Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Sept. 19, 2011

Bee careful

Share |

My wife subscribes to a publication called “Reminisce.” In the September issue, a lady from Colorado wrote in asking for help locating a book. She didn’t remember the title, but she knew it had something to do with bees, and involved chapters with titles like “Bee Helpful,” “Bee Kind,” etc., each of which had a moral lesson. Marilyn read the letter to me because it reminded her of a book I still had, buried somewhere in the basement, called “A Hive of Busy Bees.”

My mom gave me the book when I was six or seven because she thought it would help reform me. The book told how a brother and sister, Don and Joyce, spent the summer with their grandparents on the farm. Each night Granny told them one of her patented Bee stories to keep them from running amok and endangering the livestock. I’m not sure, but I think her grandmother may have frightened the socks off of her with variations of the same material. The stories Granny told always involved youngsters wrestling with their consciences, which took the form of bees buzzing stern admonitions into their ears while they were, more often than not, ignoring the advice and running full speed down the path to perdition. A large percentage of those tales did not end well, and they all were very melancholy, somehow. Perhaps it was the black-and-white illustrations, which showed children, adults, horses, dogs, and hearses only in silhouette form. Those black backgrounds gave the white, faceless children in the foreground a very ghostlike appearance.

And although the children in those stories did, occasionally, do the right thing and were rewarded handsomely at the chapter’s end, there was little satisfaction in it. The good children always said things like “No, I shall not lie, for Mother told me that was wrong,” or “I am sorry, Jack, but if you wish to pull the tail feathers out of Mr. Nelson’s favorite rooster, Ned, you shall have to proceed on your own! I am on my way to church.” Those kids were supernaturally good, and you couldn’t warm up to kids like that.

And it seemed like the bad children in the Bee stories were supernaturally bad. In “Bee Polite,” for example, Granny told the story of a brother and sister who lived with their mother in a Western town ... possibly Albuquerque, and who had never seen their maternal grandmother. Their grandmother wired to explain that she was coming to visit from her hometown, which was in the East ... possibly Scranton. Unfortunately the good little children, Dan and Daisy, fell in with a crowd of bad children, who had never learned to be polite because their parents always left them home alone while they were off carousing at the local gin mill. At any rate, the whole gaggle of children were hanging around the coal yards near the railroad tracks one day when an elderly lady appeared. I don’t remember the details, but eventually all the kids, good, bad, and indifferent, were throwing rocks and bits of coal at her. Daisy’s shots all missed their mark, but Dan, who was a Little League pitcher with an ERA of 2.82, winged the old lady in the hand as she waved her cane at him. Of course, when little Dan and Daisy arrived home, covered in telltale coal dust, guess who was in the kitchen getting patched up by their mom? It was the old lady from down by the coal yards, who just happened to be the grandmother they’d never seen. The old lady didn’t spill the beans about the kids and the rocks, but even after the children broke down and confessed and wept and said if only they’d known it was Granny they’d most certainly have found another old lady to use for target practice, she still flinched every time they came into the room. All was forgiven, but Dan and Daisy carried the burden of not listening to their Bee Polite bees buzzing in their ears well into their adulthood, when they learned they’d been written out of Granny’s will and all her worldly goods, including her fine Victorian home, her three carriages, and her stock in that new company, Bell Telephone, had been left to her Spanish gardener, Ramon.

Another depressing story, “Bee Truthful,” told of Milton and his baby brother, Marion. This one involved Milton lying to his father about closing the gate to the pasture, which resulted in little Marion wandering outside in the morning and getting trampled by an ill-tempered mule. The child wasn’t killed, but he was very sickly for a long time and required corrective shoes, and Daddy had to shoot the mule on general principles. “Bee Honest” compares the lives of three classmates. Joe and Henry did not study, hung out in pool halls, and drank hard cider. Charles, on the other hand, studied hard, drank only Ovaltine, and went to bed early. Each applied for a job with the local druggist, but only Charles passed the druggist’s honesty test, which involved planting $5 gold pieces in the stock room to see who turned them in. Because of his honesty, Charles became a trusted employee and was allowed to open the store and sweep the place out every morning. But Henry and Joe robbed a liquor store, forged several checks and went to the penitentiary. They eventually escaped, ran off to Chicago and became aldermen. “Bee Gentle” was about a mare named Fanny who galloped off for the doctor when Jake’s mother was sick, despite the fact that Jake had mistreated her by feeding her carrots soaked in Jim Beam. By which I mean he fed those carrots to the horse, not his mother. This one served to remind children that animals are better people than people. “Bee Obedient” told of two children who fell into an icy pond despite parental advice to the contrary. All of the stories in that book were equally depressing.

I tried to make some sense out of those stories when I was a boy, but since nobody I knew would ever have considered throwing rocks at their grandparents, or anybody else’s grandparents, and since I had neither a little brother nor a mule, nor a mare named Fanny, nor an ice pond to fall into, I couldn’t get much good out of them. I did get a coat hanger poked into my eye while peering through a hole in the wall at some girls changing out of their bathing suits at church camp, but since there was not a single chapter in that book entitled “Bee Careful,” I was forced to learn that moral lesson on my own.