Uncle Roger

This story came to me from my friend Tom Peterson.

His uncle Roger was a farmer in far western upstate New York. He'd lived there all his life and like most farmers, he knew everybody in the area. He knew everything that grew in the fields and the woods... well, mostly.

He was also a teller of tales. It's anybody's guess how many were true. I do know that he was a genuine character. He was in his late seventies, and had been married to a lovely lady for fifty years. When Tom took me to Uncle Roger's home and introduced us, he was sitting in a chair in his undershirt, with a TV tray of pills in front of him. He acknowledged me by pointing to the pill bottles and saying,

"This one is for my heart, and this one is for my blood pressure, and this one is for my liver, and this one is for my uterus..."

I laughed out loud, and then wondered if I had been out of line. Uncle Roger reached down beside his chair and pulled up a bottle. "Want some whiskey?"

As his very nice wife passed by his chair on the way to the kitchen, he reached out and patted her bottom. "This is my girlfriend," he said. She gave a helpless little smile and shook her head and kept walking.

He told Tom the story that one day he was out in the woods and found a mess of mushrooms. He picked them. He was pretty sure they were good to eat.

On the way home, he began to have nagging little doubts. What if he wasn't sure because he really shouldn't be sure? And how could he know if they were safe... or if they'd kill him?

As the story goes, he went back to the house and divided the mushrooms into two brown paper bags.

One he put in his own refrigerator.

The other, he gave to a neighbor.

And as the story goes, he read the newspaper every day for the next week to see if his neighbor's name appeared in the obituaries. When it didn't, he fried up his own bagful, and ate them himself. They tasted great. He ate them all.

A week or so later, he ran into his neighbor. Uncle Roger said, "Pretty good mushrooms I gave you, huh?"

The neighbor said,

"I don't know. I had them around for so long and hadn't done anything with them, so I threw the whole bag away."

© J M-K 2010