It's A Topsy-Turvy World

   Two young women walking on the beach came across an old man sitting on a driftwood log, whereupon they removed their bikini tops, stood on their hands in the sand, and shook their great breasts in his direction with much gusto and fanfare. "Oh, we should be ashamed!" said one afterward, giggling. "No freaking way!" said the other. "He will go home to his loneliness tonight and have wet dreams about this day. We have done the poor man a great service."

   But the old man dreamed instead of his home on the prairie and the strawberry upside-down cake his mother used to make when he was a boy. And of the visits his father and Uncle Jim and their old friend Ben Dantic had on warm summer evenings on the porch outside his bedroom window where he hung from the sill by his knees listening:

   "When I was a boy," his Uncle Jim would say, "they told us that the children were our future. Now I am an old man and they are still saying that and I wonder what ever became of us? We have been disinherited, I tell you, disinherited and forgotten!" "It's a topsy-turvy world, Jimmy," his father would say. "It's a topsy-turvy world." And then old Ben Dantic would take up his fiddle and play and sing, in an airy falsetto much too small for his great size,

I wanna hear it again,

I wanna hear it again,

    The old piano roll blues. 

glwarren, 2009, 2014