Back when Jenny and I lived in South Little Rock, I was working on a project out on the carport one day, and heard a beeping noise. I looked up, and it was one of those box van delivery trucks backing into my driveway. I couldn’t imagine why. I had not ordered anything. It was a biggish truck, and he had some trouble getting through my passenger car sized gate out at the street. He finally got backed up to my house, and swung out of the cab, and threw the roller door on the back up. The truck had industrial sized things inside of it. The driver fetched a clipboard and walked over to me.

Driver: Is this Bill’s Bubba Basket Bakery?

Me: Huh?

Driver: Bill’s Bubba Basket Bakery, 9117 Hilaro Springs Road.

Me: Well, yes. That is my address, but there is no bakery here. It is just my house.

He had walked a 55 gallon drum over to his hydraulic tailgate, and had lowered it to the ground. It appeared to be something called Flavacol.

Driver: You can cut me a check for $150 for this COD invoice.

Me: Wait. I didn’t order that. I don’t even know what Flavacol is. And as I told you, there is no Bill’s Bubba Basket Bakery here.

Driver: Well, what am I supposed to do? Look here at the bill of lading. Bill’s Bubba Basket Bakery, 9117 Hilaro Springs Road, Little Rock.

I wanted to slap the guy. It was a neighborhood, not a commercial center, and my little 2 bedroom house was all there was on this lot.

Me: Well, my suggestion is that you put this drum back on your truck, and take it back to from whence it came.

Driver: Huh?

Oh yeah, it was Little Rock, where people didn’t use big words.

Me: Let me be more clear. There is no bakery here, and I am not going to accept your COD shipment and pay $150, just so that you don’t have to take this drum back to your warehouse. You will have to load it back up and let your shipping manager figure it out.

He grumbled the whole time, but lifted the drum of Flavacol back up, and closed the door, and drove off up the road. I went inside and looked up Flavacol. It was the fake powdered cheese like they have in the Kraft Macaroni and Cheese packets. A big drum of it.

My front doorbell rang, so I strode over to it, and threw it open, and said loudly, “There is no Bills Bubba Basket Bakery here!”

The man standing on my porch: Hi Sam.

Me: Woody! What are you doing here?

It was Woody, a friend of Jenny’s and mine from college, who I had not seen since I lived in Wilmington, where we went to college. I invited him in, and we gabbed for a couple hours until Jenny got home from teaching. He happened to be driving back to his dad’s house in Joplin, Missouri, from where he lived in Arizona, and decided to swing by and visit us. He was puzzled when I asked him about the drum of Flavacol.

Woody: Nope, it wasn’t anything that I know about.

Jenny got home, and came in carrying the mail. After she got done hugging Woody, I sorted through the mail, and there was a padded envelope from Wilmington College. I opened it up, and inside was a baby sized t-shirt with the Wilmington College logo on it, and a letter. The letter was from the college alumni department, congratulating us on the arrival of our new baby, Virgil Churchill Birchall III, and hoping that we would be sending Virgil Churchill to attend the college when he came of age.

The college had sent us a letter a couple months before that, asking us to update our information about any changes in our lives since college. Sitting there in the evening after reading the letter, Jenny and I had decided to make up a baby’s name, (Virgil Churchill) and send it back, on the odd chance that they would publish it in the Alumni Newsletter. We knew that if they did, our friends reading it would laugh. So, upon receiving our returned form, they sent out the congratulations and a baby sized t-shirt. It was cute and tiny.

Later that night, after dinner and some wine, we were sitting in the living room gabbing and laughing.

Woody: Well, what are you going to do about the t-shirt?

Jenny: I don’t know. Do you have any ideas?

Woody: I could put it on, and you can take a picture and send it back to them.

Woody was a medium sized and very hairy guy.

Me: Do you think you can get it on? It is pretty small.

Woody: Sure. Let’s try.

It took him about half an hour to squeeze into the t-shirt, with a lot of grunting and laughing, and forcing his man sized arms and chest into the baby sized shirt. It was very tight on him. It was hilarious watching him force himself into the t-shirt. His chest hair poked out the top, and his hairy stomach stuck out below the bottom of the shirt. Jenny raced off, and came back with some quilt batting from a quilt she was making, and we fashioned a big diaper out of it. He laid down on the floor, and curled up, and stuck his thumb into his mouth. He was the ugliest baby I had ever seen.

Woody: (groaning in pain) Come on, take the picture before it squeezes me in half.

So we took a picture, and a couple weeks later when the pictures came back from the developer, we wrote a letter of thanks to the college, and included the picture of Woody in the t-shirt. We never heard from them again, and the picture never made it into the Alumni Newsletter, but it made us laugh all over again. And somewhere in the Wilmington College archives exists a picture of a hairy large baby, Virgil Churchill Birchall III, the offspring of Jenny and Sam Birchall.

I never found out why the drum of Flavacol was sent to our house.

You take humor where you find it.  .