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| No News from Doodlebug Island
by William F. JordanKevin Haslitt and his wife Kathleen have lived in a rather stately home on Doodlebug Island for thirty years. They moved into the house right after it was built, the first on a small side street called Dusty Lane. Over time, four more houses were erected on adjacent properties, elegant structures that matched the Victorian design of the Haslitt’s, and the five have been responsible for the up-scale development that has proliferated on that section of the Island.
And nicer families are not to be found anywhere. The Haslitts, Brownings, Moneypennys, Jenkins, and Whitings are regular folks, generous with their time and their means, and possessed of community spirit that makes them part of the friendly atmosphere everywhere present on the island. In addition, they individually and collectively demonstrate the sense of merriment and peculiarity for which our little slice of the world is noted. The Moneypennys, for example, are forever sponsoring barbecue and casino nights where winners eat while losers serve; The Whitings hold monthly Gray and Blue evenings where guests are invited to fire paint balls at one another in celebration of one civil war battle or another. The Brownings sponsor an ‘Elizabeth and Robert’ event each month at which a winning sonnet is read and rewarded; while the Jenkins are into genealogical research on a scale rivaling that of the D.A.R. By contrast, the Haslitts like to travel, and they have accomplished a considerable amount of it. Indeed, they have accompanied every family on the island willing or able to travel, and in the absence of anyone willing or able have traveled anyway. No place on earth has been too remote nor too inaccessible to escape their attention.
Recently, however, something extraordinary happened to the Haslitts. Visiting the British Cotswold, they discovered the hamlet ‘Haslitt on Pye’, a small village on an equally small stream called ‘Pye.’ Kevin and Kathleen were overjoyed, for surely the commonality in names had to be more than coincidental. It had to be the family birthplace, the very spot from which an ancestor of some sort sprang and from which he began the migration to America and to the forest-lined banks of Doodlebug Island. Then and there Kevin made plans to get the Jenkin family involved in tracing the intervening geneology. But not before he did some investigating of his own. He descended on Haslitt hamlet officials like the locusts devouring the first Mormon harvest, and in short order learned there were no Haslitts living in Haslitt, only distant relatives whose memories were as threadbare as hand-me-downs, and who could neither confirm nor deny the existence of any member of the Haslitt family who left for America. The concensus of those persons Kevin asked was that if any Haslitt family member left for the states, he must have done so just one step ahead of some posse.
Still convinced they had located the ancestral home, Kevin and Kathleen invited several of those people they considered ‘relatives’ to visit them, and upon their return to Doodlebug asked neighbors and Island Council if they would mind changing Dusty Lane to Pye Street? They proposed calling their place Haslitt on Pye. Intrigued, neighbors and council agreed. Idiosyncrasy, after all, must be fed and fertilized or it might wither in the shadow of uncertainty. The street sign was changed, the postman, garbage collection, and utilities were duly notified. It was then the Brownings, Moneypennys, Jenkins, and Whitings learned the invitations issued to British cousins were about to be accepted—enmasse.
They decided the occasion was simply too ripe with possibility not to be accorded proper recognition, and they laid plans and placed orders that would forever mark the event. When the day came, Pye Street—A.K.A. Dusty Lane—bore four new stuccoed mailboxes, each with its own distinctive stone crest and raised lettering. That in front of the Moneypenny house read, “Chocolate Pye,” the Whiting mailbox read, “Puddin-n- Pye,” that of the Jenkins read, “Cow Pye,” while the last crest on the street, that of the Brownings, read, “Pye Alamode.”
Anticipation, it turned out, was not the best part of the whole affair. Planning and execution remained in the shadow of any possibly negative aftermath, but the Brits and their newly acquired relatives, the Haslitts, were agreeably surprised and amused. Strangely, it went a long way in cementing good relations which, it ended up, were the more evident in shared hilarity than in kinship.
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