The “Homo Fiend” // muttering and puttering and buttering his bread
In cultivating a sense of humor, along with speech reading, I seem to have collected a sack full of funny things which happen to me nearly every day. Shall I shake the sack in hopes that the funniest of all may come to the top? Or shall I shut my eyes and “grab” for one of the funny things from this jolly bag of funnies? The “Homo Fiend” (see his photograph in the May issue of the Volta Review [ link ]) must always be reckoned with! When he is not “muttering and puttering and buttering his bread” he is sure to be engaged in other performances equally disconcerting. One morning he played a trick on me. I was feeling unusually virtuous, because the house had religiously been set in order, dishes washed, floors swept, and fragrant soup merrily simmering for the children’s lunch. All this, too, with the unopened pages of the Volta beckoning in a most tantalizing way. Faithfully I attended to “duty first,” then with a happy sigh, was soon lost in the inspiring pages. It may have been hours, or only a minute, before my nephew appeared in the doorway. I understood him to say something about “soup boiling over.”
ex “The Friendly Corner” in Volta Review “For the Deaf, the Hard of Hearing, and Their Friends” 26:6 (June 1924) : 48 Harvard copy/scan (via google books) : link
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