[Editor:] I remember digging through boxes in my grandparents’ abandoned farmhouse in upstate Minnesota and coming across copies of Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang! a kind of Midwestern 1920s proto-MAD Magazine. It read like humor from another planet. As a pre-teen kid in the ‘70s, I struggled to grasp the innuendo, paging through it in that dusty wooden house on a slow summer afternoon. That kid got old but still remembers some of the one-liners. Thanks for the inspiration, Captain Billy.
The Whiz Bang Inheritance
by Bradley Lau
I came looking for answers.
It was a Tuesday, sun spilling brightly through the visitor’s room. The air smelled of disinfectant and canned peaches. My grandfather was propped in a recliner like some antique war relic waiting for final appraisal.
Grandpa was 104. Still upright. Still lucid. Still grinning like he knew where the bodies were buried, and maybe where to dig up one or two others. A stern Norwegian wheat farmer by trade, Dakota Territories born, still stubborn enough to outlive ten local obituary writers.
I was 52. Three marriages behind me. One teenage daughter who thought I was a fossil, and a stepson who only communicated via Venmo requests. I’d started dreaming about elevators that never reached the top floor. Mortality had upgraded from rumor to roommate.
I had convinced myself that what I needed was perspective; that someone who had lived through breadlines, jukeboxes, polio, and disco might have something real to say about life’s deeper meanings. I thought maybe, just maybe, this old man had answers.
So I drove 8 hours and brought him a flask of something brown and astringent. The nurse didn’t even blink.
I said “Hey there, thought maybe we could talk, you’ve got a lot I could learn from,” settling into the plastic chair beside his recliner.
“You talking,” he said, “or asking?”
Me (diplomatically): “Asking. You do the talking. I’ll listen”
He closed one eye and nodded, like that made it official.
I cleared my throat. “Well, after all these years, what would you say is the meaning of life?”
Him: “Heh, serious question. Can’t say really, but one thing I know is that before a man marries, he swears to love. After marriage, he loves to swear.”
Me: (thinking we can get past this sort of nonsense answer) “What about happiness? What is true happiness?”
Him: “Well, the thing about happiness is.. A good woman is chaste but so is good whiskey.”
Me: “No, I mean, what makes it last?”
Him: “Well, one thing I know is you can never judge the length of a woman’s tongue by the size of her mouth. ”
Me: “Grandpa, please, I’m trying to—”
Him: “Blessed is the man born of little furniture. It’s much easier to move.”
Me: “Umm, I don’t think that answers my—”
Him: “It answers all of ‘em. You just don’t like the math”, he said winking.
I tried again. “Do you believe in God?”
He squinted toward the ceiling. “Of course, of course. But you got to admit, he’s got a hell of a sense of humor.”
Pause.
Him: “Hey kid, you ever seen a duck try to mate?”
I didn’t answer.
Him: “That’s not Intelligent Design. That’s comedy.”
Me: “Okay. What about love?” I asked. “Real love. The kind that doesn’t flinch.”
He tapped his temple with one callused finger. “Love has been called miserable happiness. Not so. It’s what makes happiness miserable.”
He winked again and looked pleased with himself.
Me: “And, what about death?”
Him: “Kid, man is made of dust. All of a sudden, along comes the water wagon of fate, and his name is mud.”
We stared stubbornly at each other, only one of us was smirking. The silence stretched. A dust mote floated between us like punctuation.
I looked at his hands, wrinkled, tremoring slightly, knuckles like knotted wood. Still stained faintly with the soil of a hundred springs, summers and falls. I looked at his face. Creased like a roadmap to a town nobody lived in anymore. But the eyes were a bright icy blue. Alive. Sharp.
“Do you regret anything?” I asked, quietly.
Him: “Plenty. But the trick is to regret with flair.”
Then he winked. “Some women kiss their pet dogs instead of their husbands. Some men are born lucky.” He sat back in his chair and his gaze went to the window.
That was when I knew the conversation was over.
I stood, trying not to show the ache in my knees. He didn’t rise. Just leaned back, eyes locked on the sunlit window and whatever horizon he still saw in his mind.
I turned to go.
“Hey,” he rasped.
I paused.
“Remember…”
He straightened, summoned one final performance from the lungs that had seen 10+ decades. His voice dropped into the cadence of a benediction:
There once was a man from Peru
Who dreamed he was eating his shoe.
He awoke with a fright
In the midst of the night
To find that his dream had come true.
Me: “Yeh, I know that one.”
Him: “Course you do,” he grinned. “That’s why it’s scripture.”
Maybe the secret to life isn’t buried in some profound truth but in the refusal to be swallowed by seriousness. Maybe life, in the end, is a dirty limerick whispered to the universe, just to see if it’ll laugh.
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