Hippomobile! (18 page)
Authors: Jeff Tapia
Soon we got so good at flavoring that story that we were becoming true linguisters just like Grandpa Homer and Grandpa Virgil. And it wasn't long before we began giving tours every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. While Pops drove around the square, and out to the old shoe factory if he thought the hippomobile was up to it that day, we told the visitors the Gottfried Schuh story, and somehow it came out a little different every time. The tour always ended right in front of Mabel's, and to get the visitors in the door, Mom had the idea of offering them a complimentary cup of joe. Nine times out of ten it worked, and another nine times out of ten the customers ordered something else to go with it. Grandma Ida said she hadn't served so many plates of butcher's revenge
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in years. And one lady, sitting in front of a houseboat,
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said the dessert was so good that she was gonna bring her knitting club out the following week. And she did, too.
Then one Saturday afternoon as we were getting everybody on board, you won't believe who we saw climb up. It was Fitz, the train engineer! “I was just passin' through town,” he said. He dug his hand into a bag he had with him and pulled out two hats. They each had
MILES
wrote on it and fit us perfect. We had him sit up front, and when we got at the corner of Hill Street, we let him blow the horn.
“F-sharp,” we said.
Fitz said, “You kids are all right.”
We just tipped our hats.
Them hats gave us an idea, too. We called our grandmas together, and they had hats and shirts made up that said
I ⥠HIPPOMOBILE
on them. Grandpa Bert put them in the window of his Hippodashery, and they sold like hotcakes. Then we contacted Mr. Buzzard, and he delivered us a giant tub of shoe wax and a carton of shoeshine brushes. Because remember all them Gottfrieds down at the old shoe factory? Well, we shined them until our shoulders were as sore as a bump on your head. A few of them Everlasting Shoes went on display at Mabel's, but the rest went on sale, and we sold more Gottfrieds than Gottfried himself ever did.
And that just about puts the lid on this pot of beans. Unless of course you wanna know how we did on our history test. Well, you'd never believe the fun you can have with presidents like John Tyler
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and James Buchanan
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once you wrap them up into a good story. In fact, it ain't even gotta be all that good, it's just gotta be a story. Grandpa Chester was right. But in the end, we didn't get an A on our test. We got an A+. And that's because we'd memorized all the middle names, too.
Â
J
EFF
T
APIA
has master's degrees in German (from Brown University) and library science and learning technologies (from the University of Missouri). He has worked as an instructor of English as a second language and as a translator, and his publications include plays and fiction in both English and German.
Hippomobile!
is his first book for young readers. He lives with his family in Austria. His wife has built a hippomobile in their backyard.
1. Even though we got the same bowl cuts.
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2 We'll explain that one later.
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3 Which today has another new name you'll learn about soon enough.
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4 That means she got nervous.
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5 That's one of the things that was gonna change over the course of this summer.
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6 That's what they used to call a men's clothing store.
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7 We've found out there's only so much old newspaper medicine you can swallow before you get a stomachache.
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8 That's what we call waffles.
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9 And that's beef stew.
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10 That's apple pie with a top crust. We ain't sure exactly how all these foods got named, but it's just one thing you're gonna have to get used to.
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11 It used to be red, but we got to help him paint it yellow because everybody knows that's the color of a school bus.
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12 That's what we call lunch boxes. Which is pretty weird on account of that nobody in Wymore has ever gone fishing since there ain't no water to fish in.
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1 It's our favorite because the seats don't sag too much in the middle and we don't have to see the TV set that's mounted up in the corner and always tuned in to the weather report.
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2 You can probably figure that one out for yourself.
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3 Bibs is just napkins around here, not them things babies wear around their necks.
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4 A waitress. Mom don't think it sounds very nice, but Grandma Ida says she don't mind it.
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5 We used to think it was “ends meat” and was something like meat loaf that you gotta eat when your money runs out. Now we know better.
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6 That means she cried a lot, and maybe our faucets leaked a drop or two as well.
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7 We used to think someone had spilled coffee up on the ceiling. But Grandma Ida told us they were just water stains from a leak in the roof.
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1 When you press it down, it just wheezes and shoots out dust.
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2 Grilled cheese sandwiches.
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1 We had real grandparents living here once, but the heat finally got to them and they moved someplace colder.
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2 The flagpole's still there, but the flag ain't.
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3 Which means they didn't like it none.
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4 Who later became Grandpa Milton.
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5 A barked pie is what we call a pie that has a crust on top. When it's done baking, it comes out looking like a piece of bark but tastes a whole lot better.
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6 The weatherman was just then pointing with his long stick at a big, fat, yellow, hot-looking sun.
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7 We also offered to call them Aunt or Uncle Whatever, but no one took us up on it.
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1 It was always stuck and hard to open.
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2 On page 87, a page we would be looking back at many times very soon.
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3 Except for the bald ones in Wymore.
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4 We didn't.
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5 The fun thing about them was that the answers were printed upside down at the bottom of the page. And so while part of the fun was trying to guess at the answers, the other part of the fun was trying to sneak a peek at the answers without the other person catching you.
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6 We're talking about phrases like “diurnal rotation” and “distraught air” and “minatory shadow” and “waggishly sapient.”
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7 We thought if we could hypnotize some of our grandparents, we could get them to tell us where they stashed their candy.
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8 Canned goods are called that because no air can't get in them.
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1 Somebody who talks a lot.
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2 That's Wymore talk for a long story.
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3 They couldn't find two other grandpas who could sing to make a quartet.
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4 Grandpa Homer and Grandpa Virgil always say that when they mean for somebody to do their own work.
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5 Seam squirrels are lice. Ick!
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6 You remember him. He used to be Mr. Snuggerud. He was Wymore's mailman back when Wymore had a post office, and you can still see him walking his old route every morning.
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7 Today, knowing what we know from The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing, we'd call them robust and rugged.
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8 It must have been lots of folks who stayed. We've seen hundreds of names carved into the floorboards or the windowsills or the window frames or the wood legs of our beds or just about anyplace in the hotel where there's wood for carving into. Grandpa Homer and Grandpa Virgil told us those are some of the people who came to Wymore back then to buy Gottfrieds. And the funny thing is that outside of their names, they all carved the same exact thing without a single exception we've been able to find, and we've looked everywhere. Here's just a few of the ones from our room: “Cager was here,” and “Briney was here,” and “Quill was here,” and “Becky was here,” and “Dyer was here,” and “Ham was here,” and “Hepsie was here,” and “Obed was here,” and “Jed was here,” and “Clemmie was here,” and “Kit was here,” and “Mattie was here,” and “Hy was here,” and “Dot was here,” and “Flossy was here,” and “Nettie was here,” and even “Zubia was here.” Who in their right mind would name their kid Zubia?
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9 That's another way to call hotcakes.
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10 Grandpa Homer could still see some back then, so it wasn't as dangerous as you might think.
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1 Even though everything in and around Wymore is as flat as old soda pop, it seems like every town's got a street called Hill Street in it somewhere. When people were naming the streets around Wymore, they noticed that if you placed a marble down on this one road, it would start to budge all on its own and roll a few inches. So they called that street Hill Street. At least that's what we've been told.
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1 Them's her knees.
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1 Or at least when we were supposed to go to bed.
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2 That's her way of asking if we remembered to say grace.
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3 Ben Franklin did that, and we could always remember his name. But unlucky for us, we're pretty sure he wasn't a president.
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4 A cup of joe is a funny way our grandparents have for calling coffee.
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5 Which is just toothpicks.
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6 We had put the letter back in it for safekeeping.
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7 Grandma Mabel kept it open to get the kitchen heat out because it was right hot and steamy back there, and that's how come Grandma Mabel's face was always red and drippy.
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8 That's water with all the bubbles in it that come back up your throat and make you have to belch a lot. Grandma Ida meant that as a big treat for us because we weren't allowed to just go belching whenever we felt like it. And now here we were getting belch water and no longer felt like belching.
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9 That was another big treat, a bowl of chocolate ice cream.
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10 It isn't always easy having so many grandparents.
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11 We say “we” because the Tooth Fairy gave us both a little something when one of us lost an ivory.
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1 Them is the funny faces you make when you stand facing the sun.