Once upon a time, when Papa was just a little boy,
his family attended a distant family reunion (it was a long drive to the location, plus most of the people were family members that Dada hardly knew, let alone Dougie). This is when a whole bunch of people that are related in one way or another get together and tell each other they need to get together more often (and as they drive away from the event they shake their heads sadly and say things like: "I expected so much more from him!" and "Wow did she really pack on the pounds!"). Since he was only about five or six or seven years of age Dougie couldn't be reunited with many people, since he hadn't met many people in his short life, but there were lots of children to see and play with, lots and lots of cousins on his Dada's side. The reunion was held on a farm where lots of animals played, but mostly sheep, and all the children were congregating with the sheep, and so that is where Dougie wanted to go, just like everybody else. He loved animals and had never been up close and personal with a sheep.
Some of his older cousins began to giggle when they saw Dougie walking into the crowd of sheep, and they told him: "Go over to THAT sheep, right there, that one is the very nicest sheep of them all! That is the nicest sheep in the world!"So Dougie headed for the nicest sheep of all, the one with the curved horns, but before he was even five feet away from the nicest sheep of all, something about the look in the sheep's eyes made the little boy stop. Dougie and the nicest sheep of all stared at each other. The big sheep's glassy eyes didn't seem very friendly. They kept staring.Then, suddenly, the nicest sheep of all put his head down and ran at Dougie, who stood there with his mouth open as the sheep did something that didn't seem like something the nicest sheep of all should ever do. It knocked Dougie down. He was hit in the tummy and thrown backward onto the ground.More surprised than hurt Dougie jumped up and ran for the safest place he'd ever known: Mama!But the nicest sheep in the world would have none of that. It wheeled about and came after the running boy and the only thing louder than Dougie's screams was the laughter of all the watching cousins, and further back, all the laughing uncles and aunts and great uncles and aunts and second and third cousins. The nicest sheep in the world caught Dougie right on the bottom and lifted him off the ground, sending him tumbling end over end.Now it might not seem like the nicest thing in the world for a bunch of long-ago-seen relatives to do, stand there laughing while a little boy gets mauled by a ram (because that's what the nicest sheep in the world really was, a male sheep, a very protective he-sheep and Dougie was the only one dumb enough to approach him), but then again, it has always been that way with Dougie, the terrible tragedies and tribulations that wreak havoc in his life always come off more as comedy, and amazingly enough, Dougie has never been seriously hurt, not in all his born days (physically, anyway). The relatives laughed, and the ram, full of himself, actually pawed the earth with his split hooves, as if he believed himself a colossal bull and not an overgrown woolly lamb .No sooner than Dougie had stopped spinning on the dirt than he sprang up and ran for Mama, and no sooner than the boy popped off the ground but the ram made his next dash and caught the boy on the bottom again and tossed him into the air. All the relatives boomed with laughter, clapping and cheering, suddenly mistaking their gathering a woolly bully fiasco, and not a family reunion.After his third knocking down, Dougie stayed down, which just goes to prove that even Dougie could learn from his hardships. The ram stood above him and gummed something that looked like chewing tobacco. The ram looked pretty proud of himself, and Dougie was too terrified to make more than a low blubber.And then suddenly Dougie's Dada was there, all six-foot-four of him, and he took the bull by the horns, oops, I mean he took the ram by the horns, and he pushed it backward. The ram, one tough customer, was having none of it, he sensed this big lout had something in common with his recently vanquished foe, that audacious midget that was now blubbering louder since reinforcements had arrived. The ram pushed Dada backward, and then Dada pushed the ram backward, and all the relatives laughed (I don't know why it is that relatives love to laugh so much at family reunions -- probably if a bear appeared and began to eat the children, all the relatives would guffaw and suddenly sweep into a wave as at a baseball game).Finally, Mama was there and she swept her only son off the dirt and whisked him away to the safety of a broad covered porch, and Dougie watched through his tears as Dada put one of his legs over the ram and pretended to ride the beast, and of course, all the relatives laughed (bunch of knuckleheads, but hey, they're family, not that I've ever seen any of them again).All Stories © 2009 Douglas Christian Larsen
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