Stumpy was a collector, and most everyone in Gooseberry Park knew that if you wanted to see something interesting, stop by Stumpy’s house.
Stumpy rotated her collections, so old ones were always going out and new ones were always coming in.
Murray was in charge of the going out. Everything went to the charity drop box in the Big Bear parking lot. One time, when Stumpy decided to let go of her jingle bell collection, Murray carried seventy-four bells to the charity drop box in one night and jingled all the way. More than one child awoke as Murray flew overhead, rushing to the window in hopes of seeing Santa. But it was only a little bat with seventy-four jingle bells attached to his feet. One child tried to tell her parents the next day about the Christmas bat, but the parents just shook their heads and gave her more vitamins.
So Stumpy’s collections were well known, and while the animals of Gooseberry Park very much enjoyed the restaurant napkin tour, the rubber bouncy ball tour, the sparkly bracelet tour, and many others, no one ever imagined that one of Stumpy’s collections would turn out to be important. Even lifesaving.
But indeed that was about to happen.
Kona and Gwendolyn and Herman had put their heads together through the dark hours of the night, and they had made a plan. A plan, said Herman, for the dog days.
Herman explained that dog days were long, hot summer days. He said that humans call them dog days because that’s when dogs just lie about and sleep all day, but that really it has to do with the dog constellation Canis Major in the summer sky.
“Well,” Kona said, feeling rather offended, “not all dogs sleep all day.”
“Indeed,” said Herman. “It’s just the law of averages.”
“The what?” asked Kona.
“Some dogs do and some dogs don’t, dear,” said Gwendolyn.
“Exactly,” said Kona.
Certainly Kona was no dog-day dog. In fact, he’d hardly had any sleep at all what with staying up all night with Gwendolyn and Herman working on the plan, and looking after Professor Albert all day. Why, he had been so groggy that Professor Albert even noticed and gave him extra peanut butter crunchies, which did, actually, perk Kona right up.
But they had made a Master Plan—Kona, Gwendolyn, and Herman—and Herman had drawn it all on the back of a VOTE FOR JEFF sign he’d found beside the library book depository (which was where he and his family borrowed their books). It was, said Gwendolyn, inspired.
And one very important word of that Master Plan was “straws.”
Well, everyone knew who had a lot of those. An entire collection, in fact!
The Master Plan also contained other vital parts. They were:
a cat
a possum
a raccoon
200 owls
20 packs of chewing gum
“It should work,” said Herman.
Kona and Gwendolyn very much hoped so. But they were a little worried about the owl part. Because owls just hate teamwork. Which is why they never play catch, like crows. So getting two hundred owls to do the same thing on the same night in the same way for the same reason . . .
It would take a pretty good talker. It would take somebody who knew how to work a crowd. It would take . . . a motivational speaker.