Avoiding Failure

Thomas Edison said he had not failed. He just found 10,000 ways that would not work. Now that's what I call putting a smiley face on the matter. The reason Edison could get away with a statement like that is he often did succeed. Just look at all his inventions. We got this old fellow who used to live down the road a piece. I say used to because he was taken off last week to live in a retirement home. His name is Horace Alva Edison Smithers. I reckon his mamma and daddy expected big things for him and named him accordingly. Well, Horace did try. He spent his whole life trying to find ways to get out of work. I remember when he was working on a self propelled, remote guided lawn mover. He used parts from one of those model airplanes that people fly from the ground. It never worked but the grass in his yard grew high he had to hire some off duty city workers to come in and clean it up. The town board saw to that. He worked on a special pan that would cook an entire meal all at one time, but different foods require different treatment and he never figured that one out. Other things he spent time on were an umbrella that opened when it was hit with a drop of rain, a universal solvent (just finding a container proved failure), a mosquito eating plant, a self-cleaning dog house, an automatic flushing toilet, a hair cutting hat, and a burglar alarm that had speakers on the roof that sounded like police sirens (to scare off the felon, doncha know?) I never heard of any of these things working. But I will say, I don't think old Horace considered himself a failure. I say this because he never gave up. When they hauled him off he kept talking about this thing he was working on that he called an all-purpose maid. I don't want to think to hard on that one.

Tales of Harper, short stories and poems about the fictional town of Harper, Mississippi is available on Amazon Kindle