Skiff to My Lou

Skiff to My Lou

       Goudlas Meirer

There was once a virtuous wife whose husband philandered shamelessly. That is, while she, Louella, baked cinnamon bread, scrubbed her neat lingerie and his baggy overalls (separately), washed and waxed the floors of their modest cottage at Camp Morton, close to the site of Freya and Segor Arondson's hotel and fishing resort on Lake Winnipeg, and made sure the aerosol spray in the bath room worked, Phil drank at the Skiff and Muff, danced with anyone whoever whenever anyone would dance with him, played on his harmonica sad love songs intended to entice the virtuous to indiscretion, quaffed frequently out of his own, private, oversized mug into which one would see him bury his face until only the hair tuft over his forehead stuck out and he appeared to have been assigned a beer vessel for a nose (his face over time came to resemble a tankard), and aggressively engaged anyone as far as three tables away in a contest of jokes and outrageousnesses. These rousting tales usually came complete with unrepeatable immoralities as punch lines that, even in a story such as this that intends to expose the rabbeliousness of this sayseed, may not be repeated, regardless of the chorusing I immediately hear from the more truculent non teetotalers among you. A common one of Phil's improper stories, by way of brief examples, involved Molly who ventured out on three successive nights to the site of a convenient alcohol vendor and requested of the observant bartender each time a twenty-four of Labatt's Blue. Each night, drinking only half the bottles, this particular libation would knock her unconscious on her back in the street, whereupon three particular male tipplers of questionable sensitivities and unlaudable scruples would, on each successive night, stumble upon her there, senseless, vulnerable and supine. She'd finally order Molsen's OV because, as she told the bartender, a certain region of her anatomy was made sore by Blue. And other such racy vaunditure did the said Phil disseminate.

(To Be Continued)