I don’t know how to spell it! It’d sound like Walt Whitman’s barbaric yawp, or an anthropomorphic oboe singing its love song to the moon. Or the mating calls of two steamrollers in a misty forest in October. Or the world’s biggest frog doing a Barry White impression.
Try to fit THAT noise in your head, and then meet today’s kitten.
Bwaaauuuur!
You may be wondering what this is. I am too. Maybe it could hold napkins, or possibly two dead mice, unless you have a better place to keep two dead mice. It is, in fact, a whatnot.
Apparently, Mentone, Indiana was something of a what-not hot spot in its day. There was a What-Not club (I don’t think it was necessarily related to the What-Not Shop, but quite a coincidence!) And then there was Eber, churning out his what-nots. People probably asked him not to. “Eber,” they’d say, “The City Fathers have asked you to slow down with the what-nots. They’re piling up around town hall, and our Suzanne couldn’t open the bakery this morning because there were a bunch of balsa-wood terriers and a clever shelf made to look like a man with a handle-bar moustache outside the door in a pile. We don’t need all these damned what-nots.”
“Nobody needs ’em,” Eber would say, whittling a piece of balsa into thin strips, dipping them in glue. “That’s the point, Lawson. You don’t need a what-not. It’d be like having a mighty craving for a whimmydiddle or a gew-gaw.” He’d peel another thin, curving strip of wood away, peel and dip. “Are you saying you’re having a problem with my what-nots?”
“Well, no, not as SUCH, we value you as a member of this community! You’ve been here since Taft. Oh, I see you’re making a Taft now. How clever.”
“It’s not a Taft, Lawson. It’s a what-not. You think this town could stand on its own feet without my what-nots? This town was BUILT on what-nots. The walls–the streets–they might as well be built of three-ply Douglas delaminated board. What-nots made this town, and what-nots can break it.”
“Well…perhaps just fewer what-nots?”
“Get off’n my porch, Lawson. It’s balsa.”
Bwaaaaauuuur!!! cat found at Goodwill on 183, Austin. Better than chocolate with more shell art.
One Response to “Bwaaauuur!”
I just found my whatnot kitty here in Michigan yesterday at Antiques on the Bluff show. Instead of blue and white, mine is red and white. I do believe this is a match holder.