Glad you could join us for the next nail-biting episode of Elliot’s Adventures. If you’re new here, you can catch up by returning to the beginning, and reading really fast…
Before Elliot’s scream skidded to a halt, the mushroom cap sat empty over an expanding set of ripples.
Juliet was the first to jump into the water.
“Come on, you guys!” she called, paddling hard and fast for the center of the vanishing rings. “Are you really gonna let the little guy’s chance for True Love slip away?”
Glad you could join us for the next kooky episode of Elliot’s Adventures. If you’re new here, you can catch up by returning to the beginning, and reading really fast…
Walter never stopped to question why he had opened his heart (and his mouth) to the little stranger lying so helplessly on the river bottom. It was his nature to care. Ask anyone.
Ask his wife, Darlene. She had seen his compassion and compulsion to nurture everyone he met when they were just small fry in school. But it had been during their senior year, when they had both worn Kissing Fish masks to the Enchantment Under the Sea Masquerade that she had known he was The One. He was the one she chose to bear the ultimate responsibility of carrying their adorable roe to term.
Every spawning season since, Walter had protected his soon-to-be progeny from marauding pike and sinister scuba divers. And he had never — even accidentally — swallowed a single one. Around the reef they called home, he had earned his reputation as the World’s Greatest Dad. Ask anyone.
Ask Darlene — if you can find her.
Glad you could join us for the next harrowing episode of Elliot’s Adventures. If you’re new here, you can catch up by returning to the beginning, and reading really fast…
One moment, Elliot’s foot surged over moist dirt, the next, it hit a large, wet stone and surfed across its surface, out of control and gaining speed as he streaked toward a precipitous drop into the roiling rapids.
(If we’re friends on FB, you might remember seeing this about 3 years ago — not that I expect you to remember everything I’ve ever posted… 😉 )
Outings to the Zoo, the museums, the merry-go-round and the train, the beach, the bank, the ferry. Listening to Dad read Alice in Wonderland waiting in the car outside the grocery store while Mom shopped. Semi-annual trips to Disneyland; car trips from California to Wisconsin, by-passing the Grand Canyon because it was out of the way. Family dinners every night. Speed math rounds. Kites. Edmund’s Scientific projects. Heathkit build-it-yourself electronics. Oscilloscopes. Photography — shooting, developing, printing. Working on the car. Watching while Dad fixed whatever we kids needed fixed. Making bullets, going to the range. Watching.
Loving Christmas.
Big Band music. Lectures on economics, politics, mistakes. Instruction. Help and advice only idiots would reject. Strong. Stubborn. Brilliant and independent, authoritarian and irreverent, determined and responsible. He was the most grownup man I’ve ever known and the biggest influence in and on my life, but I had to love him against his will.
I don’t have any pictures of Dad and me together. This one is from Christmas of 1950, before I was born. Dad holding Patty, beside Grandma Jenkins, and Grandma Ranscht.
Space, Time, and Raspberries 
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