[paydayloanfasters]

No more kids for them.

[CiccoineFed]

[Glanteeignile]

If you're going to pull that trick, it has to be for something awesome...

Major Major Major Major had had a difficult time from the start.
Like Miniver Cheevy, he had been born too late—exactly thirty-six hours too late for the
physical well-being of his mother, a gentle, ailing woman who, after a full day and a half's agony
in the rigors of childbirth, was depleted of all resolve to pursue further the argument over the new
child's name. In the hospital corridor, her husband moved ahead with the unsmiling determination
of someone who knew what he was about. Major Major's father was a towering, gaunt man in
heavy shoes and a black woolen suit. He filled out the birth certificate without faltering, betraying
no emotion at all as he handed the completed form to the floor nurse. The nurse took it from him
without comment and padded out of sight. He watched her go, wondering what she had on
underneath.
Back in the ward, he found his wife lying vanquished beneath the blankets like a
desiccated old vegetable, wrinkled, dry and white, her enfeebled tissues absolutely still. Her bed
was at the very end of the ward, near a cracked window thickened with grime. Rain splashed from
a moiling sky and the day was dreary and cold. In other parts of the hospital chalky people with
aged, blue lips were dying on time. The man stood erect beside the bed and gazed down at the
woman a long time.
"I have named the boy Caleb," he announced to her finally in a soft voice. "In accordance
with your wishes." The woman made no answer, and slowly the man smiled. He had planned it all
perfectly, for his wife was asleep and would never know that he had lied to her as she lay on her
sickbed in the poor ward of the county hospital.
From this meager beginning had sprung the ineffectual squadron commander who was
now spending the better part of each working day in Pianosa forging Washington Irving's name to
official documents. Major Major forged diligently with his left hand to elude identification,
insulated against intrusion by his own undesired authority and camouflaged in his false mustache
and dark glasses as an additional safeguard against detection by anyone chancing to peer in
through the dowdy celluloid window from which some thief had carved out a slice. In between
these two low points of his birth and his success lay thirty-one dismal years of loneliness and
frustration.
Major Major had been born too late and too mediocre. Some men are born mediocre,
some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major
Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a
man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by
how unimpressive he was.
Major Major had three strikes on him from the beginning—his mother, his father and
Henry Fonda, to whom he bore a sickly resemblance almost from the moment of his birth. Long
before he even suspected who Henry Fonda was, he found himself the subject of unflattering
comparisons everywhere he went. Total strangers saw fit to deprecate him, with the result that he
was stricken early with a guilty fear of people and an obsequious impulse to apologize to society
for the fact that he was not Henry Fonda. It was not an easy task for him to go through life
looking something like Henry Fonda, but he never once thought of quitting, having inherited his
perseverance from his father, a lanky man with a good sense of humor.
Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie
about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged
individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He
advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His
specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him
well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more
money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase
the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not
growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he
sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be
done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the
county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and
was therefore wise. "As ye sow, so shall ye reap," he counseled one and all, and everyone said,
"Amen."
Major Major's father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it
did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for
all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all. He was
a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated
to whine, whimper, wheedle, and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he could. He
was a devout man whose pulpit was everywhere.
"The Lord gave us good farmers two strong hands so that we could take as much as we
could grab with both of them," he preached with ardor on the courthouse steps or in front of the
A & P as he waited for the bad-tempered gum-chewing young cashier he was after to step outside
and give him a nasty look. "If the Lord didn't want us to take as much as we could get," he
preached, "He wouldn't have given us two good hands to take it with." And the others murmured,
"Amen."
Major Major's father had a Calvinist's faith in predestination and could perceive distinctly
how everyone's misfortunes but his own were expressions of God's will. He smoked cigarettes
and drank whiskey, and he thrived on good wit and stimulating intellectual conversation,
particularly his own when he was lying about his age or telling that good one about God and his
wife's difficulties in delivering Major Major. The good one about God and his wife's difficulties
had to do with the fact that it had taken God only six days to produce the whole world, whereas
his wife had spent a full day and a half in labor just to produce Major Major. A lesser man might
have wavered that day in the hospital corridor, a weaker man might have compromised on such
excellent substitutes as Drum Major, Minor Major, Sergeant Major, or C Sharp Major, but Major
Major's father had waited fourteen years for just such an opportunity, and he was not a person to
waste it. Major Major's father had a good joke about opportunity. "Opportunity only knocks once
in this world," he would say. Major Major's father repeated this good joke at every opportunity.
Being born with a sickly resemblance to Henry Fonda was the first of a long series of
practical jokes of which destiny was to make Major Major the unhappy victim throughout his
joyless life. Being born Major Major Major was the second. The fact that he had been born Major
Major Major was a secret known only to his father. Not until Major Major was enrolling inkindergarten was the discovery of his real name made, and then the effects were disastrous. The
news killed his mother, who just lost her will to live and wasted away and died, which was just
fine with his father, who had decided to marry the bad-tempered girl at the A & P if he had to and
who had not been optimistic about his chances of getting his wife off the land without paying her
some money or flogging her.
On Major Major himself the consequences were only slightly less severe. It was a harsh
and stunning realization that was forced upon him at so tender an age, the realization that he was
not, as he had always been led to believe, Caleb Major, but instead was some total stranger named
Major Major Major about whom he knew absolutely nothing and about whom nobody else had
ever heard before. What playmates he had withdrew from him and never returned, disposed, as
they were, to distrust all strangers, especially one who had already deceived them by pretending to
be someone they had known for years. Nobody would have anything to do with him. He began to
drop things and to trip. He had a shy and hopeful manner in each new contact, and he was always
disappointed. Because he needed a friend so desperately, he never found one. He grew awkwardly
into a tall, strange, dreamy boy with fragile eyes and a very delicate mouth whose tentative,
groping smile collapsed instantly into hurt disorder at every fresh rebuff.

[nd90t3sf]

The kid however has a great name.

[quack!]

It could be worse. He could have picked Wallace LaMay.

[illiderob]

And yes, that would be worse.

[cbUDaNFRu]

lel

[br`lorance]

Generally it should be a universal human right to decide yourself about your name once you're capable of doing so

[varrozans]

Reminds me of the old Fractured Fairytale where Mr. Galahad goes running down to register his new baby.

"Do you have a name for the baby?" he is asked.
"Yes, sir!"
"Ah good! 'Sir Galahad'," writes down the registrar.
"What?! Wait! No!! What kind of name is 'Sir?!' All the other kids will laugh at him!"