Pick a color
Boxed/Wide
Content width
Select headings font
Background (Boxed)
“Oh, oh, oh, hi Mommy, I love you so much! We’ve been workin’ hard, but we got a respite now, and we made ourselves some money. We’ve been takin’ bets. Mommy, there’s no way that we could lose.”
“What were you betting on?”
“We were bettin’ on the races.”
“The roadrunner races?” (Recently, I heard, ‘There they go. Beep, beep, beep, beep.’)
“You got it. We gave cars to everybody to race. Kennedy really wanted a convertible that was from the 30’s. He liked it and he drove very, very fast.” Laughing, Charlie continues, “But you can’t be faster than a roadrunner. We told him that all the cars were really good runners on the road. It was a roadrunner race, after all. They didn’t know what we was up to. Actually, we made bets with buttons, ‘cause they’re better than any monies.”
I agree with that assessment and ask him about the race.
“Us kids had roadrunners. We saw from the cartoons that nobody can beat a roadrunner. It’s been stressful for you. It’s not stressful for us and it’s not stressful for them (the council members) ‘cause they’re all dead. They want the best for everybody, and Papa was a little bit nervous. I’m just tellin’ you this. We don’t know why he was nervous ‘cause he made a cloak of it. We figured it had somethin’ to do with big stuff out there.
“We got a little bit of a break and we decided to have some fun. I talked to Kennedy ‘cause he’s a guy who can get a party goin’. I said let’s have a party and asked him what he wanted to ride in. He said a 1938 Chevy. The others got cars and everybody was racin’ their engines, varoom, varoom!
“And then we just walked up with our birds. The others looked at us like we were gonna lose. We let ‘em ride for a little while before we turned on the speed. ‘Cause really the race would have been over. You can’t beat a roadrunner, Mommy. We coulda passed ‘em before they even got started. I said to my roadrunner, ‘Take big, long steps like you’re a slow walker, like a dodo bird.’ I showed him a dodo bird and he said, ‘Okay.'”
Charlie’s laughing as he says, “It was really funny, Mommy, ‘cause they thought they was winnin, and they was not ever gonna win from us! They was never gonna do it. You can’t beat a roadrunner!”
“You had roadrunners that were big enough to ride on?”
“Mommy, we can have ‘em any size we want!”
“What car did Marilyn ride in?
“She was ridin’ with him. She was wearing’ cute, little polka dot shorts with a white top. She was really pretty and he looked at her like this.” Charlie grins. “She was anticipatin’ some fast speeds, so she put a scarf on her hair.”
“Who else was driving?”
“Papa drove a pickup truck. The knights had weird lookin’ cars. They just don’t get it. They got the ones from the other race we did where you had to use your feet to make them go.” (Cars with big stone wheels like the Flintstones had.)
“Oh no!”
“They were really slow. There was no way we could be that slow, ever. Everybody else was in bleachers. We did it up right. We even put porta-potties there but nobody used ‘em. If you have a lot of people in one area, you gotta have porta-potties. It’s required where you live and we were tryin’ to be as authentic as possible.”
Speaking with Mr. Kennedy, I ask him if he knows about the roadrunner cartoons. His answer, “I do now.”
Tonas remarks about his choice of a truck. “I didn’t think for a second that I needed to be faster than a speeding bullet.”