In the last few posts, I've been telling stories about my life in Bixby Oklahoma. A small Tulsa suburb, Bixby was the home of the Spartans (as in "We are the Spartans! - Mighty Mighty Spartans...") . We were not a cultural icon like our noble Greek city-state counterparts, but we did have the Green Corn Festival, The Watermelon Festival, and the Purple Martin Parade.
Bixby Merit Sweet Corn was harvested and ready for the festival the last week of July - coincidently, so were the traveling carnival companies, gospel quartets, and funnel cake makers. Our other festival was in honor of the world's largest watermelon grown by our very own Conrad farms. It's not the largest any more ... some jerks in Arkansas got a bigger one. This was probably because of all the toxic waste that was dumped in that state while a certain Governor was paying too much attention to a certain Flowers.
The backbone of our outstanding agriculture and the reason we adopted the Purple Martin as our city bird (previously, it had been the mosquito) was the Arkansas River. It bisected the town into the cool "North" Bixby where I lived and old "South" Bixby where the Daylight Donut Depot was in the middle of downtown. This river is also brings us back to "The Frog Story".
One hot summer, the river was up and the the local frog population took advantage of the situation and decided to annex the downtown business district into their hopping-grounds. Back behind the donut shop, there was a large parking lot for Citizen's Security Bank. This was apparently the frogs favorite place to hop about under the yellow streetlamps - especially about 3:30 in the morning when bank traffic was light and they felt like croaking out "Joy to the World" and other Three Dog Night songs.
While taking out the trash, I found that if you pick up a frog by one leg and fling him up in the air as far as you can - it will make a cool 'thwapp' sound when it lands on the bank parking lot. You might be surprised to learn this, but there is a lot of waiting around in the donut business for an eleven year old. I filled the spare time that summer flinging frogs. Ebenezzer Scrooge would have been proud - I helped to decrease the surplus population.
3 comments:
Read the previous stories and enjoyed them. Sounds like Bixby had its own biblical proportion plagues. Keep the stories coming, they are good.
ribbit, ribbit, ribbiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-thwapp.
Great story. What was your brother doing while you were flipping frogs?
I keep thinking about the Spartan cheerleaders on SNL. "Whose that Spartan in my teepee?" "It's me, It's me."
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