During my visit to my parents, I discovered that my mother has a new conspiracy theory. In the second week before Christmas, she had seen many inflatable Xmas displays in the front yards in Port Desespoir. Inflated snowmen, inflated Santas, inflated deer, elves with an inflated opinion of their toy-making abilities. (There is a annual contest in Port Desespoir as to who can have the most lavish display of lights and outside decorations. I believe OPEC is this year's sponsor.)
By the end of the second week, these robust air engorged holiday fancies had littered the landscape, deflated, forlorn, strewn about in contortions no inflatable had ever been designed for. So, who was KILLING the inflatables?
Her immediate neighbors were no help, for they themselves had a display of inflatable reindeer and Santa which they inflated manually - or orally - or without the aid of air compressor! As a consequence, they were usually out of it until New Year's. She broached the subject to her husband, my father, but his "Hmmm..." , no matter how sincerely mystified he could mutter it, was no water to her thirst for the truth.
So my mother, who, by the way, is an avid reader of mystery novels, put on her Miss Marple persona and set out to find the culprit. She had already interrogated a number of local worthies. The butcher, the baker, the banker. The banker, a decidedly oleaginous character, actually had the effrontery to tell her that all was right, do not worry, things could not be better in the world of exterior holiday foo-fra. "My dear lady, these inflatable symbols of the season are designed to deflate upon the rising of the sun!"
Given the high price of compressed air, he said, at sunset there is a chip within the inflatables which " IN-spires them" and turns on their higher faculties; that is, to say, the strings of lights...which gladdens our hearts! And when rosy-fingered dawn stretches into the sky, this same MASTER chip bids its faithful servants to deflate...oh, deflate, breathe out, gentle rolly-pollies! ( whisper) lights out. sleep. rest....
Rolly-pollies?! I was not present to register my mother's undoubted disdain for this monstrous nonsense. She has been around. She is on the Beulah Land side of 80 years and does the Sunday Times crossword every week. She knows that when a person reaches the age of about 75 or so, every bank, utility, and drug company initiate a program of mistakes and flubs, backed up with maddeningly evasive automated telephone systems, expressly designed to scam, trick, deceive, and exasperate those old numbers who have been their customers for a half century or more. She immediately smelled a rat. An allegorical rat, that is. Not a real rodent. Why was the banker not telling the truth?
To set things in their proper time frame, I drove into town when the price of gas was $2.19 per gallon. I saw a few inflatables taking a break, recumbent on patchy lawns. I had already caught sight of inflatables in distress by my house. I had merely thought a good citizen had taken it upon himself to do us all a service and go about clobbering the Snow Goons littering the front yards.
This was all before I had learned that the Rev. Franklin Graham was going to have an inflatable of his father made. I began to take inflatables seriously.
My father and I drove about on our errands, keeping our eyes peeled for clues. We went to the Super K for cat food. My Mother had written "Seafood Medley" on a piece of paper. She had written that it was on sale at $8.49 per 18 lb. bag. Of course, this was a test. With the amount of detail she had supplied us with, one would actually have thought that once we reached Super K, there would actually be a cat food department with some 18 lb. bags of "Seafood Medley" for sale. It was a test.
If we were going to be her assistants, she had to test our acumen. Of course, there was no Seafood Medley. There was something called Oceans O' Heaven. Working quickly, I decided that if indeed the apple did not fall far from the tree, and, running the video backwards, the tree did not grow far from where the apple fell, then she probably just made up the name Seafood Medley, wrote it down as if it were gospel, affirmed its existence four or five times, and sent us out. That's what I do; something, something, fish...something, something, various and several...ah! Seafood Medley, and all that it really says is " tuna".
We drove by a scene of a crime. It was a Pere Noel Desouffle. I hastily averted my gaze; too late; I had seen the hideously detumescent face of Claus! We returned home to make plans. The price of gas was $ 2.45 per gallon. We drove slowly on the way to dinner. We drove on roads where but a week ago a happy population of balloon buffoons bobbed and lived their brief existence. All gone. All killed. Yes, my mother had finally mentioned the unmentionable: the inflatables were the victims of conspiracy. (Since we have never looked at inflatables so seriously before, we found it difficult to tell the difference between an inflatable and a rigid, yet transparent, decoration. We devised a nomenclature: inflatables were "blimps" and the other rigid thingeys were "dirigibles".)
We drove through the gore. Well, since the inflatables' life blood, as it were, is actually air, the "gore" was pretty much invisible, and you had to use your imagination a good bit to see it. Had some disgruntled competitor in the annual Christmas Decoration contest taken an ice pick and Trotsky-ized all his neighbors' inflatables? And, mentioning Trotsky, had the order perhaps come down from somewhere higher up? From some malevolent Stalin of the Inflatables? There is much more sleuthing to be done.
If my younger brother had not been in jail, he would have been a prime suspect. He had once hatched the brainy scheme to attach the inflatables to the ground with stronger wire and fill them with HYDROGEN gas! He was in what the family refers to euphemistically as his Lakehurst, New Jersey phase and thought that the Inflatables hovering just above the ground would add an amusing and idolatrous touch to the proceedings. Of course, you know what happened next. An entire city block of Inflatables exploded one night, lighting up the sky for miles and rendering Port Desespoir visible to the Mir space station. The local paper ran a headline the next day " Oh, the humanity...!"
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image1: die ganze Welt is aus Papier
image2:B.E.L.T.
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