With such a herd of grandchildren I had to brush up on my nursery rhymes for bedtimes stories, like Old Mother Hubbard and the Little Old Lady Who Lived in the Shoe. The rhymes went something like:
“Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to get a poor dog a bone, but when she got there the cupboard was bare and the poor dog had none.”

The rhyme doesn’t go on to explain the rest of the story. The humane society came out and confiscated the dog on the spot. It was malnourished. Then they impounded her milk goat. The dog was promptly euthanized. The old mother wasted away and died slowly as a result of lack of goat cheese which was not covered by Medicaid and a necessary part of her diet.
Now as for the lady who lived in a shoe:
“… Who had so many children she didn’t know what to do. She gave them some milk and she gave them some bread and whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.”

It’s no easy task to properly investigate events that happened in Medieval times. Records are sketchy. Facts get garbled and scrambled.

The first question is why were they living in a shoe?

As it turned out, her husband was a cobbler and decided for purposes of advertisement to build a great big shoe with the cobbler shop in the lower part for customer service and domestic quarters in the upper levels. The tax records show that he was doing a booming business.
Just when times were looking their best, here comes the city zoning board and ruled it to be residential only zone, and shut down the business. To console himself, the cobbler took to gin and opium. One night he pulled one cork too many and fell in a London cesspool and drowned.
Some time later the Dept. of Human Services seized the children on account of all of those sound whippings and sent them to the work house where they suffered from even more malnutrition and, it was rumored, bugs and social diseases.

The old woman went totally insane and couldn’t stop laughing even in Bedlam, a popular mental institution of the day. At least she had a happy ending, but she was about the only one of the whole crew that did. This research has depressed me.

Ricky Harpole
P.S. That Jack B. Nimble fellow who jumped over the candlestick was convicted of arson on a docked sailing vessel and subsequently hung from a yardarm.
Ain’t that a hoot?
(Contact Ricky Harpole at www.facebook.com/harpolive or www.colespointrecords.com)