Babbler Excerpt No. 1

Oregon man sues own sister for $1.25 million
"She turned my babies into aliens!" he contends

Reprinted courtesy of The Beemer Babbler

Diligently, vigilantly, Robert Burr had strived to protect his young daughters—Ema, 6, and Megan, 5—from the corruptions of modern life. He'd removed them to the verdant depths of the Oregon wilderness some 300 miles from the nearest urban cesspool. Had taught them the lore of compost heaps and horse poo. Had nourished them with hand-pumped water, home-baked pumpernickel, and fresh-picked produce from his wife's organic garden.

Then poor Robert Burr miscalculated big-time. He took the girls to visit "Aunt Susan" while he was attending a convention in Detroit.

"I hadn't seen my sister in 17 years, mind you," Rob groans, and there is that in his voice which pleads for absolution. "So just how in the [unprintable] was I supposed to know she would ruin my babies?"

Grabbing the closest object at hand—an antique cheese vat—he hurls it in evident frustration toward the bucolic tapestry adorning the distant wall of a room which, in another time and place, would have served rather nicely as a mead hall. The vat lands short of its mark and smashes to bits on the anvil Rob uses when forging up homemade shoes for the mares.

Rushing from the kiln room, caked to her elbows in wet terracotta, Jan Burr notes the wreckage and looks at her husband quizzically. "Who broke my colby chessel, Rob?" she casually inquires in the soft and musical voice so befitting the unalloyed sweetness that made Midwest in-laws adore her.

Rob blames the incident on Megan, waves Jan back to the pottery wheel (where she's cranking out a dinner-service for 12), and expands his diatribe.

"Can you even remotely comprehend the electrochemical mayhem a bowl of marshmallows can cause?" he demands, poking a slender finger into the breastbone of his visitor, as if to impale him with the question. "And it didn't end there, man. She fed my babies Froot Loops too—and gummy candies resembling teddy bears."

He drops like a shop rag to the hand-hewn oaken floor and, rending in twain his Guns N' Roses T-shirt, shrieks, "Oh, the horror! The horror!"

Meanwhile, in Michigan, Susan Elizabeth (Burr) Beemer, the nefarious sister in question, produces the lengthy legal document cataloging her brother's copious complaints and expectations for redress to the tune of $1.25 million.

"Rob must think I make quite a bit more than five-fifty an hour working the bra bar at Hudson's," she says with an air of amusement. "And I love the part where he claims the girls came down with attention deficit disorder from watching our Back to the Future video and playing Sega with their cousin Daniel. It was Aladdin, for godsake! Had I known Rob was going to sue me I'd have loaded up Mortal Kombat."

She lets the summons slip to the carpet and slumps in her corduroy armchair and shields her moistening eyes with her hand. "I did what I had to do," she sobs. "I mean, my nieces were serving us play food, and when Ema called the toy Twinkie 'butter,' I knew what I had to do. ..."

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