The Pickering Chronicles #10 – For Willie
“Laughter is the best medicine for sure”
Uncle Jim/Reader’s Digest
I’m giving away the punch line of my Africa trip, but what the heck. Here’s what I went to harvest, but I didn’t.
The One That Got AwayMy friend Chen Wei was really unhappy and apologetic, and on the ride back to Harare from Hwange we talked about my lack of trophy. Suddenly, I had a brainstorm (this doesn’t happen too often).
“Chen Wei,” I asked him, “How about this? How about if you search out these next few weeks or months and find what I would call a Cinderella-sized pile of elephant dung — that is, not too big, not too small, but juuust right! One with an elegant shape, symmetrical, beautiful, pyramid-shaped… Talk to the taxidermist and see if you couldn’t have one epoxied or something like that. Make something I could put on my coffee table. That would be a fitting trophy for me, don’t you think?”
He told me, “As a matter of fact, I already thought of that. Last year I picked up a pile and brought it back to my home in Harare. I had my people wrap it up, very carefully, in plastic wrap. Then they wrapped it in butcher paper and tied it all up with string. It didn’t smell at all. I took it with me on a trip to China so I could do something like epoxy or some other way to keep it. But I lost it.”
“You LOST it!? What happened?”
“You’ll like this,” he said. “I was taking some other trophies with me — a giraffe head, a skin, and something else I don’t remember. Anyway, I needed to make sure the trophies got to my clients. I flew from Harare to Joburg on South African Airlines, then I switched to Cathay Pacific to fly to Hong Kong. I put the elephant dung in the overhead compartment. In Hong Kong I switched airlines. I was paying so much attention to my luggage with the trophies, I forgot about the dung. When I got to Chengdu, I realized I forgot it.”
“So, what did you do?”
Here, he started to smile. With a glint in his eye he told me, “I called the Cathay Pacific Manager to get my package back, but he told me it was ‘too late’.”
“Too late? What you mean, ‘too late’?”
The Manager said, “The cleaning crew found your package in the overhead, but it had no name on it. Anyway, they thought it was a cake. It felt like one. So, they took it to the canteen to share with the staff.”
Chen Wei and I started laughing at the same time — visions of people in the Cathay Pacific staff canteen standing around a table holding paper plates and plastic forks while the package was being unwrapped. We laughed so hard he momentarily lost control of the car and we veered off onto the shoulder of the road. He got us back on the road and we chuckled all the way to Harare.
Willie, I can’t possibly top Uncle Jim in the humor department, but I thought you might get a chuckle out of this true story. And, any chuckle is better than none. Get well soon! Cheers!
TRP
Find the entire series here: The Pickering Chronicles
If Uncle Jim were a few years younger, he’d be old enough to be Thomas’s son! Nevertheless, Thomas enjoys hunting, freehand shooting, and reloading. He’s looked for challenges all his life and continues to seek them out. He agrees that everything goes better with Loads of Bacon!
