October 16th, 2024
Dear Mr. Fudd,
It’s getting colder, which means that I am in the midst of the thankless job of gradually ripping out all of the plants in my wife’s garden and placing them in our garbage bin. It’s about a two-month process since I refused to purchase those large brown paper sacks, so I can only properly dispose of one garbage bin of garden at a time. I could probably start the process earlier in the year since my wife inevitably loses interest in said garden around mid-June, which annually coincides with when there are vegetables that require something to make use of. Some people use vegetables, we let them sit on our counter for the duration of the summer and leak vegetable goo down the kitchen drawers and onto the hardwood floor. It’s an odd hobby, but it seems to make my wife happy. Me, not so much.
Last year I attempted to plant my own herbs to capture some of the thrill my wife seems to enjoy with witnessing the gradual birth and death of an object, so I bought a lemon verbena plant. I don’t know what one does with lemon verbena, but I heard about it in a book once. It’s a plant that smells like lemon. I know what you’re thinking, “you’re just talking about lemons.” I’m not. Lemon verbena, it’s like lemons, but without the lemons. Gradually the plant lost its lemon scent, which I felt was odd, but I was new to gardening. I attempted to make a syrup out of the enormous plant, but it tasted awful and took forever. While I was in the process, my mother came by the house and informed me that I was in fact, not making a syrup out of lemon verbena, but a common garden weed. How was I supposed to know? I had taken good care of the weed though, I was rather proud of it.
Much obliged,
C.S. Beaty
•••
My daily trips to the mailbox were now met with greater anticipation. My boss had taught me how to send for autographs through the mail about a year ago, but I had run low on B-list celebrities willing to sign a hockey puck. Since my growing autograph election had stunted its growth, checking the mail had also grown less exciting.
Until now.
It was still early phases in our relationship. The first few dates had gone well, but now Fudd and I were getting to know what each of us was like when we didn’t feel the need to impress one another. When we didn’t get all glammed up before a night on the town. We were inching toward the wearing sweatpants and farting in front of one another phase of any meaningful partnership, but it was still exciting. Now that we were six letters in and things felt serious, I started bragging about my new pen pal with the people I cared about. It was about time they knew who this special person in my life was.
I started with my wife.
“This has got to be the weirdest thing to happen to you this year.”
I think she understood.
I went back to our matchmaker, Mike the Printer, and told him about Fudd and I. He was thrilled the two of us had hit it off. I emailed him scanned copies of our correspondence thus far, and nine minutes later, Mike the Printer sent me a response.
“Thanks, I think this is going to be the best reading ever.”
•••
Fudd’s letters corresponded with a creative, albeit somewhat lonely phase of my life. After adopting three kids, every single meaningful relationship I had prior had been impacted. I lost friends. I felt estranged from the people who supported me before becoming a dad, meanwhile trying to become a dad to a three-year-old, five-year-old, and eight-year-old who didn’t speak the same language I did and had never had a meaningful relationship of their own. No one in our new family knew what this thing was supposed to look like or what to do with one another.
There were only a few constants between the before and after of this abrupt life transition, but one was my boss. He had always been in my corner, even if it meant giving me life advice that was counter to what he probably should have said as my employer. He taught me life was short. Working hard was often overrated. Professional ambition is often a fool’s errand. And life gets better when you learn to care less and enjoy it more.
He loved it when I told him about Haywood Fudd:
“My two thoughts:
1) this man needs NO psychedelic drugs and
2) this is what self actualization must look like. Best proof of reincarnation I have seen.”
•••
When Haywood’s next letter arrived in the mail, I was smitten.
•••
November 2nd, 2024
Dear Mr. Beaty,
Hi, there.
The following is what I scribbled last Tuesday. I propose you give the following your best as you will see them again: Bliss is a blooming word that is used primarily to describe happiness. Oodles, dickens, catawampus, whoop-de-do, clobbered, toot, kaput, and skedaddle are blooming words, too. These words are chiefly extinct. The word chiefly is extinct, too.
From deep inside my cerebral cortex a bobbing and weaving memory has floated to the surface and is now thirsty for my parched attention. Here it is:
It was in the third grade, 50 or so years ago, that a budding juvenile delinquent with the name of Scoop tried to wrestle my Baby Ruth candy bar from my clutches. The fight was on, and I fought to protect my Baby Ruth as though it was my mother’s reputation. We brawled similarly to the lyric in the 1969 hit song by Johnny Cash titled “A Boy Named Sue” which goes:
And we crashed through the walls and into the street
Kicking and a-gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer
We didn’t crash through any walls, into the street, and we weren’t covered in mud, blood and beer, but I’ll have you know we were brawling like panthers with abscessed fangs. At the end of the fisticuffs I kept my Baby Ruth.
It’s go time. The pressure, although governable and biddable at this stage of my on-going world-record literary stunt, is preparing to mount a charge.
Much obliged,
Haywood Fudd
King of the Literary Daredevils
