That’s it. I’m through with that ox of a nurse. I despise the way her buttocks ripple shamelessly back and forth under the thin fabric of her white uniform as she walks. She gives me sponge baths with ice-water, changes my colostomy bag only when it’s so full of urine that it has grown to the size of the Graf zeppelin, and feeds me my castor-oil with an old spoon with an icky metal taste. She also greases the rectal thermometer with limburger cheese.
In the old days I simply would have had her smothered, but she was hired by my sons to be my care-taker, and my infirm and gumless self is virtually helpless to stop her.
If anyone in my abominable family truly cared about me, they would hire a good food chewer. People with proper regurgitation skills are few and far between, and there is nothing I long for more than someone to pass partially digested food into my mouth, for I am an old man and can no longer produce my own saliva.
My father, in his own old age, had a most excellent servant in his hire who could feed him a three-course dinner without losing any of the food’s flavor or nutritional value while making it digestible for my father’s delicate, elderly stomach. The servant was an Eastern European emigré who had previously chewed food for Czar Alexander of Russia and most of the Hapsburg aristocracy. Shortly after my father’s death, the servant took his own life, ashamed of his past. It was a pity, since he was a true artist, and dirt cheap to boot.
A few years ago we tried out a number of chewers, and they were all abysmal! They’d either get too much saliva in the food, or not enough, or they’d miss my mouth and send half the portion up my nostrils. Some would just chew and swallow the food, tip their hats and leave, evidently mistaking my mansion for some sort of soup kitchen!
A food chewer is worth at least 20 nurses. If someone would only just press their lips to mine and transfer bites of salisbury steak into my mouth, I would be restored to the bloom of health in no time.
T. Herman Zweibel, the great grandson of Onion founder Friedrich Siegfried Zweibel, was born in 1868, became editor of The Onion at age 20, and persisted in various editorial posts until his launching into space in 2001. Zweibel’s name became synonymous with American business success in the 20th century. Many consider him the “Father Of American Journalism,” also the title of his well-known 1943 biography, written by Norman Rombauer.
