No. 61.—The Chipmunk.

Once upon a time there was a chipmunk. Now, you’re probably thinking you know all about him already. You probably think he was Chipper, and he ate Chipped Ham, and his name was something alliterative like Chester or Cholmondeley, or even something like my name, which is Cheswick, except that’s my last name, and we’re talking about his first name, which wasn’t alliterative with “Chipmunk” at all, and you might think it was but you’re wrong. His name was Ralph. But he hated the name Ralph, so he went by the name Abernathy. However, no one he knew could remember the name “Abernathy,” so they all called him Phil. So one day Phil the Chipmunk was out gathering nuts in the woods. He gathered some chestnuts, and he gathered some walnuts, and he gathered some butternuts, and he gathered some peanuts, and then he said, “Wait a minute, peanuts don’t grow in the woods. I must be in a field in Virginia or Georgia.” But he wasn’t in a field, and someone had put the peanuts there just to fool him. I don’t know why they wanted to fool a chipmunk into thinking he was in a field in Virginia. Some people are just like that, I guess. So while Phil was gathering all these nuts, along came a red squirrel, and she said, “What’s your name?” And he said, “My name is Abernathy.” And she said, “Really? What a coincidence! My name is Phil, too!” And they lived happily ever after except for the mortgage crisis in 2007, when they lost a lot of the nuts they had invested. This shows you that you shouldn’t use nuts to speculate in dubious loans, but you should bury them in the woods instead, and then they’ll grow into big nut trees, and you won’t have the nuts, but someone fifty years later long after you’re dead will be able to eat nuts from those trees, or maybe bury them and make more trees, and eventually we’ll have nothing but nut trees as far as we can see. I hope we all learned our lesson from that. Next week I’ll tell you the story of the itsy bitsy spider who had a lemonade stand in Nuuk, which didn’t work out very well for her, but I don’t want to spoil it for you. Till then, this is your old friend Mrs. Cheswick saying eat your granola or something, cause I want to have a good effect on you kids.