The Land of Vos - Tales of Eclectus

Tea Party with Aunt BB

by Tom Rea

Email from Aunt Lula . . .

Just got a postcard from Aunt B. B. Don’t know if I ever told you about her. Leroy and I met her on one of our RV trips. Leroy will stop in the strangest places and loves to take up with the most peculiar people you ever met in your life. I say to him, “How do you think that looks? Like I’m one of your collection of peculiar people.” He replies, “Course you are, my love.”

Well, this particular time it was the old hippie camp called the “Slab” somewhere in the Arizona desert. Leroy stopped and parked our RV on some abandoned government runway in the middle of nowhere. It was inhabited by a motley group of old hippies as ever you care to see. I’m always half afraid to get out of the RV at some of the places where Leroy stops. But it was free and he says, ”Hippies are harmless.”

One old hippie man had completely painted a mountain in bright trashy colors. Spent years at it. He seems a little crazy if you forgive the expression. Well, after you got over the shock of the sight of it and the fact that it was constructed out of roadside beer bottles and trash, it was kinda pretty in some strange, confusing way. I just see beer bottles and gaudy paint, but there were German tourists there who were quite impressed with it. They are everywhere athletic, red faced, German tourists in shorts in little German RVs that look like Ice Cream trucks. The Germans were photographing the hippie man’s mountain and saying. “Yah, yah. Das Guten, Gutenheimer” or whatever they are saying in German like it was a beautiful cathedral on the Rhine. Or maybe they were marveling at the insanity of American pop art. To me the hippie man looked like a crack pot.

I have long known that most everyone I know is crazy in some way. I just have to accept them as they are. I have thought about it and have decided everyone is doing about the best they can, coming as they do from their own circumstances. Each of us has our own unique flaws. We're all cracked pots in some sense. But it's the cracks and flaws we each have that make our lives together so very interesting and rewarding. You've just got to take each person for what they are, and look for the good in them. I always say, “Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.” America the beautiful has plenty of crazies to take pictures of.

But to get to Aunt BB and the Slab. I met Aunt BB one day at the “water pipe” where we all had to go sooner or later to get water. She was a sweet, ruddy and matronly woman dressed all in handmade frills. When I asked her name, she replied, “I’m a beach ball.”

I knew immediately she would go on my “crazies-I-have-known” list. I asked her name again and got the same answer. When I looked confused, she smiled and said, “That’s really my name. My given name is Ima and maiden name is Beach. I married the late John Ball. No matter what people call me, it sounds like a joke so I decided Ima Beach Ball would just have to be it. Most people call me Aunt B.B. for short.”

Aunt BB invited me over to her little trailer for tea. So here I was in the middle of this godforsaken desert going home to tea with one Ima Beach Ball if you can imagine. She turned out to be a dear person a cracked pot, eccentric oh yes, and she wasn’t the best of it!

Inside was an amazing place. It was like a fantasy, Alice-in-Wonderland house. Every square inch was covered in nick knacks and doilies. I call her the doily lady. Her trailer was small. It was like a little dollhouse with several tiny cuckoo clocks, lace curtains, pictures of ancestors, etc..

One of the most amazing sights was her dogs. She had three tiny strays she had found on the highways in her travels. They were Mr. Baxter, Mademoiselle Lola and Senorita Consuela and they were all elaborately dressed in handmade tailored clothes! I am not kidding.

Mr. Baxter, a Pug, had on a little cowboy shirt and blue jeans. Lola, a tiny, black toy French poodle, was dressed as a nun with a wimple! Aunt BB had a new dog, Senorita Consuela, who wore a bright Mexican outfit with little scarves and beads. Senorita Consuela had painted toenails!

When we sat down for tea, I was further amazed. Ima Beach Ball pulled up three highchairs around the table each with one of the well-dressed dogs! I thought I would just die. Then Ima put little handmade and crocheted bibs around the dogs’ necks. She served me tea and tea biscuits on fine bone china. Each dog had a little china plate with one perfect dog biscuit on it and its own china cup of milky tea. Ima Beach Ball talked continuously to her dogs as if they were children and indeed, all three seemed to understand every word. Ima spoke to Consuela in broken Spanish. Seniorita Consuela, a tiny white Chihuahua, had been found on a beach in Mexico and didn’t know a word of English. Ima kept telling the little dogs to “mind your manners” and not to eat the biscuit “until our guest begins.” The dogs were beside themselves to grab the biscuit, but trained to wait. I saw them watching my every move like a torture for them to wait.

Then came a man’s voice next to me, “Hi, Toots! Get Daddy a beer. I drive all day. I deserve some service here, woman.”

It was only then I noticed a bright, emerald green parrot with red feathers on the tops of his wings in a cage beside me. He had a large orange beak. He was wearing a tiny, plaid vest. His name was Mr. Bippers. Mr. Bippers was in a doll house type cage beside the table. His door was open and he had a change purse in his foot and he was carefully counting slot machine tokens in and out of the purse, one by one! He often mumbled swear words in English and Spanish whenever he dropped a coin. No matter what he said, Ima never scolded Mr. Bippers in the least for his colorful vocabulary.

Ima said she had inherited this beautiful parrot off of an old hippie’s death bed. She said Mr. Bippers had had a “colorful life.” Ima could only surmise his past life by the things the parrot talked about. He was an astonishingly good talker. His last owner had found him in the desert screaming, “Bad bird, don’t bite the momma. Bad, bad bird! No bite! Don’t bite the momma! Some day I’m gonna sweep you off the porch with my broom.”

The last owner found Mr. Bippers lying exhausted and bloody having been lost in the desert with clipped wings and attacked by pecking ravens. Fortunately the ravens were somewhat intimidated by the parrot’s size and his human voice. They had been working him over good, but he was no push-over and growled and barked at them like a dog and yelled, “Damn ravens get! Get the hell outta my corn!”

One thing Mr. Bippers said in a frantic woman’s voice that I politely ignored was, “Uh oh! little Lola, naughty nun. Lola, pooped her panties. Lola, pooped her panties.” Then he laughed and laughed. “Why do I bother to run a day care? I just changed that child’s panties five minutes ago,” Bippers said further. Lola looked guilty as if she knew Bippers was putting her down for a past transgression.

Mr. Baxter, the cowboy Pug, watched me carefully to see when he could start his biscuit. He had the air of a serious responsible caretaker of Aunt BB. He literally rolled his huge black eyes at me as if to say, “We love our mommy, but she is a little daffy, so please start eating now. Yes, yes, now please. Hurry.”

Mr. Bippers said in Aunt BB’s voice: “Now Mr. Baxter, be polite, don’t eat your biscuit.” Then in a man’s voice, “Poor little fella. All dressed like a dude. Birds don’t wanna wear clothes. Want a beer, Mr. Bippers? Bring me a beer, Babe.” Then in a woman’s voice: “Get it yourself beer belly.” Aunt BB just smiled. Contrary to all the parrot was saying, she was a refined lady. She just beamed. She was so proud of how well her rescued old parrot could talk even if his conversation and language were quite revealing. Bippers cried like a one month old baby and said in a four year old child’s voice, “Uh oh, Marsha pooped her panties. I’m telling. Marsha pooped her panties.” I thought maybe the parrot had lived once in a children’s day care. He talked in numerous childrens’ voicesalways about “number one” or “number two.” Bippers seemed obsessed with detailed potty training conversations.

I quickly ate my tea biscuit listening to hear what new potty talk that verbose parrot would say next. I was thoroughly enjoying Mr. Bippers’ conversation at my first tea party with fully dressed dogs. Ima Ball told me of all her travels. Meanwhile Mr. Bibbers was holding his tea biscuit in his foot and began reciting, “Dirt can’t hide from intensified Tide,” a TV commercial for Tide laundry detergent. “That ad was at least 40 years ago,” I told Ima Beach Ball. She said she thought Mr. Bibbers must be quite old by the TV ads he knew. “Mmm, mmm, good. Mmm, mmy good, that’s what Campbell Soup is, Mmm, mmm, good,” Bippers interrupted to verify her point.

Then Mr. Bippers whined in the nagging woman’s voice about her arthritis in her fingers. “I work my poor arthritic fingers to the bone while you sit there and watch football and drink beer. Useless man anyway!” Apparently some time in Mr. Bibber’s past he had lived with a not-so-happily-married couple. Of course, I had never heard a parrot who could talk so well, especially a parrot who was now walking on the table and holding a spoon of peanut butter and dunking his biscuit in my tea cup! He came right over to me and said, “Wanna give Momma a big kiss, pretty boy. Daddy, dance with me. Ahh, come on, Daddy, get up and dance with me. We used ta dance all night. Here’s your beer, you old goat! For pete’s sake, pull your t-shirt over that belly.”

Bippers examined my diamond ring with his tongue. “Pretty seeds. Pretty seeds. No eat.” Then he eyed me up and down with his orange beak turned completely upside down. Then he tried to hump my rings. I jumped in fright and Aunt BB gave Bippers a grape to distract him. She said he gets romantic when he sees diamonds and jewelry and attractive red fingernails. For some unknown reason, Mr. Bippers gets romantic toward anything deep red. He has a stuffed red toy duck that Aunt BB has to keep locked away whenever guests come to play “Mexican Train,” (a dominoes game played in all the RV camps). Mr. Bippers is mad for the red duck and mounts it and embarrasses Aunt BB’s friends to death. He also has a green duck, but he is only in love with the red one. That’s a mystery Aunt BB never has figured out. Aunt BB just says there must have been a red head in his life! Or maybe his mother was a red parrot since he has red on his shoulders and under his wings. Maybe he is a mix from red and green parrots. In any case, Aunt BB has never seen another bird like him nor have I.

After Bippers climbed off my red fingernails, I changed the subject and talked to the parrot to distract him from his amorous advances. “What a pretty bird you are,” I said. Mr. Bippers answered, “Momma’s pretty sugar pea. Look yonder at that fool building a mountain out of beer bottles, Daddy. I wish I had a nickel for every bottle you’ve drunk, you old fool. You make me sick you old goat. If I hadn’t run off with you, I coulda been a dancer. Momma said I had rhythm. Come on Bippers, dancey, dancey, dancey with Momma. You make me sick you lazy old goat.” Then in a man’s voice, “Oh yeah, like you’re the cat’s meow. Poor Bipper’s in love with a gin drinkin’ dance hall gal. Bite Momma, Bippers.”

So that was my tea party with that amorous parrot who kept a running dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Dysfunctional Couple. That was my tea party with a woman named Ima Beach Ball and her fully dressed up dogs, Mr. Baxter, Sister Mademoiselle Lola, and Senorita Consuela, in a tiny trailer, decorated in Victorian grandeur.

Ima lives on the road. To this day she writes me cards from many places. Today’s card said Senorita Consuela was learning English quite well from Mr. Bippers’ chatter and Mr. Baxter had a new set of hand-tailored Bavarian leather shorts made by a spinster seamstress, an English tourist. Eileen Dover. The English lady had Ima photograph her on the edge of the Grand Canyon at sunset with three little urns beside herthe ashes of her three toy fox terriers, Master Bates, Boas, and Tinkle. I could see the tears in Eileen’s eyes even in the picture. The German tourists will surely photograph Mr. Baxter in his leathers and say, “Yah, yah. Guten, gutenheimer.”

Mademoiselle Lola, the toy poodle, had recently had her bushy poodle head “corn rowed” with colorful beads in Louisiana by a backwoods Cajun African American lady, named Prissy Mussinfuss. Prissy lives alone in a tiny little trailer named the “Queen of Sheba.”

“This child needs accessorizing, honey. She needs color, some Indian beads,” Prissy had concluded after seeing Sister Lola’s nappy head. Aunt BB writes, “Poor Prissy has a worse name than I do. Her parents named her Prissy because of the way she ate her grits as a babyall pucker-lipped lest she get the least speck on her bib. Prissy’s last name was Frickling. She married Albert Mussinfuss. Poor Prissy Frickling Mussinfuss! We say each other’s names and laugh and laugh.”

I sent Aunt BB a tin of imported English tea biscuits and little embroidered sacks of gourmet dog biscuits from the mall for each of her dogs. I sent the parrot, Mr. Bippers, a bag of toys, including a toy slot machine I bought in a novelty store in Las Vegas that rings bells and spits out coins. Mr. Bippers loves to hold his toy and play the slots. He cusses and cusses. Aunt BB says he still faithfully repeats the conversations of “Momma” and “Daddy” from many years ago! Aunt BB has met a bird psychic on the road, Sue Ella Spincker. Ima says Swella is doing “readings” to find out the details of Bippers past life. Ima says she will publish his biography. I know it will be a best seller.

Fortunately, Mr. Bippers lives in a most happy home now. Each day his recollections from his long life are sounded off like a little daily soap opera that keeps him quite busy, quite entertained. At least he usually laughs when he repeats all he heard for umpteen years. Another picture Ima sent. Mr. Bippers has a suction cup perch on the side window of the truck front seat. What a sight to see Aunt BB driving down the road to wherever the wind blows! There is Lola, the nun, looking out the back windowwimple and all!and Mr. Baxter and Consuela, noses pressed on the windows. Ima writes, “Mr. Bippers sits on the passenger side on his perch singing commercials from long ago radio and TV. If Bippers sees a crow or raven, he gets quite upset and yells to the wind, ‘Damn ravens! Bad bird, don’t bite the momma! Get outta my corn! Momma get the shotgun! The ravens are back.’”