So What Was the Deal with Mr. Tuttle?

Okay, okay, so I got everyone wondering about the bear in the story about Mr. Tuttle. What? Is it unusual to have a circus bear in the back seat of your car all of a sudden? I don’t know, maybe it’s a generational thing. Back in my day, lots of people had bears in their back seats. We even had expressions for it. Like when we paid for something at the local five and dime, we used to say as we counted out the money, “Here’s your three dollars and there’s twenty-eight cents for the bear in the back seat.” Honestly! Your parents never told you about that?

All right, I can see this isn’t going to work with you guys. Tough crowd. So I guess I’ll just have to explain my thinking.

You see, just recently I saw the Shakespeare play The Taming of the Shrew. To make sure we’re all on the same page here, let me point out that a “shrew” in Shakespeare’s sense is a caustic, scolding woman, someone very difficult to get along with — so get those images of a stout fellow in lion tamer garb subduing a tiny field mouse with whip and chair out of your head . . . it’s not the same thing at all. And, thankfully, there were only “shrews” in Shakespeare’s day — nowadays all woman are consistently congenial and the pleasantest creatures on earth. But for the purposes of explanation, we must imagine that there could have existed at one time a woman who was hard to please.

Anyway, this fellow named Petruchio sets out to marry the shrew Katherina for her money; but, not being satisfied with merely that, he also determines to break her of her “froward” ways and mold her into the kind of wife he wants. His program calls for him to do many lunatic, nonsensical things to completely throw Katherina off her game, and one of the actions he takes is to dress up in a ridiculous costume for their wedding. The whole wedding party can’t believe why he shows up so attired, but, despite their protests, he goes through the wedding in that costume without once explaining how he came to be dressed so, passing the entire thing off as a long and tedious tale.

Well, from that I got the idea of writing a story about a staid, quiet couple whose uneventful lives get a jolt when the husband goes completely out of character and appears in the middle of the night drunk and wearing outlandish clothes. To crown it all, I had him arrive home with a bear in the back seat of his car, leaving to his wife’s (and the readers’) imagination how this humdrum man came to be in this condition. The wife, who loves him, eventually reasons that to demand an explanation of her husband’s outrageous actions might threaten the very underpinnings of their marriage — in other words, if he confesses to one thing, then she would of course have to react in a certain way, and so on and so forth until any hope of recovering the placid life they once enjoyed becomes destroyed. She knows he’s a good man and thinks it wise to forgive him his one indiscretion, this blip on the screen as it were, and keep herself in the dark. I little counted on readers getting hung up about the bear, but now I can see that that was indeed a provocative element in the story.

So what can I say? I am blessed to have intelligent, critical readers who have the patience to read my whimsical little tales and give me the feedback I so desperately need. So thank you one and all . . . I mean it, you guys — you’re the best.

And, by the way, I had a wonderful vacation this past week and will file my report soon.