Meet Great Grand Aunt Tiddlewinks, Chapter One

Great Grand Aunt Tiddlewinks wasn't really an aunt, but a close family friend who was once intimately involved with Uncle Herbivore who wasn't really an uncle but a third cousin twice removed on Mom's side. I think it was Mom's mother's side, because that is the only way I can explain the affinity between me and cousin Zelda...

Anyway, by somewhat nefarious means I was able to wangle Tiddlewinks diary from the cold (possibly dead. It's hard to tell with that side of the family) hands of Toastre (pronounced Toe-Stray) Pastry, one of the daughters.  Toastre is sweet and a bit flaky.  She does exotic dancing  (or did until a few years back) at the Limber Puppy club in Winoshka.  After age began to show itself she got fired on the grounds that her puppies needed an uplifting experience.  She is now the historian at the Modern Adult Bohemian Culture Club, Salome chapter, whatever that is. I'm sure I don't want to know.

Tiddlewinks was  a tiny creature (I use the word advisedly) with long claw-like fingernails that twisted spiral-like at their tips,  She painted them blood-red or black.   She said she liked the color, but I suspect it was because she was too lazy to clean them properly. She wore her hair in a tall bee-hive (sigh...I wish I was better at description...bees really did take residence in that hive...) that rarely knew a shampoo or a comb. Herbivore worshipped the ground she walked on; if he slipped up, she kept a small whip tucked discreetly in her garter.

Tiddlewinks and Herbivore led quite an adventurous life, traveling around the county (yes, county. Only left it once as far as I can tell) making money on Herbivore's inventions. One of them, a flying car, is still in litigation according to Zelda. I can't imagine why. It only got eighteen inches off the ground, crashed into a fire hydrant drowning two dogs, injuring a bunch of street sweepers and whooshing a hot dog vendor's cart into the Wagasaskins River where several carp reportedly exploded from gas build-up after eating Farter's Chili. I wouldn't lie about that, would I?

Herbivore was a vegetarian who occasionally succumbed to a spare rib (he said there was no meat on the bone), a chicken nugget (he said that wasn't real meat) and Spam (ditto). He subsisted mainly on Tiddlewinks' inedible offerings of cucumber and kraut casserole and Pepsi. Once he invented a fruit that tasted like a pear on one side but if you turned it over it tasted like cherry. The farmer's lobby said it was too confusing, then came out with an apple that tasted like grapes. Go figure.

Herbivore was diminutive, perhaps four-foot-ten or so, with a bristly red beard that Tiddlewinks couldn't get him to shave and eyes like emeralds (one of them, anyway. It replaced the eyeball he lost in one of the wars).  He walked so straight that some said he had a rod down his back, but of course that was nonsense.  It was merely a yardstick.
Tiddlewinks loved animals and well-designed men.  She raised boxers for awhile but after losing several matches in a row she decided to train dancers instead. Looking at the antique furniture she had acquired, she got the inspiration to call her dancers the Chippendales.  Finding out the name was taken, she was very disappointed.  Somehow the Duncan Pfyfes never caught on. 

As she wrote it, the big break for Tiddlewinks and Herbivore came when they went on their one and only trip outside the county to the State Fair in the next county, some twenty-seven miles from home. Tiddlewinks took a jar of her famous ragweed honey and Herbivore took a sample of his newly-created lawyer-calling bullhorn. So many people had allergy attacks after trying Tiddlewinks' honey that one blast on the bullhorn brought lawyers from seven states to their rescue.

You'd think it would be Tiddlewinks who got sued, wouldn't you? But not on your life. Those lawyers loved the bullhorn so much that they paid Herbivore just to carry one around and blow it every time he saw somewhere they could make money. Eventually every ambulance in the county was equipped with an Herbivore lawyer-calling bullhorn. The judge got his cut, too, and the honey was dismissed as just one of those things.

Toastre came to see me the other day; I'm getting the idea she isn't dead after all.  I heard she paid a visit to Zelda, too.   She says I have no right to the diary because Tiddlewinks wasn't really my aunt, just the concubine of Herbivore.  As it turns out, Zelda's in-law said that she found out that Zelda and I, being second cousins of first cousins and by a quirk of the law being sole heirs to the estate of Herbivore and consequently to Tiddlewinks (their marriage license and will were in the diary), we are the real owners of the diary and the estate (which after everything was paid and the bull-horn matter settled amounted to $13.73).  So there, Toastre.

I also found out that Toastre's birth name is Gruntsmuch. Hmmmm....there must be a story in there someplace....