The Story of the Story of Lodi

I—or, to be politically correct, we—have two children. I mean we had two children, but they are now fifty and fifty-two years old—respectively that is—so they are no longer actually children. We have followed their trajectory from conception continuously through now, at which time (now, that is) they have grandchildren... that is to say, as far as they are concerned, just plain children who, as far as we are concerned, are grandchildren. Also, come to think of it, not exactly children as such, as the youngest is already fourteen. Whatever. Anyway, as you might expect, for most of all these years I and my wife (my wife accounting for the we in the politically correct version noted above) have repeatedly asked ourselves that eternal burning question: Where did we go wrong? I think I can now pinpoint the answer.

Back when our sons were pre-literate we parents confronted the prospect of getting both of them to sleep, not just on time, but, for all intents and purposes, at all. Their usual bedtime whining, demanding to watch some crap on TV or asserting the pressure of sundry bodily functions and needs all were craftily aimed at prolonging our active involvement with them well into the hours that we parents hitherto had employed as our own personal time to whine, to watch some crap on TV or to deal with sundry bodily functions of our own. Accordingly, I would firmly stuff the boys, each into their particular bed, turn out the lights, sit down at the head of the stairs outside their bedroom, and tell a story. Without me within hearing distance, amidst the hopefully soporific darkness, our sons were allegedly subject to disturbing fantasies of malevolent beings lurking under their beds or in the closet, one such being being a witch named Bitey the Bitey, although just how her actual name was ascertained has to this day, for whatever reason, not been revealed to us (my wife and me).

But what story to tell? What would do the trick? Aesop's fables proved to be unsuitably brief, the completion of a unit stimulating a demand to the effect of "Tell another one." More-sophisticated material, such as Gulliver’s Travels (not the real title, but you know what I mean) or the Arabian Nights (ditto) are far too long and require having a light on to read the stuff from a book, as in those days there were no electronic reading devices. Within our culture, arising or descending as it does from the Puritan ethic and earlier Catholic preaching, there exist few if any suitable stories (i.e. both of decent duration and appropriate) that are not tainted by violence and moralism (e.g., The Three Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Jack and the Beanstalk...). Accordingly I would have to invent new stories devoid of any lessons that would twist the impressionable young minds in my care toward hypocrisy and religiosity, no offense. As there are only so many such stories that one can come up with on the spot (or, rather, up with which one can come), I tended to repeat my tales, sometimes in response to a specific request on the part of the audience, although this would afford some particularly attentive and critical member of said audience the opportunity to object should I happen to change a word or two in the reiterated version. Furthermore, the freedom to issue requests enabled controversy, something quite undesirable as this could put off the happy time when the targets of the stories would finally sink into the arms of Morpheus. For example, one boy would say, Tell a scary story and then a nice story, while the other would say, No, first tell a nice story and then a scary story.

The state of technology being what it was in those days, I resorted to taping my stories on a little portable cassette machine and playing the recording under the guise of actually sitting there and personally enunciating while guarding the premises from Bitey the Bitey and her cohort. This stratagem would enable me to leave the scene surreptitiously while the tape was running and pursue something more useful, returning eventually to find the tape exhausted and both boys fully engaged in REM activity or whatever. I don't know if they ever detected my dereliction, but, anyway, what's done is done.

This brings us back to the main point of where Mom and I went wrong (actually, I guess it was just I): everything seemed to be going well until I was inspired to think up one final story. I think that the attitude conveyed in that story was too honest, and telling that story is where we, or at least I, went wrong and why our sons became entrepreneurs rather than enter some decent profession like law or medicine or even the arts. Had I run the story by Mom in advance everything would have been different. As it happens, she didn’t let me tell stories after that one.

What's the story? I'll relate it here verbatim exactly as I taped it on that single, final occasion with my expectation that replaying it on subsequent nights would as usual get me off the hook.

Here goes.

The Story of Lody

As Told By Papa Myron
One Snowy Night

You say you want to hear the story of Heidi? Well, that’s much too long. Instead, I’ll tell the story of Lody.

Now be quiet and listen.

This is the story of Lody.

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago in a faraway country there lived a little orphan girl by the name of Lody.

Why was she an orphan? Because her parents were dead.

Why were they dead? So she could be an orphan. In many stories like this you have to be an orphan to be interesting and to end up successful and famous. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

Why was she called Lody? Because she lived in a lower valley in the shadow of a lesser alp (in Switzerland, of course). Enough questions. Just be quiet and listen or we’ll never get through with this.

Lody had orange freckles, blue eyes, a red mouth and yellow hair in two braids that she tied with a green ribbon like the usual Swiss girls in these kinds of stories. She wore brown shoes and a purple dress with a black belt.

Why? Because those were the only colors in those days.

What else did she look like? You need to know this? Well, she had a small button-like upturned nose and, for a while, was less than five feet tall until she grew larger. Her shoes were size three. Her head circumference was forty-four centimeters, alright?

What are you asking now? What size were her cups? Her cups!!? Oh, you mean her sippy cups. They were small and medium for drinking milk from the cow that she lived with along with her widowed great step-aunt in, like I said, the valley under the lesser alp.

Now this step great-aunt was very poor by virtue of having only one cow and having to take care of.... What now? I said she was a great step-aunt not a step great-aunt? Well, whatever I said, it’s the same difference. Anyway, there were both. Two of them. A step great-aunt and a great step-aunt as well as Lody all living off this cow. OK? They were very poor, but they loved Lody, the aunts, or at least they had promised Lody’s parents to take care of Lody in case both of the parents happened to die. Which they did. The parents I mean.

Lody had no other children to play with and the cow was not much fun most days. Neither were the aunts. Therefore she had to use her imagination and she came up with all sorts of games and inventions, like using her black belt instead of her green ribbons to tie her hair in a ponytail and therefore using her green ribbons on her purple dress as a belt; or standing on her head while drinking from her sippy cups... those types of things.

Like the usual Swiss girls, Lody had a bad habit. Same as you, she picked her nose. This was something that the great step- and step great- aunts could not accept. Even though they were only some kind of step- relatives, they honored the longstanding family tradition of using nose-picking as an example, a focus for teaching good manners and bringing up a child to be proper and polite, so they strictly forbade nose-picking. Being a very smart and inventive girl, Lody switched to picking her ears instead. You know, getting the wax out type thing.

Luckily for the aunts, who themselves could barely get by on the diminishing output of the aging cow and with Lody’s increasing appetite as she passed the five foot mark, the girl developed lactose intolerance and was no longer comfortable drinking cow milk as it gave her gas, which the aunts, in turn, could not tolerate. Accordingly, the aunts sent Lody up the alp to live with a grouchy old hermit who insisted on being called Herr Grismaul because that was his name. As a parting gift, the aunts handed Lody, who was coming up in the world, no pun intended, a bigger pair of a different kind of cup with instructions to share with Herr Grismaul.

Now at first Herr Grismaul resented having this girl placed in his already tiny and disgustingly filthy hut that was full of stuff Herr Grismaul would never toss down his lesser alp because he hated to waste anything. But what with Lody’s openness, helpfulness and applied ingenuity he soon came around. She straightened things up in the room and helped him extend things in the house. Like what? Like an entryway for pulling snowy boots on and off and an indoor toilet room so they didn’t have to trudge through snow to the outhouse in the winter, the autumn, the spring and a lot of the summer, being as how they were up on an alp.

You’re asking about Lody’s bigger cups? No, these were not the sippy cups of Lody’s early years, but regular cups not really for drinking out of. You see, Herr Grismaul had goats, not cows. Being a very smart and inventive girl, like I said, Lody used the cups to make lactose-free goat milk cheese, which she shared with Herr Grismaul. She just made it up by accident having not rinsed out her cups for a while.

Herr Grismaul became quite excited. Instead of killing and eating all his newborn baby goats (called kids, by the way), he let them live to become grown-up nanny goats (if they were female; otherwise he would still eat them) that produced more goat cheese than he and Lody could eat and he took to selling the product to a stream of villagers and tourists who had taken to trudging up to his increasingly well-known and ever-expanding Swiss Hütte outlet.

As she was becoming a young lady, Lody’s nose grew to be less button-like, her freckles turned carnation pink,
her hair turned between gold ochre and
burnt sienna
and her eyes became green blue
not middle blue-green, which would come later;
and her skin was now more flesh color.

Needless to say, although I’ll say it anyway, Lody’s ear picking habit had become quite intense and she was producing a substantial quantity of wax every day. After all, she had no friends, so what do you want?

Lody also developed her business sense by getting Herr Grismaul to deal directly with big jugs instead of using her cups for the cheese; also by handling the over-the-counter retail sales and by lending a hand in keeping the financial records.

By being careful and observant Lody managed to pilfer enough cash to acquire a new checkered Prussian blue and olive green dress with red orange trim and a sea green bonnet, all of which she wore only at night, because otherwise they clashed. But she learned even more about commercial transactions when Herr Grismaul took on a professional goatherd and a sales clerk, hired an accountant and sold Lody to a passing serial entrepreneur.

It was not greed that motivated Herr Grismaul to discharge Lody from his service; it was the wax. Having been a hermit for so many years, Herr Grismaul’s imagination was pretty much all used up so he could not envision any use for the wax and felt freaked out by Lody’s steadily accumulating stash of what he regarded as waste. You remember that when Lody first came to live with Herr Grismaul his hut was full of things he could never throw away and Lody had picked up this ethic from him.

The entrepreneur, whom we shall call ŘhƧg for want of a better name (he is famous and litigious, and we certainly don’t need any more trouble at this particular point in time), quickly grasped the potential of the wax and he took it as well as Lody to the start-up he immediately established in his parents’ garage atop a distant greater alp. Lody never saw Herr Grismaul again. Or her aunts, for that matter.

ŘhƧg set Lody up in the start-up up on his greater alp to live a life of luxury and leisure so as to enhance her production of the wax that he so avidly desired. Now you might find this strange. What, you may ask, would anyone want with wax atop a greater alp? Well think for a minute. Hint: Switzerland? Snow? Yes, you got it.

Gazing through a retrospectoscope it’s easy to spot what ŘhƧg recognized and how Herr Grismaul totally missed the forest for the trees, as it were. Top-quality cross-country wax was needed for the rapidly growing ski industry. At first it was biathlon athletes seeking a competitive edge. Then the military, hoping to mount surprise trans-Alpine attacks like Hannibal with his elephants, only different. Then, the vastly greater market of serious and then casual cross-country and then serious and then casual downhill skiers. ŘhƧg was making a fortune, he was feeding Lody as much as she could eat, and she was in heaven picking away at her ears while reading, gazing blissfully at the beautiful alpine scenery and planning her escape.

Eventually, she did (escape). A synthetic substitute wax had come to flood the market, the cheap driving out the good, and ŘhƧg had to stint on his security outlay to the point where the guards became lax, demoralized and easily corrupted by whatever Lody managed to offer them.

But what now? Lody was penniless, or, rather, franc-less and didn’t even have a GED to cite during job interviews. However, Lody did have two important assets: her constantly improving business sense, her creative imagination, what she had learned from all the books she had read, and her wax. That’s four? Sorry. She had four important assets. You’re not asleep yet?

So Lody put them all together, her assets, and invented the world’s first crayon. I’m sure you know the name of her company. First thing that comes to mind when you think about crayons, right? That all came from her.

She started with the colors she knew from her earliest childhood: black, blue, green, red, yellow, orange and brown. Oh, right, and purple. Of course. Then Prussian blue, sea green, olive green, gold ochre, burnt sienna and red orange, like her nighttime outfit back at Herr Grismaul’s place. As sales exploded she added white, salmon, brick red, mahogany, orange red (that’s different from red orange), bittersweet, melon, tan, peach, apricot, yellow orange, gold, maize, orange yellow (that’s different from yellow orange), lemon yellow, green yellow, spring green, yellow green (that’s different from green yellow), pine green, turquoise blue, middle blue-green, cornflower, green blue, periwinkle, violet blue, blue violet (different), orchid, thistle, red violet, magenta, carnation pink, violet red (different), silver and gray. That was then but this is now and her corporation has offered over 200 different colors, with the number increasing by 2.56 percent annually despite having dropped flesh color in 1958 for obvious reasons.

Are you still awake? Hello? Anybody? No?

OK, the end.

And that’s the story of Lody. Good night.