Tall Tales

 I love pulling my grand-children’s leg. I put on a straight face and tell them the tallest of tales all the while insisting that it is the absolute truth. I then wait for the moment when they realize that I am feeding them blarney and they roll their eyes, heave out a great groan and say “Ah, grandpapaaaa!!” I remember, for example, telling them, as we passed by a field filled with hundreds of gulls, that it was a gull farm and that the gulls grown there supplied all of Canada with gulls.

One of my proudest moment was when I learned that the grandkids had invented a game called “grandpapa explanations”. The purpose of the game was to come up with the most outlandish explanations for specific events or things.

I realized this morning that I have serious competition as a provider of such blarney. Mr. Trump recently said, with the straightest of faces, that the forest fires on the West coast of the United States was not caused by climate change, but was the result of not raking the leaves and picking up dead branches on the forests’ beds. Now that is powerful tall tale telling! I bet he must be waiting with anticipation for the moment when hundreds of millions of Americans heave a great groan, roll their eyes and say, “Ah, Mr. Truuuummmmppp!”