Bedtime stories

So, there you are, motoring along a quiet country road that you have driven on about a million times. Your mind is drifting, and you’re taking your half of the road out of the middle. You crest a hill, and there’s suddenly another car coming directly at you. And you’re closing in on each other at a speed normally associated with fighter jets.

You both swerve, missing one another by the width of an atom. Your life didn’t flash before your eyes, but you’ll definitely need to do some explaining to the laundry lady.

Once the cold sweat has dried and you can pry your fear-stiffened fingers off the steering wheel, you begin to think. Specifically, you think about the big “What If.”

You imagine your funeral service, conducted by that new minister, a man you barely know. The core message of his eulogy is: He was sort of an OK guy, I guess.

Your wife collects the life insurance, sells the house and purchases an elegant hilltop villa in Tuscany. It isn’t long before a smarmy slickster named Lorenzo moves in with her. She doesn’t think of you often, but when she does, she can only recall your frequent crankiness, and the word “badger” pops into her head.

And that’s that. You realize you’ll leave behind about the same impression on this world as a hand does when it’s withdrawn from a 5-gallon bucket of water.

We’ve all mentally run through this scenario or something like it. At the end of mine, I think, “Well, at least I read bedtime stories to my kids.”

I don’t recall exactly how it started, but our two boys were still quite young when it somehow became a ritual for me to read stories to them at bedtime.

On Sunday nights, their stories would come from that day’s funny pages. Our boys had bunkbeds at the time, so one would sit beside me and follow along while the other would lie on his tummy and look down from the top bunk. “Calvin and Hobbes” was our hands-down favorite, with “The Far Side” coming in a close second.

On other nights, I would read books. We went through a “Little House on the Prairie” phase but soon graduated to Patrick McManus, an outdoors writer and a world-class humorist. His books of collected essays have such titles as “Never Sniff a Gift Fish” and “Real Ponies Don’t Go Oink.”

McManus often plumbed the depths of his austere rural Idaho childhood for material. For instance, in one of his stories, he described how he and his pal, Crazy Eddie Muldoon, decided to construct a tiger trap in back of Eddie’s house. The boys only managed to catch a skunk, followed shortly by Eddie’s high-strung father. From then on, Eddie’s dad smelled vaguely of skunk and had a severe and unexplainable facial tic.

Our sons loved these stories, which gratified me greatly. It also gratified me that they didn’t try to emulate any of the epic exploits McManus so vividly described.

One night, after being read their story, the boys remained restless. They demanded another story, but we had used up our collection of books.

Totally on a whim, I grabbed a stuffed toy monkey that had big, doleful eyes and comically long arms. “One day, Monkey was walking along and...” I began.

And what? I had no clue. “He found a case of dynamite,” I continued impulsively.

Monkey had several dynamite-related mishaps that evening. First, he mistook the sticks of dynamite for cigars and tried to smoke one. After a thunderous explosion threw him high up into the sky, Monkey theorized he had perhaps found a cache of hot dogs. He fired up his grill, and you can imagine what happened next.

Our sons laughed themselves silly.

Monkey had calamitous misadventures at almost every bedtime. His misfortunes became more diverse as the boys began to make suggestions. So it was that Monkey suffered the consequences of such things as overeating prior to going on an amusement park ride and the unpleasant side effects of trying to lift a heavy rock shortly after consuming large quantities of industrial-strength laxatives.

My wife would hear the boys giggling uncontrollably and often came to their bedroom to admonish, “You’re supposed to be calming them down, not firing them up.”

She was right, of course. Even so, I couldn’t say no whenever bedtime came and those little voices pleaded, “Do Monkey for us. Please? Pretty please?”

That isn’t much of a legacy and it certainly won’t be etched in stone anywhere. But I guess it will have to do.

Jerry Nelson is a recovering dairy farmer from Volga, South Dakota. He and his wife, Julie, have two sons and live on the farm where Jerry’s great-grandfather homesteaded over 110 years ago. Feel free to email him at [email protected].