a surprising connection

[schlomo]

A Surprising Connection

Today, I browsed through one of the old brief storybooks that my daughter with the help of her children wrote and illustrated a decade before my wife and I settled in Hawaii. The booklet focused on my fictional alter ego, Schlemo, the snake who slithers into bunches of misadventures. In this instance, he inadvertently scares his partner Schlemina while she is on a rickety swing whose creepy reverberating sound had scared Schlemo. Discombobulated, Schlemina falls off the swing and hurts her spine. Schlemo is devastated. Searching in vain for the button to alert his friend Big Humphrey, an elephant who always succeeds in wresting Schlemo and his hapless friends out of predicaments, Schlemo becomes frantic. He eventually locates the button that had fallen into some nearby bushes. Big Humphrey once again saves the day, hoisting Schlemina and Schlemo on his trunk as he makes his way to the local doctor, an owl named Dr. Hoo. The good doctor manipulates Schelmina’s spine back to normal.

How fortuitous! When my wife and I came to Hawaii, we just happened to find a primary care doctor who had opened a new practice. He has an owlish demeanor, and his last name is Dr. Hoo. What a hoot! What a reprise for the verbal sparring between Abbot and Costello.