GOOD SAMARITAN STRIKES AGAIN - Softcover

MCMANUS, PATRICK F.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805029222 ISBN 13: 9780805029222

Verlag: Griffin, 1993

Inhaltsangabe

"Everybody should read Patrick McManus." -The New York Times Books Review

Hilarious and heartwarming stories of outdoor mishaps and misadventures from The New York Times five-time bestselling, beloved humorist Patrick F. McManus, "a writer who makes people laugh out loud, hard." (The New York Times)

Gathering together twenty-four of his hysterical stories about camping, hunting, woodwork, and fishing, The Good Samaritan Strikes Again features not only McManus's follies with Mother Nature, but those with human nature as he recalls his first kiss, his public relations career, his less than helpful attempt to be a good Samaritan to an injured motorist, and much more.

Including such classic stories as "The Worry Box" and "Ah, Sweet Poverty!"

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Patrick F. McManus (1933-2018) is the author of novels, plays, and more than a dozen collections of his humor columns from Outdoor Life and other magazines. He has sold roughly six million copies of such bestselling books as They Shoot Canoes, Don't They?; The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw; and A Fine and Pleasant Misery.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Good Samaritan Strikes Again

By Patrick F. McManus

Holt Paperbacks

Copyright © 1993 Patrick F. McManus
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780805029222

Good Samaritan Strikes Again, The

THE WORRY BOX

I have this theory that people possess a certain capacity for worry, no more, no less. It's as though a person has a little psychic box that he feels compelled to keep filled with worries. When one worry disappears from the box, he immediately replaces it with another worry, so the box is always full. He is never short of worries. If a new crop of worries comes in, the person sorts through the box for lesser worries and kicks them out, until he has enough room for the new worries. The lesser worries just lie around on the floor, until there's room in the box for them again, and then they're put back in. They're welcomed by the worries that have been in the box all the time: "Hi, guys! Good to have you back. Boy, you should have seen the duds that just left. And they had the nerve to call themselves worries!"

For a while I worried that my worry theory wasflawed. I was talking to an old gentleman who gives every indication that his worry box is empty. Ed's ninety-three.

"Do you realize," I said to Ed the other day, hoping to worry him and thereby gain support for my theory, "that this new federal budget deficit will add another third-of-a-trillion dollars to the national debt? If this keeps on, by the year two thousand, we'll be about five zillion dollars in debt. How are we ever going to pay off a debt like that?"

Ed chuckled and tapped the ash off his cigar. "Beats me," he said. "But it ain't my worry."

"Yeah, sure," I said, "because you're an old geezer. But what about your great-grandchildren? They'll have to pay."

"Don't have any great-grandchildren. Got one that's fair to middlin', but the rest ain't worth a dang. Serve the loafers right if they have to pay off the zillion-dollar debt. Put some grit into 'em."

"Well then, how about the banks and the S and Ls? They're dropping like flies. That has to worry you."

"Nope. Don't have no money."

"Here's a good one. Pollution is eating holes in the ozone layer and within twenty-five years ... Okay, forget that worry. Let's see. Hmmmm. There's a lot of new sexually transmitted diseases, of course, but I suppose you're in a low-risk group."

"Ain't none lower."

"Yeah, but suppose you went to a dentist who had a deadly disease and ..."

"No teeth."

"Right. You don't have to worry about your hair catching on fire, either. You could get burglarized, though. How about that?"

"Got nothing to burgle."

I tried for another hour to worry Ed, but without success. He seemed pretty well to have knocked my worry theory in the head.

"I've got to leave now," I said irritably. "Just remember, I'm picking you up at five o'clock tomorrow morning to go fishing."

"Good," he said. "Who's driving the boat, Smoky Joe?"

"Joe can't make it. I'm driving the boat."

"Now that worries me!"

I was elated. My theory was still intact. Ed had only one teeny-weeny worry, but one big enough to fill his worry box. He just had a teeny-weeny box.

I, on the other hand, have a very large worry box. My wife, Bun, is one of my major suppliers of worries.

"What did you do with the checkbook?" she asks me.

THE CHECKBOOK! Is that monster loose again? I imagine at that very moment an escaped convict is picking it up off the sidewalk. Maybe he will forge my name and deplete our checking account of every last penny and after he has exhausted all our funds buying dope, he will come to our house, because the address is on the checks, and he and I will grapple with each other, and he will pull a knife and ... !

"Oh," Bun will say, "here's the checkbook in my purse. Silly me! Now what's wrong with you?"

"Nothing," I say, booting that worry out of my worry box, at least until the next time Bun asks, "What did you do with the checkbook?"

Bun's telephone technique is designed specifically to worry me. The phone rings. Bun picks it up. "Hello ... . Yes ... . Nooo! [Me: One of the kids has done something bad with his car.] Oh my gosh! How bad? [Me: It's real bad. Otherwise, the police wouldn't be calling.] You just never expect these things to happen to you. [Me: I do.] When can we see him?" [Me: Only during visiting hours, when he'll be wearing either a full-body cast or an orange jumpsuit.]

"So what is it now?" I ask, steeling myself to deal with the horrible emergency.

"Ernie's Garage. Ernie said he fixed the car's oil leak with a thirty-five-cent part. What's funny is that to install it, he had to totally disassemble the car. Isn't that amazing, just a thirty-five-cent part? How lucky can you get! By the way, Ernie says he wants to talk to you about something when you get a chance."

Ernie the Mechanic wants to talk to me? I know what he wants. He wants my house in exchange for totally disassembling my car, that's what he wants. We're about to join the ranks of the homeless!

You see from this example that the old worry about the kid is immediately replaced by a new worry about becoming homeless. I used to pity the homeless; now I am one. And so on. The worry box is always kept exactly full.

Where Bun really excels in worry production for me is on camping trips. It is popularly thought thatcamping provides a wonderful way to escape from the stresses of modern city life. I myself think this. I can always tell it's time to head for the mountains when I start getting stress cramps in my eyelids. They are quite painful, and cause me to go about for days with a startled, somewhat horrified expression. People coming toward me on the sidewalk look at me and then jerk their heads around to see what's sneaking up behind them. It's an embarrassment, not to mention a major social liability.

Once I'm back in the mountains, though, and Bun and I set up our tent and roll out our sleeping bags, the stress cramps vanish from my eyelids. Soon, I'm drifting into a deep and peaceful slumber, the fragrances of leaf mold and cedar boughs caressing my nostrils. It's nice.

"Was that you?" Bun asks.

"Nope. Probably just leaf mold."

"I mean that snuffling. Did you just snuffle?"

"I don't think so," I reply, trying to recall the characteristics of a snuffle.

"Oh well, go to sleep. It was probably just my imagination."

Yeah, but maybe not, I think. Maybe something outside the tent snuffled. A bird wouldn't snuffle. Squirrels and chipmunks are too small to snuffle. Something would have to be pretty big to snuffle. A deer could make a sound similar to a snuffle but not a true snuffle. Actually, the only animal I've ever heard do a true snuffle is a ... BEAR!

"For heaven's sake, what's wrong now?" Bun asks.

"Eyelid cramps."

Now, here's an interesting aspect of my worry theory. Up to the point where Bun mentions the snuffle, my worry box is neatly layered with worries about the children, work, money, illness, poverty, pestilence, environment, war, the checkbook, famine, etc., each patiently awaiting its turn for my attention. But the instant the snuffle is mentioned, and its source identified as BEAR, all those other worries are blasted right out of the box by the sudden inflation of the snuffle worry. War, poverty, pestilence--why, they couldn't even be...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Griffin
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1993
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0805029222
• ISBN 13: 9780805029222
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 222
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar