Sybil Bruncheon's TALES & TAILS!... NANNY PRUMBLE and her Kiddie Kollege......

Mrs. Fernanda-Marie Prumble had been widowed for over ten years when she made a decision. She had never had children herself, and her husband had been 18 years older than her (that’s 126 in human years), and she realized that her heart was too full of nurturing love to let it go to waste one more day. She had always been popular with neighbors’ children who came to spend the afternoon playing in her yard, listening to her stories, learning her nursery songs, and pretending to be burglars stealing her delicious cookies while she pretended to have her back turned not noticing! She was so well known in the neighborhood, that everyone nicknamed her “Nanny Prumble”, and that’s exactly what she became! She opened a school in her own home calling it Kiddie Kollege, and she oversaw every aspect of the care, feeding, education, and enrichment of her charges!… Children who came to her “academy” could expect to be tutored in history, geography, poetry, advanced mathematics, and literature with special attention on the classics; “My Friend Flicka”, “Charlotte’s Web”, “Black Beauty”, “Make Way For Ducklings”, “The Wind In The Willows”, “International Velvet”, “The Incredible Journey”, “Old Yeller”, “The Velveteen Rabbit”, and “Lolita”…

Everything went smoothly for years, all of her children growing and going off to school to be replaced by their younger brothers and sisters, generation to generation, until one particularly disturbing incident in a late afternoon in mid-Winter. The sun had already set as it does at that time of year, and the parents were due to pick up their young within an hour or so, when suddenly there was a crash of glass in one of the rooms off the main hall in Nanny Prumble’s home. The children screamed in terror, and Nanny Prumble ran into the playroom in time to see a large burly man with a surly manner lumbering through the smashed window in a dog-catcher’s uniform and cap and wielding a huge and very soiled grab-it net! He must have been 6’ 4” and weighed 240 lbs.!!! Nanny, being a terrier-mix, was very petite and couldn’t have weighed more than 12 lbs herself! But the “terrier” part of her so-called “mix” was the operative factor in what followed. Apparently, the fight lasted less than 3 minutes, according to the police…and the forensics experts.

The intruder, Mr. Filbert Fullers, a lower echelon civil servant in a neighboring town, had heard about the Kiddie Kollege, and had decided to spy on the property, finally making his move that fateful evening. He had climbed a hedge, raided her tool shed for a ladder, gotten through the window, and crossed about 12 feet into the room. Nanny Prumble had probably finished him off there but had dragged his mauled body into the front hall and was headed to the root-cellar, perhaps to bury him along with several old bones, some rubber balls, and a much-loved spiked collar that she had received from her college beau in the Westminster Obedience School. It turned out that humble and lovable Fernanda-Marie Prumble was actually from an exclusive family of rare Cпаржа-Hounds, a breed created and adored by both the Hohenzollern and Hapsburg dynasties. At a young age, she had escaped the international whirlwind and frantic pace of that “show-business” world, to live simply in the countryside with a nice older spaniel who wooed her with games of fetch, various chew-toys, and longing looks into her big brown eyes.

All of this came out in the newspapers along with extraordinary photographs of her with her many awards and prizes and parties with famous celebrities. Nanny Prumble was mortified, not only by all the attention, but also by what any formerly glamorous beauty would be; the passing of her youth, the public’s dismay at how she had changed, and of course the loss of her ready ability to catch a Frisbee in her mouth. She returned gratefully to the welcoming hearts of the children who loved her and their loyal and supportive parents and resumed her work with Kiddie Kollege. (postscript: All charges against her had been dropped, but the court DID request that, as part of her release, she add something to the cur-riculum at the school; HUMAN-ities….. “to give her students perspective and empathy for lesser species”. She complied, but with reservations. Nanny Prumble lived a long and very accomplished life. She died in her sleep at the age of 26….that’s a 182 in human years!)  

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