The last time I was here...

Mm, that reminds me...when I was a kid, I never knew all bedtime stories were supposed to begin with "Once Upon A Time". You see, my dad was story dad for my brothers and I. (Pretend like your computer screen is waving and getting blurry now like you are seeing the past, or a dream that seems so real it can be nothing else but someone else's past, like mine.) Enter five people, two adults cocooned in a giant mustard-colored sleeping bag (actually the color is more like crusty mustard on the rim of the bottle. And is that thing one bag or two zipped into one? It is huge!), one brother sleeping on a table which somehow converted into a bed by interchanging pipe legs and other arcane stuff and two other brothers crammed onto a shelf that retracted from above the driver's seat of the family's cracker-box Winnebago. Youngest brother has his face pressed up against the metal mesh of a small window, waffling his face and trying to escape the sweltering atmosphere in the motor home, sucking in the smells of the KOA campground and listening to the buzz of dirt bikes in the trees off in the distance somewhere. But something more interesting is about to begin. A story. A voice from the mustard cocoon begins with "The last time I was here..." and story dad tells the three brothers all the hi-jinks involving the last time he was where they now were. The youngest brother swears story dad had been everywhere before he was born and all family vacations were just a retrace of those earlier journeys. (OK, you can wave and blur back to the present.) Hi-jinks, you ask? OK, it was mostly facts and itineraries and stuff involving fish and edible plants. You people are probably feeling sorry for me about now, huh? Well, if you suffered through the details (sometimes you had to wait until the next night, though) maybe, just maybe, you would get a real story. THE story. The only story that started out with "Once Upon A Time". Skipper the Flying Squirrel and Fibber Fox! "Once Upon A Time, there was a squirrel named Skipper the Flying Squirrel and he had a friend named Fibber Fox..." Well, you can pretty much guess what the moral was every time. I wonder if we lied a lot when we were kids or if my dad was just smart enough to keep the same story going with minor alterations and we never caught on. Anyway, his secret is safe because I can't really remember any of the stories anymore, but I've cranked out a few of my own on the spot for my girls at bedtime. The other day I forgot to point out for them what the moral of the story was and they called me on it. When I asked what the moral was and they knew it, I asked how they knew it (hoping they would have a flash of insight that pierced them to the core and convinced them forever that honesty is the best policy) they just laughed and said, "Uh, dad, that's what it always is!" The cheekiest one (oh, did I say cheekiest, I meant youngest in the interest of self-esteem) wanted to add a "duh!" onto that, but rethought the consequences. They never know if dad is going to be "duh!"-able or not and he isn't going to say one way or the other. So anyway, the point is, the last time I was here, I wrote something.