Ray's Thought for the Day - Ray and Olwen 3

Jezebel was taken to the Ample Bosom of the Goddess three days after Ray’s coming out. Her husband bought her a nice funeral in a swell cemetery for appearances sake. And for perhaps the only time, ever, he intended to keep his word on the forked carrot malarkey, for he was in no hurry to marry up again, and thought to play the field, fer a time. But just in case, the husband paid out a special fee to the cemetery operators. That fee obtained for the husband this extra service; that the cemetery personnel were to seed carrots on Jezebel’s grave and nurture those presumptive carrots, in the hope that one or more of the carrots, if any came up from seed, should be forked.

Meantime, baby Ray grew like a weed. So that by the time he was a week old he was as big a regular seven year old. And by the end of his first year , baby Ray was as a big as he was ever gonna get. He would have got even bigger, faster, but baby Ray found himself in a hostile environment with no one for company but his potential father’s minions. These minions, lawyers, land brokers and gun thugs made baby Ray nervous, so baby Ray developed allergies which caused him to snuffle somewhat, and also baby Ray spent much of his energy on, fidgetin’. But also, in that great big house there were wicked perfumes, artifacts of the many chemical agents rubbed and poured and scrubbed on to everything in the place to kill off the bacterial life that sprouted therein. And these afflicted baby Ray also, and he came to sympathize with the bacteria and made of himself an ally, to them. Finally, and due to baby Ray’s weed-like growth, he spent lots of time at the shoe store getting new shoes and having his feet x-rayed. For in those days, it was customary to x-ray your feet to assure that the bones were properly distributed inside you new shoes. And this may have affected baby Ray too, somehow.

Baby Rays’ snuffling, fidgeting, bacterial sympathies and footgear/sartorial requirements greatly aggravated baby Ray’s potential father and Jezebel’s widower, plus baby Ray’s rapid development was unnatural, inexplicable, embarrassing and a no good topic for casual or business discourse. So baby Ray’s potential father and Jezebel’s widower determined to farm Ray out at the first likely opportunity to, somewhere else; any where else, where the lad would be out of sight, and therefore, usually, out of mind.