Comic Interlude 5

We interrupt regular broadcasting once again to bring you a few cartoons from our resident cartoonist…

1.

Quilter’s Delight – Created by Don Cheke

If you are married to a quilter, you can be sure that he/she will be making a quilt for everyone they know and love. They might even decide that quilted pants and a shirt are appropriate for hubby, a walking advert of sorts of their quilting prowess. Although I didn’t get the quilted pants and shirt, I got my bed quilt only after everyone else got theirs. That’s pretty low on the totem pole, in my opinion, but at least I get to live with the little missus and no one else does! That is the best prize of all, but I wanted the quilt too! 😊

BTW, chain link is an actual quilting pattern that can be found in most quilting stores, so I’m not just whistling dixie! I do pay attention!

P.S. The cat is lying, as it got a quilt long before me, although I guess he is after quilted booties or a quilted coat at this time. Greedy bugger! 😊

2.

Seeds & Stuff – Created by Don Cheke

Now that Little Loaf and Sally Mander have a wee one to raise, they have been selling seeds and other stuff on the weekends to raise funds to ensure Loafina’s well being. After all, it is an important part of being a parent and since they are both in school on weekdays, the weekend it is. Note that the bird is still around, and although you can’t tell from the image, he/she/it is eyeing up those seeds intently. Little Loaf better not leave them unattended, or the bird will go for it, since he/she/it won’t be able to resist. Why won’t anyone take the damn bird off their hands!? It’s free for pity’s sake! 😊

My wife Denise has a couple of great stories from her youth that the sale items in this cartoon are based on. I have her tell the story to me and our friends from time to time. Here is the first story in her words:

I was about six years old and living in Edmonton where my new dad, my stepdad, bought me a big beautiful yellow Tonka dump truck. It was the biggest one they made at the time, and I liked it a lot. At the time, there was also a boy named Barton who lived across the alley from us. His dad was an electrician and used to bring home all sorts of junk for his son to play with; things like wires, light covers, switches, all kinds of stuff like that. I really thought that was the coolest thing and thought it might be nice to have all that gear. So, one day I traded my dump truck with him for a box of, well, basically junk. When my dad got home from work, he just about had a conniption fit, but since he never used to get mad at me, he just took me back to Barton’s house to trade the dump truck back for the electrical wires and such.

Isn’t that a great story!? Here is the second story about seeds:

I learned early on, when I was nine and half years old, or maybe 10, that I would never make a good salesperson. In the back of many popular magazines, you could order different things that you could then sell. This included packages of cards, packages of seeds, and other such things. After you paid for them, you made a few cents for each item you sold. At one point, I saved up my money and I ordered seeds. I went around town trying to sell them to everybody I encountered, and nobody wanted to buy them. One day, I decided I’d take my younger half-brother, Leonard, with me. Maybe I didn’t have a choice but to bring him, since I always looked after him, but the point is that he came with me. He was about five or six years old, and as cute as a button. Everyplace we went to try our luck he would say, “would you wanna buy some seeds” and they’d say, “oh sure, from you we will for sure.” So, Leonard got to be the expert salesman, just because he was so darn cute, and I discovered that I would not make a good salesperson at all, ever!

3.

Sacapoopoo – Created by Don Cheke

Sacapoopoo is a cartoon inspired by yet another of Denise’s stories. It is quite funny, if not adventurous in a crazy kind of way. Here it is in her words:

When I was much younger, two of my favorite stories were Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I was fascinated by the story of them building a raft and floating down the Mississippi River. When I was about 13 or 14, my dad decided that he would recreate the adventure for me and my younger brother. At the time, one of Dad’s money-making schemes was selling fence posts, so the materials were already on hand. Dad took a number of those posts and fastened them together with rope to build a good-sized raft. He added a 3-sided shed with roof so that if it was going to pour on our adventures, we could get in out of the rain. A great idea for sure. We packed all kinds of things and when we were ready Dad towed it down to the launching point on the North Saskatchewan River, just near Drayton Valley. Up to this point, my mom was complaining the whole time that this adventure was dangerous and that she didn’t approve. She knew full well that none of us could swim. She asked many reasonable questions like, how we could navigate the big river, and what we would do if we hit rough spots. All reasonable questions that Dad answered, likely unconvincingly. To make her feel part of the adventure, we asked her to do the honor of naming the raft. She looked it over and said, “well it looks to me like a sack of poopoo.” So Sacapoopoo it would be, and we painted it proudly on the side of the little shed. The launch went fine, but after traveling only about 25 or 30 feet we got hung up on some rocks because of many factors. The water was shallow at the start, the raft was quite heavy, and it didn’t float well at all. In fact, after we finally freed ourselves from the rocks, we found that the raft actually “floated” about four inches under the water surface for the whole trip. As a result, pretty much everything that we had packed in the shed was instantly wet. Undeterred, we continued on our adventure, and we floated along until we rounded a bend in the river and we hit some rapids. The swift moving water snagged one of the oars out of my dad’s hand, so we were left with only one oar to steer this big floating monstrosity. I spent most of the time up on top of the shed sun tanning because I was 14 years old, and I wasn’t really into this whole adventure anyway. The thinking about it was sure different than the doing it! On the first night we decided to try to get off to the side on the bank of the river to camp and get dry. That took quite a while because we only had one oar to steer with and we had to find some slow-moving water. We eventually got beached and slept on the raft. The next morning, we headed out again and soon hit some shallow water and battled some rocks again. Somehow, the rope that was holding our anchor wore through on the rocks and off went the anchor. So now we’re floating again down the North Saskatchewan River with one oar, a raft that’s barely floating and no way to stop it because we have no anchor. That was how we spent the next two days. Part of the plan, established before we left, was for Mom to meet us down river in a few days and take us home. I think she had been waiting a full day, possibly more, before we got to the end. Dad was able to coax the raft over to the shore and we survived our adventure, much to Mom’s surprise. I am sure there is more to tell, but that is the story in a nutshell.

4.

Insult School – Created by Don Cheke

Have you heard of the joke about the guy who gets insulted by a clown every year when he attends the circus? The clown always asks him if he is the horse’s head, and the guy always answers with a resounding no. The clown then replies with, “then, you must be the horse’s ass.” Of course, the clown and audience laugh, but the guy goes away, yet again, having been made a fool. The joke goes on to tell how the guy decides to go to insult school, so he can hand a zinger right back to the clown the next time he attends the circus. As you can see by the cartoon, he voiced the best zinger that he could come up with after weeks of insult school. Do you get it!? 👍😊

What reminded me of this joke, and the inspiration for this cartoon, was another story I like to hear Denise tell. When I asked her to tell the story to me so I could record it, she said with a laugh, “Donald, the things I don’t do for you out in the middle of a restaurant!” A little bit shy she was, but she did it anyway, the great sweetie that she is.

Her next story goes like this:

We moved from Edmonton to the farm when I was nine years old. Up until then I had led a very, very, very sheltered life, and I had to ride the school bus to and from school. It was about 2½ miles each way. Always on the bus was a boy that lived on a farm just down the road from ours and he was a wild little thing. In this day and age, he probably would have been diagnosed with ADHD or oppositional defiance disorder or something like that. Hysen was his name, and he had a mouth like a long-haul truck driver, and I learned the F word from him. One day I got home, and my dad was cleaning out the granary and he wanted some help. I was out in the granary with him, so he asked me to sweep the floor. I wasn’t in the mood for sweeping the floor, so I looked at him and in my sweet innocent little 9½ year old voice said, “fuck you dad.” He laughed so hard that he had to leave the granary so he wouldn’t pee himself in front of me.

Denise is not one for swearing, so her story is so much funnier because of it. My daughter and I have gotten Denise to swear on the rare occasion, and then we have the gall to tell her, that swearing is not becoming of her. What a hoot! 😊

5.

Billboard – Created by Don Cheke

This cartoon was created specifically to introduce this comic interlude blog post. Wouldn’t it be great to find yourself being introduced on a billboard as you drive by, knowing that you are the star of a phenomenon! Loaf thinks so. He is so pleased that his comic series and new book are being well received. He hopes that all his former English and Art teachers from the past take note of this billboard and know that he did, in fact, make something of himself.

As a note of interest, one day I went to the local McNally Robinson bookstore. I had just walked into the science fiction section when, low and behold, I spotted the author of the recent sci-fi books I had been reading. It was none other than Canadian author Robert Sawyer. Of course, I said hi and asked him what on earth he was doing here in Saskatoon. He said he was just checking his stock of books and that he was currently the writer in residence at Saskatoon’s main public library. I was quite surprised by this but did know in the back of my mind that the library did have writers in residence for periods of time, but that this was the first time I ever met one. I was tickled pink by my brush with celebrity, but, as is typical of me, I remained cool as a cucumber and didn’t even ask for his autograph.

This brush with celebrity reminds me of times I have seen notices of upcoming book signings at various bookstores. I have heard occasionally that they can be poorly attended. Wouldn’t that suck, to go to all the trouble of showing up to your own book signing and finding zilch for attendees. I think that would absolutely crush me. 😢 How about you?

We now return to regularly scheduled programming….

Donald B. Cheke – August 5, 2024