No He's Not a Monkey, He's an Ape and He's My Son

146 Pages·1999·0.62 MB·English

by  Hester Mundis

No He’s
Not a
Monkey,
He’s An Ape
and He’s
My Son
No He’s
Not a
Monkey,
He’s An Ape
and He’s
My Son
Hester Mundis
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy,
recording, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without
explicit permission in writing from the Author.
© Copyright 1976 by Hester Mundis
First e-reads publication 1999
www.e-reads.com
ISBN 0-7592-2929-5
A letter to Tom and Charlie
written with love for
Thelma Williams
Nick Carrado
and
Ken Green
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 A Trip Downtown 1
Spreading the Word
Ex-Post Facting
Chapter 2 The Homecoming 11
Living Quarters, Nickels, and Dollars
Dark Awakening
Chapter 3 In the Province of Positive Thinking 20
Out Again, In Again
No Business like Show Business
Chapter 4 A Joyous Insanity 31
Mamma’s Boy
Spoonerisms
The Sibling Rivalry Scare
Chapter 5 Day Mommies Are Different 39
Boris and the Boob Tube
Babysitter Blues
Social Clamor
The Suspended Banana
Chapter 6 Swinging Style 48
The Great Water Discovery
Apron Strings Untied
Chapter 7 A Sunday in the Park 55
A Birthday by Mouth
Walking Tall
Games Primates Play
Chapter 8 Once Around the Park Again 65
Ape Tripping
Chapter 9 Boris, We’re Going to Make You A Star 72
The Hairy Genius
Time Out
Chapter 10 Home and Running 81
Reverberations
Physical Fitness and Photos
Chips and the Chimp
Chapter 11 We Meet the Monkey People 89
A Case of Mistaken Identity
Chapter 12 Savage Sibling 97
Enter Saint Nick
Boot Camp Days
Boris’s Pajama Party
Down with Diapers
Chapter 13 Meeting the In-Laws 105
’Tis the Season to be Jolly?
Shooting the Works
Notes from the Underground
New Year’s Revelations
The Fan Goes Wild
Believe It or Not
Chapter 14 The Animal Medical Center Redux 116
Boris Gets the Munchies
How Now, Howells?
Spitting, Taxes, and Boris Strikes Again
The Naked Ape
Chapter 15 The Easter Bunny’s Surprise 125
Placing an Ape
The Saddest Good-bye in the Whole
World—Ever
A New Life
Would We Do It All Again?
Epilogue 133
Epilogue’s Epilogue or The Real Happy Ending 135
No He’s
Not a
Monkey,
He’s An Ape
and He’s
My Son
Hester Mundis—No He’s Not a Monkey, He’s An Ape and He’s My Son [e-reads]
1
*A TRIP DOWNTOWN*
B
eing at home on a rainy weekend with your eight-year-old son is not
the worst thing in the world. It’s not the best, either. On one particu-
larly bleak Saturday in March my husband Jerry and I were seriously
considering locking ourselves in our bedroom and pretending we
couldn’t get out. All hope of sending Shep somewhere else to play had been
snuffed out by a mushroom-soup mist that obliterated Manhattan’s upper West
Side (probably the rest of the city too, and maybe even the state, but who
cared about that?), and for over an hour we had been assaulted by the most
insidious weapons known to modern child—words. Lots of them, specifically
those infamous rainy-day deadlies that can turn even the most placid parent
into a banshee: “There’s nothing to do!” ... “I did that already!” ... “I don’t want
to!” ... “It’s broken” ... “I hate it!” In the field of word-to-word combat, Shep was
a black belt.
To make things worse, Jerry and I were wrestling with some heavy
parental guilt. Since he had been working obsessively on a book for several
months and I had spent a lot of extra hours at the office, Shep had really got-
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