Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Oct. 10, 2011

Old wives' tales

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I had never met Lucius Dremel before, but his call, asking me to come to his hospital room and interview him, piqued my curiosity. He said he had been filming segments for a reality television series.

“Slide that chair up where I can see you,” he said. His face was covered in bandages, and there was an IV drip in his wrist, just below the cast.

“Me and my friend Arvis was talking about that ‘Mythbusters’ show on TV, and I said we could do something along them lines and make us a fortune. I told him we had all we needed, which was a video camera. I said we could investigate old wives’ tales, and he said he already had an old wife and he didn’t care to investigate no such thing, and so I explained the tales I was talking about were only stories that old wives tell, and he said that made sense. So we set out to investigate some of the old wives’ tales we’d heard over the years. I can tell you some we filmed already, if you got the time.”

I had the time.

“WALKING BAREFOOT WILL GIVE YOU WORMS - Both me and Arvis went barefoot when we was kids, and both me and Arvis had worms. We said that into the camera. TRUE.

DON’T CROSS YOUR EYES, OR THEY WILL STAY THAT WAY - For this one we called on my cousin Dean, who crossed his eyes all the time when he was a child and to this day always looks like he is staring at a bug on the end of his own nose. He looked me in the eye, sort of, and said he did not care to be interviewed and if we didn’t turn off that camera he’d turn his rat terrier loose on us. It was a short segment, but it proved that one was TRUE, too.

IF A LADYBUG LANDS ON YOUR TV SET, THE VERY NEXT COMMERCIAL YOU SEE WILL ADVERTISE SOMETHING YOU WILL SOON RECEIVE - We got us seven or eight ladybugs, but Arvis he said we couldn’t shake them out over the TV set, they had to fly there on their own. We emptied them out on the floor and pointed to the TV, but they wasn’t interested. I got the idea that it didn’t make no difference whether they flew up there or crawled, long as it was volunteer, so I let one crawl off my hand onto the TV. The next commercial was for a laxative, which made Arvis mad because he said that after all that stewed cabbage he had for dinner, that was the last thing he needed. But when his wife come home, sure enough she had brung some Dulcolax, which I guess means that one is TRUE.

EATING BREAD CRUST WILL MAKE YOUR HAIR CURLY - Arvis’s hair is straight as a board, what there is of it. He said he didn’t care for bread crust, but I told him it was a noble scientific experiment, and besides I already had the bread crust put in a Hefty bag, so he agreed and he started in. After a half hour or so he asked me to turn off the camera while he belched and laid down to massage his stomach, which was very swolled up. I filmed him for nearly a day, but there wasn’t no change in his hair at all. His eyes did glaze over, but the hair results was NEGATIVE.

IF YOU FEED AN ALKA SELTZER TO A SEAGULL, IT WILL EXPLODE - Me and Arvis we took our camera and went to Savannah Beach. We had some leftover bread crust from the hair curling experiment, so we made a little trail of bread crust along the shore and put some Alka Seltzers at the end of it. All them seagulls was interested in was the bread crust. Wouldn’t a one of them pay no attention to the Alka Seltzers. Neither would any of the other birds. So when we got home we decided to try it on Larry, which was Arvis’s cat. Me and Arvis we both put the camera on a tripod on the porch, put on long sleeved shirts and heavy duty rubber gloves and while he got a good grip on Larry, I got me an Alka Seltzer and a pair of needle nose pliers and prized Larry’s jaws open, which wasn’t no picnic, let me tell you! So I finally got most of that Alka Seltzer into Larry, and he commenced to squalling and clawing and carrying on and Arvis couldn’t hold on no more and Larry he run off across the yard foaming at the mouth and scared the neighbor lady half to death. Larry did not explode, but me and Arvis looked like we’d been through a paper shredder. Far as we could tell, Alka Seltzers don’t make nothing explode. FALSE.

IF YOU DROP A CAT, IT WILL ALWAYS LAND ON ITS FEET. IF YOU DROP A PIECE OF BREAD, IT WILL ALWAYS LAND ON THE BUTTERED SIDE - My idea here was to tape a piece of bread, buttered side up, onto the back of a cat, and drop the cat from a second story window. It was a bad idea, because the only cat I had access to was Arvis’s cat, Larry, who remembered me from the Alka Seltzer experiment and resented me for it. I was in the upstairs bedroom with the camera rolling and the window open and the duct tape and the buttered bread on the dresser, and Arvis he opened the door and tossed Larry in. When Larry seen me he hunched himself up and started spitting and walking sideways very slow with his tail swishing back and forth and I knowed I was in trouble. To make a long story short, I fell backwards out the window with Larry stuck to the top of my head. I did not land on my feet, and Arvis said he couldn’t tell what Larry landed on, because that rose bush obscured his view. RESULTS, INCONCLUSIVE.”

“And that’s what put you in the hospital?” I asked.

“That and the COW TIPPING WITH ONE FINGER tale. Me and Arvis found out that cows do not sleep standing up, they only rest that way. And they deeply resent being disturbed. Especially bulls. It’s FALSE! DEFINITELY ... def ... de ...”

Lucius drifted off to sleep, and I left, never quite sure just what point he was trying to make.