Tell A Fib
I’m fixing to tell a fib.
On certain rare and dangerous occasions it could be more to your advantage to tell a lie than tell the truth. Now I’m not advocating lying, because everybody knows the whole world hates a liar about as much as they do a thief.
They say the truth will set you free, but I think that is meant in more of a spiritually sense than a physical one, because sometimes the opposite can happen when telling the truth can result in incarceration, or at the least getting you chastised or ridiculed.
So what I’m talking about is fibbing, and not lying. I personally believe there is a difference in telling a fib and telling an outright lie, that telling a fib may be saying something that is not true, but it doesn’t injure anyone physically or mentally.
I used to tell fibs to my momma, but I never told her a lie. I knew better than that because I knew I would be suffering the consequences of her wrath if I told her a lie. But sometimes, due to circumstances, I knew what would be coming if I told the truth, or if I told her a lie, so I fibbed.
I believe my momma knew something about time travel, because she was always saying if she caught me in a lie she was going to knock me into next week.
What brings fibbing to mind is the remembrance of an incident that could have resulted in a tremendous amount of grief for my brother Fred and myself if we hadn’t have fibbed.
To make matters worse it happened on a Sunday, the Lord’s Day, and according to our momma that doubled the weight of our sin.
The preacher was coming to have Sunday dinner with us and our momma had gotten up real early before church an fried up platters of two of her young chickens, prepared mounds of potato salad, a big pot of green beans and had breaded the okra for frying as soon as we got home from church.
But the special thing she had done was make a big banana pudding with golden brown meringue on top of it with pointed swirls covered with little clear droplets.
That’s what got us into trouble—that banana pudding.
What happened was my brother and I got to get out of church early so we could rush home and chip up the big block of ice that was in the icebox so everybody would have big glasses of cold sweet tea.
While we were working on the block of ice with our ice picks we kept looking at that pudding—the one with the golden meringue and the clear droplets.
At first we just each stuck a finger in it and licked them while we put ice in the glasses, but it tasted so good we decided to attempt to cut a little slice out of it without ruining its appearance, but once we did that we saw that wasn’t going to work so we gave in to human frailty and ate the whole thing.
No sooner had we finished than we realized what deep trouble we were in. In great misery I told my brother that there was no way we were going to be able to lie out of this one, but my brother was not so easily defeated.
I was astounded when he brought our old dog into the kitchen and let him lick the pudding dish clean.
While the dog was lapping away my brother smeared meringue all over his snout and said, “Now then, we won’t be fixing to tell no lie when we say the dog licked that dish clean and it ain’t gonna hurt nobody if that preacher don’t get no banana pudding! We’ll just be fixing to tell a fib, that’s all.”