Good morning! Good morning, and welcome again to Sunday Griot! I’m happy to be here. It’s been quite a week, and quite a couple of days, and now I’m glad to be back on familiar ground: up here in front of the crowd on a Sunday morning, ready to tell a story. And today’s story goes back to Aesop once again; it’s about what happened when the frogs decided they couldn’t leave well enough alone, and asked to have a king.
Knee-deep! Knee-deep! Better-go-round! Knee-deep! Knee-deep! Better-go-round!
Well, one day as the frogs splashed happily in a pond made just for them, stocked with their favorite foods, they decided they wanted a king. Now don’t ask me why they decided they wanted a king. You can’t know everything about a story, even one as simple as this. But for whatever reason, they decided they wanted a king to rule over them, so they changed their song and made it a prayer to Father Io:
Knee-deep! Knee-deep! Give-us-a-king! Knee-deep! Knee-deep! Give-us-a-king!
Now Father Io was in his palace atop Mount Olympus, and he heard the frogs singing Knee-deep! Knee-deep! Give-us-a-king! Knee-deep! Knee-deep! Give-us-a-king! . . . and he thought that was funny. Fall down hilarious! He laughed, and laughed, and finally when he got done laughing, he went over to the corner where he kept the brace of thunderbolts Vulcan had made for him. “I’ll give them the kind of king they should have,” he laughed in his best Geoffrey Holder voice.
He went out on the porch, took careful aim at the pond far below, cocked his mighty right thunderbolt-throwing arm, and . . . BLAM! Scored a hole-in-one at the base of a tree that overlooked the pond. There was a mighty CRACK! as the tree split from the ground, followed by a mighty CREAK! as the tree’s roots tore out of the ground, and finally a mighty SPLASH! as the tree fell into the pond.
All was silent for a moment. If you’ve ever thrown a rock into the frogs’ pond, you know how their singing stops while they all head for cover. But soon it starts again, as it did after the noise of the falling tree had faded away.
Knee-deep! Knee-deep! What-is-that-thing? Knee-deep! Knee-deep! Is-it-a-king? they asked. Knee-deep! Knee-deep! What-is-that-thing! Knee-deep! Knee-deep! Are-you-a-king! they asked the tree, but the tree, which of course had just been through a most traumatic experience and was only now starting on its way to being a log, didn’t answer.
Knee-deep! Knee-deep! What-is-that-thing! Knee-deep! Knee-deep! Are-you-a-king! they asked again, but still, the log didn’t answer them back.
Then one frog, braver than the rest, decided to go swim out to see what this new king was about. He poked his head up out of the water, touched the log quickly, and dove back in even more quickly. Nothing happened.
So he poked his head out of the water again, and this time he poked the log, but he didn’t dive back into the water. Still, nothing happened.
Now a couple of the other frogs joined him. They poked the log, and got the same non-response. Then more frogs came out, and a couple of adventurous frogs actually got up and walked on the log! Soon there were frogs all up and down the log, jumping into the pond and then jumping back onto the log again. I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that frogs are not the brightest creatures Mother Nature put on the earth, right up there with clams, particularly intelligent beds of petunias, and posters at Free Republic. But even the dimmest of these frogs was beginning to realize that, whatever this thing was, it was not going to rule over them. So, they started up their chant to Father Io again.
Knee-deep! Knee-deep! Give-us-a-king! Knee-deep! Knee-deep! Give-us-a-king!
Now Father Io was getting annoyed and tired of the frogs’ croaking, so he sent a stork to the pond. The frogs hailed the stork as their king, but changed their tune rather quickly as the stork began to eat the frogs, one by one.
Better no rule than cruel rule.
Like I said, it’s been quite a week, and it’s been quite a couple of days. On Friday I joined the ranks of the unemployed.
Oh, don’t panic. I’m intentionally making it sound a lot worse than it is. It was the end of a contract job, I knew the end was coming, and in truth, I was kind of looking forward to a little down time to spend with my granddaughter and working on some projects of my own before my next job kicks in.
Then yesterday igor died.
igor is one of the most faithful servants a man can have. igor (small i is intentional, and it’s pronounced EYE-gor, thank you) was my mail and web server, and it will be sorely missed for a few days while I build a new igor, in the true fashion of mad scientists and their Igors everywhere. I knew igor’s demise was coming, and had bought the parts for its replacement; I just didn’t expect to have to rush it into service.
So last night I was up way too late working on the latest revision of igor (again, in true igor fashion, the newest model is but the latest in a long line of homebuilt projects — frankly, I’ve lost count of the number of computers I’ve created from bare parts and left-over electrons), plus another project I do every month where my contributor was running late and I didn’t get it finished until after midnight, on a day when I had already been out in the heat and was hot and tired and wanted nothing more than to go to bed.
So when I woke up this morning with low blood sugar, you can imagine that I wasn’t in the greatest shape I’d ever been in.
Fortunately I had this story in my archives. I wrote it back in March or so when Sunday Griot was just getting started. I think it’s a fun story, and would be great to involve a bunch of children in, getting them to do the knee-deep knee-deeps.
Thank you all for coming by! I hope you enjoyed the story, and if you did, stop by in the comments below and say hello. Until we meet up again, may all your stories be happy ones, and as always, cheers to all of you.
Calling the Dood/Bood….we need a chimp face on the stork ; )
LOL…good one Omir, thanks for the laugh. KUDOS