Sybil Bruncheon's "Tales & Tails"... Millie

Millie had started out as most urban kitties do, abandoned very early in life by a neglectful mother either too drunk or too busy with gentlemen-callers (or both!) to raise her litter properly.……Although Jacob Riis photographed her at one of the most dire times of her young life, Millie’s natural beauty shone through, and brought her enormous notoriety in all the gazettes of the day. Society matrons flocked to her neighborhood near the dank and dangerous slum known as Five Points in an attempt to “rescue” her and be seen as the “great philanthropists” that wealthy citizens found to be the most fashionable hobby.

Millie did indeed go on to a very comfortable life, but she nevertheless became an inveterate thief of people's personal property… It started out with small unimportant objects; pieces of string, a paper clip, rubber balls, coins, things left on dressing tables....You know the type! But then she began to raise the stakes… and the consequences. The police couldn't trace her crimes for years because there was no rhyme or reason to them... a rubber band on Monday would be followed by a $2000 earring on Wednesday. What she couldn’t carry off to her hide-aways, she’d simply knock off the edge of tables in an off-hand sort of way, usually when no one was looking, but sometimes right in front of them!

Finally, the authorities tracked her down...she had holed up in a seemingly abandoned paper bag….but her rustling gave her away. As they closed in, she leapt out at them in one final burst of surprise scaring the crap out of all of them. Yowling triumphantly, she escaped and was never really caught again...although there were reports for years that she could be seen lying on other people's desks, pillows, sweaters, bathmats, open romance novels, fashion magazines, dress patterns, gentlemen’s “French Calendars”... you get the idea. She could, on occasion, allow the unwary to scratch behind her ears and compliment her on her lovely whiskers as she did her bathing. Reportedly she was very well loved in spite of, and perhaps because of, her life of narcissism and mischief. …..She had private accounts at Luchow’s, Tony Pastor’s, "21", The Stork Club, The Russian Tea Room, The Rainbow Room, oh, all over..... Of course, she never paid her bills, but they kept seating her anyway…. And at the best tables!

She lived to the ripe old age of 22, although she lied about her age till the very end, claiming she was only 3 or 4. She might have lived longer, but she was killed in a motor car accident of her own making. Her friends had warned her not to drive herself, but she insisted, even though it was very difficult for her to see over the steering wheel of a Duesenberg, and a stolen one at that! She was laid to rest in a very expensive cigar thermidor of carved mahogany with her favorite lobster fork and a brass door knocker in the shape of a pineapple. Her many kitty friends delivered hours of eulogies in the alleyway behind Bergdorf’s …at the top of their lungs…. And the nice people at the Plaza Garden Court Café catered the luncheon… (Other diners were heard to complain about the yowling.)

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Sybil Bruncheon's "Tales & Tails"... SOON!

Pixie, a formerly friendly kitty who lived at 2242 Maple Grove Blvd. suddenly began having strange notions. Talking to herself, hiding cheap costume jewelry but leaving expensive items in place, eating vegetables but rejecting sardines and even caviar, trying on hats, lip sticks, etc., etc. Everyone noticed, but hoped it was all a passing phase...something that was quite innocent! It wasn't until that awful night in late November, when Pixie had taken down a cleaver from the cupboard and hid in the sheers in the parlor waiting for kindly old Matilda the housekeeper to meander by... and then the screams, the terrible screams.... the carnage!.... and then all the reporters prying, prying, prying into the crime, the photographers and the flashbulbs...and the scandal.... the shame of I.F.M.!!! (Inherited Feline Madness!!!). Look!!! There in the curtains!!! Behind you!! IT’S PIXIE!!!!! …oh God, NO!!! Pixie!.. NO!!!…

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Sybil Bruncheon's "A Whole Month of Thanksgiving!"...

...or should we say a HOWL Month???

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Sybil Bruncheon's "A Whole Month Of Thanksgiving!"... Abundance??

Abundance, even in a time of want! Friends, did you know that during the Great Depression of the 1930s so many American families were facing insecurity, and even hunger and homelessness? All across the wide country, fathers tried to hold on to their jobs while mothers struggled to stretch a dollar as far as it would go... even to maintaining a staff of servants who could keep the house clean, the gardens tended, the laundry washed and ironed, and the meals cooked and presented properly! If there was any corner to be cut, it might be in substituting different dietary choices for traditional ones. It wasn't spoken of widely, but, instead of an expensive turkey from the trusty butcher for Thanksgiving, Mother might substitute a family pet. And you know, it wasn't always so stressful or heartbreaking either... especially if it was a neighbor’s dog from down the street.

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SYBIL PREDICTS!!!... #66....

SYBIL PREDICTS!!!... yes, folks, it's that time again when I make my predictions for the New Year and those mysterious days lying ahead of us...

Prediction #66: In this next year, with the oncoming famine, animals both domestic and in the wild will disappear. Tragically, trusting household pets will be the first to go. Formerly loving owners will first turn on their aquarium fish, reptiles, snakes, iguanas, then small and very cute rodents, then parakeets and the larger bird species, and finally dogs and cats! The heartbreak will rend society's very fabric. Families will be torn asunder. And the morals and basic laws of civilization will begin to vanish. For the few who can maintain their sanity in the face of all this loss, the creation of "Fashion-Accessories-As-Pets" will open new vistas for comfort and companionship. ..... By 2023, all Petland Discount Stores will be converted to Pradas.

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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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OUR THANKSGIVING HERITAGE!!.... the occasional heartbreak of growing up at Thanksgiving time...

Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, (and I use those terms loosely!) along with the wholesome lessons about our national day of thanks, there is also the poignant side of the holiday tradition. How many of us as youngsters were shocked when we read John Steinbeck's "The Red Pony", "The Yearling" by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, or "Old Yeller" by Fred Gipson??..... what started out as simple fables of beloved animals and the children that adored them ends in horror and tragedy. That is why, as parents (or friendly adults in the neighborhood!) we must always be careful when allowing our young people to bond with animals that start out as companions...and end up as entrées!

I am reminded of the lovely Ferguson family over on Elco Drive whose three boys ranging in age from 3 to 7 years of age, and with the brightest (almost glaring!) smiles, became quite enamoured with a local turkey named Big Tom at the Clara-Lou Spinnaker Petting Zoo. It was during a charity drive that Mayor Fred Buffington of the town raffled off a complete Thanksgiving dinner with all the side dishes to raise money for a new roof for the Shriner's Lodge Animal Husbandry Pavilion. Every Thursday after school the Ferguson boys would run to the petting zoo to feed their special turkey and pet him and tell him about their school activities; an A+ on a Sumatran geography test, a three-run homer in the Pee Wee League semi-finals, the new wheels on the lavender Soap-Box Derby cart, or being cast as Macbeth in the 3rd grade "Let's Like Shakespeare Pageant"...

And then...one afternoon, it happened. Tom's pen was empty. The boys' dismay immediately alarmed their parents Doug and Kimberly, and the head manageress of the zoo, Miss Edith Kranque. Before the tears could start falling, the adults quickly brought Big Tom out from the janitor's store room where he had been put along with all the Chinese food containers of candied yams with orange zest and apricots, the rustic mashed potatoes, the crunchy buttered Brussels sprouts, the green beans with slivered almonds, the celery, chestnut, and oyster stuffing, and the many other delicious side dishes that the lucky prize winners had won! The grown-ups explained that Tom had just gotten a "haircut" and was taking a nap, and that everyone should whisper about their day at school, but "not to wake him up"!....

The boys were much relieved, although little Dickie said he couldn't see Tom's head, but MIss Kranque explained that birds like to tuck their heads under their wings when they sleep...even if their wing was missing feathers and had a light coat of herbed butter with sage on it!!.... And then it was 6 o'clock and time for the boys to go home. There was just one more problem; the Ferguson family happened to have been the lucky winners of the raffle!!... an unhappy coincidence!... Miss Kranque asked Doug and Kimberly what they would like to do... they looked over at the boys petting Tom and getting all buttery. They were smiling those special smiles  that childen do with beloved pets, so Doug and Kimberly decided they'd rather donate the dinner to The Wayward Wives Of Sailors Home on the corner of Key Street and Holgate..... And on the Friday after Thanksgiving, they would tell the boys that Tom had moved to sunny Ft. Lauderdale, where Grandma used to live ....before she passed away...

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