Friday, November 06, 2015

The Limelight

Crumpet. She only has one name. She only needs one name.

Crumpet has been out of the limelight for a long time. At least a year. It was a complicated time, happy but sad, a time of loss and new beginnings. For the farmer, not for Crumpet.

For Crumpet it was a time of extreme Crumpetude. After officially being declared an undersized hood ornament, a long-bodied wiener dwarf, too tiny to breed, too microscopic to milk, too small to show, something happened. Nobody knows what. Maybe it was something in the water.

Anyway Crumpet, TMFGITW, sister of Crayola and Pebbles, daughter of Jackie and Abby, failed piano prodigy, goat show flop, inexplicably brimming with self-esteem - that Crumpet - continued to grow. Everyone else stopped growing once they got to be her age. She did not. She kept growing, stealthily, in tiny increments.

And in less than one year, while no one was watching, she grew three inches so that she was over nineteen inches tall. On certain mornings after stretching when she woke up, she was almost twenty inches tall.

She went around saying it, in lieu of more customary salutations:

“Isn’t the weather nice? I am twenty inches tall.”

“Please step away from the grain pan, Moldy junior. I am twenty inches tall.”

Twenty inches, Crumpet’s almost height, is a normal height for a Nigerian. It isn’t exactly towering, but it is normal. It certainly wouldn’t be considered Lilliputian, except maybe in the Belle family. But then on the other hand, Betty, the smallest Belle, is only about 21 inches tall.

In addition to growing three inches, Crumpet arranged to be bred, with no help or assistance from anyone else, and she became a milker, and she took to the milkstand like a duck to water.  At the peak of her milking she was milking three pounds a day. Wherever she went (in her mind’s eye) the invisible crowds erupted in cheers.

That is almost all we can tell you about Crumpet’s year out of the limelight, because she has requested that a veil of privacy be drawn across these twelve long bittersweet triumphant  months.

So all we can say is yes, it is true, she proved everyone (the farmer) wrong. She showed that where there is a Crumpet, there is a way. She built a ladder to the stars, and she hung the moon.

Because sometimes you are in the limelight, and sometimes the limelight is in you.