by: RPARIS
In 1993, I wrote a humor book, called "One Frog Can Make a Difference." The book was a send up of self-help books of the day, and topics on everyone's mind: e.g. Frogs in the Military.
One of the sillier chapters was a send up of Shirley Maclaine's voyages into her recessed past. But while Piggy is Cleopatra, Kermits sees himself as a street sweeper in Ancient Egypt. Kermit's roles are far more the accidental Garp-like partipant in pivotal world events.
And here's Kermit's foray into a past life regression in Revolutionary America:
"Then the channeller told me I got woken up one winter in seventeen-seventy-something, while hybernating on the banks of the Delaware River, by this nice guy with wooden teeth who asked me how to get to the other side. I must have given him good directions, the channeller said, because, here we are."
To skip, or rather, hop, to the point:
Some 20 years later I was to discover that my 5th. Great Grandfather, a Ship's captain in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, had really played the Kermit (or Rudolph-the-Red-Nosed-Reindeer won't you guide my sleigh-tonight-role) that snowy eve, changing the fate of our nation:
Captain John Blunt was a delegate from Newcastle to Exeter in the first assembly called during the revolution; and if family tradition was correct was once brought into picturesque association with Washington. When the great general crossed the Delaware, there was much floating ice. Seeing the danger he inquired “Is there any one here who is well acquainted with the river?” Some one replied: “Here is Captain Blunt.”
The latter had been regularly coasting for years between Portsmouth and Philadelphia, and was nearly as familiar with the Delaware as with the Piscataqua. So the great general said to Grandpa Blunt: "Captain Blunt please take the helm."
And in those words of the great general I hear two clear echoes:
First, that of an introspective, and very green frog, whose vision wasn't far from the mark.
Then I can't help but replay over and over in my mind, the image of Santa Claus, in a similar bind, turning to his shyest but strangely abled Raindeer, and saying those fatal words: "Rudolph won't you guide my sleigh tonight."
"Rudolph, won't you guide
my sleigh tonight?"