02-21-2007, 05:48 PM
Well yeah.
The letterbox appeared overnight, as if beamed there by some alien life form. That is certainly how it must have seemed to the daily work commuters, not there one evening when returning home from work and blatantly there, resplendent in the morning sunshine, the following day. Beamed there by an alien, they may well have thought, but it was no alien it was my dad.
Although not an alien, dad did have some alien qualities, not alien to planet Earth but definitely alien to the local morale. One such alien quality was his innate yearning to defy conformity so, consequently, upon purchasing our slice of rural Australia, no twenty-litre drum was going to suffice in the mundane task of housing the family mail. Dad did not perceive a letterbox to be merely a weatherproof hold, for mail you most probably did not want to receive, but instead as an icon of your estate, a mascot for your family. Hence, the Ugly Frog letterbox was spawned.
Weeks of dreaming, planning, constructing, sculpting and finally painting had culminated to summon into existence this seemingly alien, amphibian. It was a fat little frog in shape, but with hallucinogenic skin and psychodelic smile, it was not even Earth like.
I recall catching the school bus on the morning of its debut, standing next to the alien amphibian as it squatted on its thin pole and smugly smiled at the morning traffic. Thirty gaping school kids with their faces all pressed along one side of the bus's windows, the hiss of the bus's folding door and the hanging mouth of one agog bus driver.
The deluge of questions upon boarding had caused my face to glow like an electric heater, but by the time we arrived at school the glow had turned from humiliation to pride. The defiant appearance of the Ugly Frog had appealed to the rebel in their childish minds, and I was a celebrity for a day.
For the most part, the martian mailbox was accepted by the adult sector of the community as well. In fact it instantly became a key navigational tool used by nearby residents, "…not far past the Ugly Frog" or "…if you see the Ugly Frog, you've gone too far." would be given as infallible directions. Without actually acknowledging it the stiff backed community had accepted the colourful spectacle.
Sadly, however, it wasn't long before the fat frog, perched on its long thin pole, was subject to tall poppy syndrome, and it wasn't long after that, that one or more of the passer-bys took a gross dislike to the mocking smile.
We found our beloved family mascot one morning, with its ferro-cement head smashed in and its smug smile crushed close. I was devastated by the sight, but dad said nothing, just slowly shook his head as he went about prising apart its mouth and propping it open with a short stumpy stick.
The next day a sign appeared over the frog's head, again apparently beamed their by an alien. It read: "Sticks and stones may break my bones but you'll never make me croak" The sign remained for exactly one week before the intolerant vandals struck again, this time up-rooting the frog by it's thin pole and disabling it forever.
When we found it the following morning, lying twenty metres down the road, on its side, scratched and broken all over, I could still make out that smug smile and was glad to know that that had been its only crime. Dad is twenty years older now and has a twenty-litre drum as a letterbox, but in the back of the now redundant chook shed he still keeps the scratched and broken family mascot, where it grins eternally and still refuses to croak
|