Excerpts

So what is a "Tale from the Creekbank," anyway? I started writing them so I could catch Darren as my husband. It worked brilliantly!!

Okay. How about we start over here? While I was away putting the children to bed with sweet bedtime stories of my childhood, Darren co-opted my blog post.

What I was GOING to say was that I started writing them so I could record family stories. The thing is, with families, the stories don't stop happening. The Creekbanks turned into a mixture of memoir and current events of family adventures, life in a small town, and crowd-pleasing discussions of why the South is such a great place to live. All of the stories are true and most of them are decidedly wacky.

(I was already writing them by the time I started sending them to Darren, but it's true that the stories certainly didn't hurt my chances with him.)

Following are two excerpts: the first is one of Darren's favorite stories, the second one of my favorites.

The Brief Career of
Dressy Bessie

My sister Rosemary is forever bringing home new – or nearly new – bargains that we don’t realize we need until she brings them home. One of her most entertaining purchases was something she and Mom came across in a Goodwill store: an adjustable dress-form to use for sizing and sewing.

They hauled it home. Rosemary immediately picked up work on the dress she’d begun five months before. She set the dress-form up on a chair and slipped the dress over it. The dress-form looked so eerily lifelike – in a legless, armless sort of way – that we decided to name it. It was christened Dressy Bessie.

Dressy Bessie worked hard as a model. Her only problem was that her center supporting rod tended to give way now and then, dropping her height several inches without warning. Generally, though, she served her purpose well.

Then she became discontented with her domestic life. She decided to embark on a stage career.

Her first appearance was simple, but effective. I walked into the family room one day to find a headless, armless figure sitting at the computer. I jumped visibly. The debut was a success.

It is against human nature, especially if the human is a Roberts, to allow anyone to be more clever than you. One morning a few days later, Rosemary stepped out of her room and shrieked. Somehow Bessie had found her way upstairs and was waiting just outside Rosemary’s door. I said that Bessie was just being sociable. She’d even put on a long-sleeved shirt to give the appearance of arms.

After that, Bessie’s career skyrocketed. She was booked for appearances in every room in the house. ...

***

From Sadie Rides Again! (Sort Of)

[My yellow Mercedes, Sadie] was in good spirits as I drove her around town the next week. The speedometer still didn’t work, but I did replace the fuse for the fuel gauge. It was satisfying to watch the needle rise slowly and stop at the Full mark (“4/4” on my gauge). I’d made sure I’d filled her tank as soon as I went over town the first morning after her recover. I learned my lesson last time: I wasn’t going to be caught helpless and stranded once again.

I would like to take this opportunity to say that just because I was sitting on the curb at the library two days later, waiting for someone to change the flat tire on my yellow car, I was not helpless and stranded. I was perfectly capable of walking over to the nearby service station for help. And as for being stranded, I could have called home for a ride, or even flagged down Tammy McLendon twice if I’d wanted to.

The flat tire was first introduced to me by my friend Jairus, whom I encountered in the library. He informed me pleasantly that the right front tire on my car was flat. I went out and examined it, and then I called home.

"Mom, Sadie’s tire is pretty flat. Do you think I ought to drive over to the station?"

Mom asked, "How flat is 'pretty flat'?"

"Well, it’s not as flat as it could be, I suppose, but it’s certainly flat."

That was the sort of answer that would have put my stepfather in a bad mood. Mom wasn’t very impressed either. "I don’t think you should drive on it. You’ll ruin the wheel. Just walk over to the station and ask them if they can change it."

So I did. I didn’t seem to make much headway at first.

"You’re asking the wrong person," said the helpful mechanic. "You need to ask some good-looking, single guy to change your tire."

I pointed out the flaw in his otherwise sound scheme, namely that good-looking, single guys were scarce in the library parking lot that day. After several more suggestions along the same lines, Mr. Will finally agreed to change the tire.

Now, changing a tire is a simple enough operation. I could do it myself, if I had the equipment and absolutely no way to get someone else to do it for me. But experience has taught me that nothing involving Sadie is as simple as it ought to be.

"Do you have a spare tire?" he asked.

"No, sir, I don’t think so."

"Do you have a jack and a lugwrench?"

"Well. . .I don’t think so. I mean, there might be one in the trunk, but I don’t know for sure."

"Why didn’t you look in the trunk?"

"The trunk won’t open. It’s jammed."

I climbed into the truck while he loaded the lugwrench and the jack, and we drove over to the library, where Sadie waited patiently as she leaned rather heavily on her right front tire.

Then began the process of changing the tire, an episode fraught with uncertainty.

The lugwrench didn’t fit the lugnuts on Sadie’s tire. We thought that maybe the right-sized wrench would be in Sadie’s trunk. And, indeed, one may be. There may be a body in that trunk for all I know. We certainly couldn’t get it open to see. ...

***

The rest of the story... and more! now printed, bound, and ready to be sent out! Email me.

-- SJ