STAVE I: Tigger Bounces By
TIGGER had long since bounced his last bounce: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his bounding was signed by the bouncyman, the clerk, the underbouncer, and the chief bouncer. Pooh signed it: and Pooh’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Tigger was as bouncy as a door-nail, and half as fun-fun-fun-fun-fun.
Pooh knew he was unsprung? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Pooh and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Pooh was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, so long as there was a bit of hunny to be had, and maybe a bit of a ham sandwich on a potato roll with a dollop of mustard.
Pooh never painted out Old Tigger’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Pooh and Tigger. The firm was known as Pooh and Tigger. Sometimes people new to the business called Pooh Pooh, and sometimes Tigger, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him, he just asked for a small pot of hunny.
Oh! But he was a lump-fisted hand at the hunny-pot, Pooh! a weezing, drenching, gasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old snacker! Soft and puffy as cotton batting, through which no steel had ever run up except to defend a bite to eat; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as a boiled oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his roundy black nose, fuzzied up his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes shine, his thin lips nearly invisible amid his trim and twisty whiskers; and spoke out shrewdly in his gentle raspy voice.
Well. In fact, I have decided to pull the rest of this post. I started the “what if Pooh was stuck into the Scrooge roll?” project in, maybe 2010 or 2011. Stave I came quickly, and I posted it on Facebook for the enjoyment of friends.
Stave II the next year, same treatment. I posted Stave I to whichever blogger-hosted blog I was using at that time, as well. Then it got difficult. Staves III and IV are challenging; there’s little about them that’s amusing, and it felt wrong, somehow, to put the residents of the Hundred Acre Wood through the Dickensian palpitations of The Ghost of Christmas Present’s “ignorance and want” scene, and to show Pooh his post-mortem? Yikes.
But I always wanted to complete the project, and get it off my lifetime to-do list. In late 2018, I managed to see a way to do a bit of justice to both Dickens and Milne within the context of this disrespectful project. I finished A Hundred Acre Carol, and shared it with family and close friends, as I had always intended. I am pleased with it, but for public consumption, the first few paragraphs are plenty.
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