Boy and the Bear Stories

The four posts below this are classic "Boy and the Bear" stories. I call them classic although they are really only classic around my own household, where everyone knows certain things about them. First, they usually involve a hamburger in a restaurant with a "no shirt no shoes no service" rule. They often involve parking tickets for a bear who basically doesn't feel like he's parking. And finally, whenever a listener (or reader in this case) comes to think they have a handle on the plot line, it features a sudden, unexpaected departure of any kind. Sometimes this involves the set being blown up. But in any case the surprise is built right into it.

Here are some examples:

The Boy & the Bear, the Pizza & the Parade
The Boy & the Bear and the Trump Rally
Boy and the Bear, and Amtrak
Yer Classic Boy & Bear Story

enjoy!

The Boy & the Bear, the Pizza and the Parade

 

Once upon a time the bear was receiving a parking ticket downtown, as the boy watched with interest. The meter maid was a young woman on her first day on the job, and she wanted to be diligent and aggressive and get all illegal lollygaggers out of the public places as soon as possible, so as to keep traffic moving and keep general order in the village. The bear had now been in this particular parking spot for over twenty minutes, and it clearly said fifteen minutes only.

 

The bear pointed out that he could eat her in one bite, as a way of refusing to pay the ticket, and if he did, he could claim that she had never given him a ticket in the first place. He could use her little metal pencil as a toothpick and the tickets themselves as a napkin, he said. But the boy said that if you’re polite and friendly you can often get your way much more easily. For that reason he ordered a pizza and insisted that the young lady join him for a picnic right there at that parking spot. Surely she’s tired from working hard on such a hot day?

 

But just then a hot dog vendor strolled by pushing his cart on his way to the parade, and the bear just reached out and grabbed a hot dog. That was the bear’s way; he wasn’t used to paying money, or asking for food, or even for taking his time and putting mustard and ketchup on it. But he soon realized the error in his ways and grabbed another one, this one for the young woman, and he was about to get a third for the boy when the hot dog vendor started squirting him all over with mustard, using it as a weapon, as if to say, if you aren’t going to pay for it, at least I’ll make your life miserable!

 

Just then the pizza arrived, and even though it was pepperoni and sausage instead of the plain sausage that the boy had ordered, at least there was an entire pizza for the bear, so it didn’t look like he was going to have to beg or try to wheedle anyone else out of their fair share. The problem was, he was now covered with mustard, and the napkins that came with the pizza were only making it worse, since his fur was oily and the mustard worked its way down into it. Now what animals generally do in this situation is, they lay down on a log and lick themselves all over, but the boy was trying to train him in general etiquette and he wasn’t sure that he could do it downtown on parade day, with all these people standing all over the place, and the hot dog vendor still squirting the mustard all over the place.

 

In fact, the hot dog vendor was now trying to hit everyone, and had a special passion for getting the young meter woman who was trying to enjoy her pizza, and a librarian who just happened to be passing by and who decided that a piece of pizza might be a good thing on a hot day like this. The librarian was thinking maybe if some of the mustard landed on the pizza it wouldn’t be all bad, but in fact the mustard was landing all over the place, and when it hit a dog the dog shook himself and then it flew all over the place, hitting everyone. Finally the librarian pointed her umbrella at the hot dog vendor and said “Freeze” at which point the vendor, well trained, dropped everything and put his hands up.

 

Fortunately it started raining, but when the librarian opened up the umbrella it actually had mustard on it and the mustard went flying and hit the dog again. The boy had now made the perfect pizza construction: it had a few extra hot dogs on it, and some mustard, and pieces of a rose that he had torn up and put carefully on it. He didn’t want the pizza to get wet, so he stood under the umbrella, but the librarian got suspicious because the petals of the rose were bright pink and she questioned the boy about where the rose had come from. It was true that, somewhere in the fuss of the last ten minutes, some man had given him the rose and asked him to give it to the librarian, or perhaps it was to the young meter maid, or maybe it was the bear, he couldn’t quite remember. It was just because he was overwhelmed by the excitement of a picnic downtown, that he lost track of certain details. And the bear felt pretty much the same way, though he was now back at the hot dog cart putting one hot dog after another down, and enjoying the view. He had never even realized you could put mustard on a hot dog, but now realized that it tasted pretty good over all, and was trying all the other condiments on the cart, one at a time. The hot dog vendor didn’t seem to mind, since the rain was pretty much going to spoil this batch of food anyway. People were now running toward them from the direction of the parade, trying to get out of the rain or get to their cars, which were all parked downtown not too far from where this story takes place. They weren’t sure if it was going to be a huge downpour or just a sprinkle, but they didn’t want to wait around to find out, since a lot of times there was lightning involved, and last time the lightning struck the firetruck in the parade and caught the hose on fire, and nobody knew what to do, because it couldn’t put itself out.

Boy & the Bear, & the Trump rally

As the boy and the bear came down out of the forest, some guy gave them two tickets to the Trump rally, because he said he had to leave the country and couldn’t go. The rally was in about ten minutes, so they made their way over to the Memorial Coliseum and stood in line. It was an enormous line but it moved quickly even though lots of people were cutting in line and going in front of everyone else, and it was pouring down rain.

 People were selling buttons and stickers and t-shirts all over the place and making an enormous racket. Some people were selling food: cotton candy, melted chocolate on bacon, and pork fritters. One guy was even selling guns, but he acted like it was illegal and hid them under his trench coat. The bear said he would have bought one, but didn’t have a trench coat, and wasn’t sure how to carry it. The boy said, no, it’s better to avoid such things, as they only bring misery upon you later, although licenses were easy enough to get, if not downright unnecessary.

 People were yelling and screaming and were especially angry at anyone who looked like they might be a protester. The bear was nervous about his fur looking different from everyone else’s, so he simply bought a dozen bumper stickers or so, and plastered them all over himself so that his fur was less noticeable. Now he appeared to be a gung-ho Trump supporter, and that image was made stronger by the way he kept yelling Trump slogans like everyone else. At one point everyone was doing a salute, or a pledge, or something where they stuck their hand out straight in front of them suddenly, and the guy behind the bear clipped him and almost knocked him over. Well, this made the bear’s claws get ready to do some serious damage, but he refrained. He didn’t want people to think he was a protester.  He was trying to fit in.

 The boy got really mad about something Trump said. It was something about how bears couldn’t be trusted, and should have a database about them, and be given a special identification card, so they could be tracked more easily, or maybe have a big “B” branded into their foreheads. The boy thought this was specism, and became enraged.

 The bear actually didn’t mind. He’d been barefoot, on the fringe of the economy for so long, what harm could come from special identification? He figured if these guys were all afraid of bears, it shouldn’t necessarily be harder for him; maybe, in fact, it would be easier. His political thinking was actually pretty murky, but he considered himself adaptable and capable of surviving a political movement which he now considered himself in the middle of.  The last time he had even tried to vote, they got into a huge argument about what they meant by “address,” and he ended up scaring the voting attendants into running out onto the street outside the church where they were voting. When the police came, though, the bear had found himself up on the roof, where there were mulberries dropping from a huge tree, which he considered a bonanza. In other words, he considered politics to be lucrative and joyful, and didn’t expect any different from this rally with so many red, white and blue buttons.

 ~3-16, Tom Leverett

 

 

Boy & the Bear, and Amtrak

 The boy and the bear were on an Amtrak, but it derailed north of Philadelphia because somebody put something on the track. Actually it was the Amtrak in front of theirs that derailed, but theirs was supposed to be soon after, and it couldn’t go its way down the East coast corridor until they removed the remains of the train in front of them. Some Amtrak representative was telling the boy and the bear to go take the bus, or rent a car, whatever they had to do to get to Baltimore. But they really wanted to take the train, and were wondering how long it would take for the Amtrak people to remove whatever it was from the track.

 I’m not sure if they ever found out what it was. There was a guy in the Philly train station who claimed it was Union Jack, a famous ghost out in the woods down that way; apparently this Jack guy had lost a brother to the Amtrak, run over by the train while he was in his car, and Jack was determined to get revenge by removing engines from cars and placing them on the tracks every once in a while. What this guy in the train station was asserting was that this was a fairly regular event, like maybe every three or four months or so.

 The bear was a bit perplexed by this, because he couldn’t imagine taking an engine out of the car. He’d derailed a train or two in his time; a good tree would do the trick – but what struck the bear about the story was how somebody would get a car to the point where one could simply remove an engine and get it over to the tracks, without blocking traffic. The bear was only familiar with a certain stretch of Amtrak tracks, and there weren’t a whole lot of places, along those tracks, where this kind of thing could be done. Besides, an engine was heavy, and it was attached in all kinds of ways to the rest of the car.

 The bear and the boy, as it happened, were called back, and told that they could take that last train after all, since they were now almost finished cleaning the debris off the tracks, and since they both still had valid tickets in their sweaty hands, or paws, as the case may be. One problem was the luggage. The boy was carrying only a duffel bag, but the bear had a number of things, including a cherry tree and a u-turn sign, and it really wasn’t convenient at all for him to keep getting on and off a train.

 The deck of cards they were playing gin with had presidents on it, and some kibbitzer pointed out the Warren Harding was the worst president ever. The boy noticed that Harding was like the four of clubs or something, not much in the big scheme of things, but didn’t object much because he really didn’t want to argue about history. The bear, however, had strong feelings about Truman, and began to argue. It wasn’t that he thought Truman was a bad president; it was more that he thought anything that was in his family’s lifetime was probably more important than anyone born before all the wars. And he wasn’t excited about it, he just calmly asserted, repeatedly, that Truman was the worst. You’d think one of his relatives was in Hiroshima or something, but it was really more about the Zoo Act of 1959, or something, and the building of the interstates destroying habitat in southwest Montana. The problem was, a lot of people on this train were involved in the argument. One guy even snatched the deck for a full three minutes, and they could no longer play until they agreed they would take a close look at Millard Fillmore. One other guy insisted that first had stolen Buchanan, because he couldn’t find him, but the first guy insisted that you couldn’t find Buchanan even if he was right in front of your face.

 This train derailed too, or at least got stuck somewhere way out in the country, and wouldn’t move for a long time. You’d think there wouldn’t be much countryside this side of Philadelphia, but in fact there’s lots of no-man’s land, and that’s where they were. There was no point in getting out and hailing a bus even though they were only an hour or two from Baltimore. The card game had now become very rowdy, but one problem was that people were gambling increasingly large sums of money, and the bear didn’t have money; he couldn’t even fake it or get credit. And when people gamble real money there’s always a chance of a fight, and that was certainly true in this case, where the one guy was still stinging about the fact that people didn’t care much about Millard Fillmore, and the other guy had some thing about Buchanan, perhaps he didn’t like how they’d spoke poorly of him. These are both kind of obscure presidents, thought the boy – why not argue about Lincoln, or Jefferson, or one I’ve heard of? But in fact the boy was still trying to figure out how to play gin. The one time he won, almost by accident, he got enough pennies to last him a while, but after that he lost steadily and was wondering if he should break the ten-dollar bill he got in the diner.

 4-16, Tom Leverett

 

 

Yer Classic Boy & Bear Story

 The boy was walking through the woods when the bear jumped out and almost ate him. He quickly asked the bear if he was hungry, and the bear said yes, so the boy offered to buy him a hamburger in the restaurant in town. All he hed to do was walk down through the woods to the center of town, and the boy would buy him a hamburger. “I’m going there myself,” said the boy. “You can come with me.”

The bear didn’t really know what a hamburger was, so the boy described it: melted cheese on top, sometimes a tomato and onion and lettuse and maybe even relish. But the bear didn’t know what any of this was. The bear decided to go along with the boy and try it anyway.

 Along the way they met a dog, and asked him if he wanted to go with them to the restaurant to get hamburgers. But the dog was too busy chasing a cat. “The cat got out into these woods,” said the dog, “and she may stay out here forever if I don’t catch her and bring her home.”

 They ran into a raccoon who was busy with some garbage that he had stolen in a dumpster in town. They tried to make the raccoon feel guilty about stealing garbage, but he didn’t feel one way or the other about it. They tried to describe the hamburger to him, thinking if they got him on hamburgers it would improve his diet, but the only thing that really appealed to him was the onion, since he knew what that was, and he only had a vague sense of what a hamburger was or what it would be like to actually walk through the center of town.

 So when they got to the conter of town it was just the boy and the bear, and the bear waited outside the restaurant while the boy went in to order the hamburger. Or rather, he hesitated, in the street, trying to decide whether to just walk in. While he was there a meter maid came to give him a parking ticket. Her reasoning was, he was taking up the space and not plugging the meter, so it was her job to write him a ticket.

 But she had a hard time getting any information about him. He claimed that his name was only “Bear,” and if he had a middle name or a family name he’d never known what it was. He also didn’t really have an address, though he was perfectly happy right where he was, and he made it clear he wasn’t about to pay some fine, or go to court, as these things always ended up bad. “But you can write me whatever kind of ticket you want,” he said. “I have probably broken half a dozen laws and you can write me up for all of them.”

 The first, she said, was walking downtown without any clothes on. He explained that he was a bear, so his fur kept him warm, and kept everyone from looking too hard to see what was beneath it. He said he never had any problem walking around without any pants or shirt, but when a hat took his fancy he would certainly walk around in that for a while.

 Just then there was a large explosion coming from the building across the street. The boy was just coming out of the restaurant with the hamburgers, so the boy and bear ran down the street together. The meter maid followed them because she didn’t want to have an almost-finished ticket that she hadn’t given to the offender. The bear pointed out that she couldn’t expect him to pay for a parking spot that was about to be blown up, so she might as well pitch her little ticket book and come with them and share hamburgers.

 The three of them ended up out in the train yard in some weeds, where someone had made a little fire pit out of rocks and had left a few apples strewn about. The boy didn’t care much for wild apples but to the bear this was a big treat, right up there with coming upon some fisherman’s bucket full of thrashing fish he had just caught and then walked away to answer a phone call. The bear in fact went on a story-telling ramble that included all the fine supplies he had run across in his colorful life, mostly based on the fact that he wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone, and he’d made friends pretty easily.

 The police came around looking for someone who had bombed the newspaper office across the street from the hamburger restaurant, but all three of them said they were there but had no idea who could have done it. The policeman asked them questions about who they might have seen coming and going while they stood there in the street outside the office, but only the meter maid and the bear had been standing there; the boy hadn’t, but the boy remembered somebody unusual in the restaurant while he was ordering the hamburgers and waiting for them.

 Apparently somebody bombed the newspaper because they had published a cartoon of the president. But there was also a cartoon of a bear, so the policeman had a lot of questions for the bear. Were you aware of the cartoon? Do you consider it wrong to make a cartoon of a bear? The bear was perplexed. He had never really thought of a cartoon of a bear. To him, everything was like a cartoon anyway. Fast-moving, violent, in wild colors, that’s how he saw the world.

 But they tried to describe to him what a newspaper looked like. To the bear, newspaper had other functions in the woods. You wouldn’t consider reading them. Or even looking at a cartoon.

 While they were standing there, a train started up and the bear jumped on it. He had learned how to jump on trains back when he lived in the city. The only problem was when someone was already up there in the boxcar, but that wasn’t the case with this one, and he scrambled right up there and waved good bye at everyone. The policeman was wondering whether to arrest him or what, but he decided that was too risky and the bear rode off into the sunset. The boy knew he’d catch up to the bear later, so he decided to go home for dinner. The problem was, he’d forgotten which way home was. But the policeman knew his dad, and showed him the way. They decided to let whatever happened at the newspaper office go, since they really weren’t involved. 

 Tom Leverett, ~Sept., 2020