nails holding a blow torch in his hand! Ricky was having none of it. The blacksmith no sooner laid a hand on that cake tin than Ricky commenced with a scream of rage, frustration and fear so loud it brought at least a half-dozen mothers, the mechanics from the garage across the street, Mrs. Beatty - the volunteer fire chief, and the local constable all running.

It took all of them to hold him down. One on each arm, two on each leg, another held his head still, others soothed him, some soothed the littlest one and my mother, I sat there in complete awe at the hullabaloo this little snot was raising. Slowly, inexorably, the blacksmith cut into the rim of the cake tin with a hacksaw, then down through the tough aluminum with tin snips, then hack sawing through the bend of the metal at the bottom of the sidewall where it forms a small shelf to support the bottom and the cone. Finally, with sweat pouring down his face and all of our eardrums near bursting, he snipped through the last part of the "Elizabethan Crown of Angels" as I'd referred to it when Knighting Ricky in the first place. Angels, my ass.

Ricky never forgave me, not that I blame him. He grew up to be a tough-minded competitor, able to handle whatever was dished out.  At least that's the way it seemed most of the time. But he never let me near him with an angel food cake tin ever again, either.

Sadly, Dr. Ricky is no longer with us. All photos of the event were long ago destroyed by the injured party in the hopes of memories fading in time (fat chance that your brothers would forget THAT one).  Rest in peace.Well, John, that's what you missed by not having three boys in the space of four years. Kiss Athena on the forehead for me tonight, give Krissy a hug and thank your lucky stars that birth control is easy and affordable today. 

Grins and giggles,

Wil