the Boyntons

THE BOYNTON

CHRONICLES

A Fictional Story That Will

Warm The Cockles Of

Your Hearts, I Hope.

By izzy ess of hopefulness

In a small town in Illinois, there lived a family of twenty-five who thrived on potato pancakes and chicken, chicken fat and kosher pickles.  Living chickens and a single rooster roamed the seven acres of the Boynton Farm, where Clem Bud Boynton ruled the roost of twenty-four quite happy teens who’d run away from home and found the Boyntons who did take them in and feed them and provide them with the opportunities that a bright couple, Clem and Annabel, could provide.  Ms. Annabel had been a teacher in a one room school in Livingstone, the Illinois small town, that barely stayed alive until the Boyntons started saving lonely children and doing all their shopping at the Livingstone Dry Goodies, a smallish grocery store.  Last year, our Annabel Bea Boynton died of wide-spread cancer of the breast.  The entire population of Livingstone, all one hundred twenty of them, including Boynton’s family, attended at the sad affair.

Bud Boynton was OK with 24 young teenagers.  He did OK with teaching “The Life’s Lessons,” to his kids, but was not really keen on other subjects.  He did order text books at the tiny postal station in the town of Livingstone, where the clerk had searched his Google for a high school online bookstore.  He ordered high school texts for Math and Science, English and Spanish, Physics and Chemistry, Health and Bookkeeping, Woodwork and Sheet Metal, Gymnastics and Track, Basketball and Football, Hockey and Field Hockey, Trigonometry, Geometry and Algebra, and the School Curriculum for Illinois.  He also ordered all the accessories to teach these subjects and a teacher’s skull cap for good measure.  Everything arrived within a week and all 25 the Boyntons went to town to get them back to the huge Boynton farm house.  The rumour all around the town was that Bud Boynton was establishing a new school for all the children still in Livingstone.

In truth, the ambitious children read the books and taught the others what they learned.  The less ambitious kids took extra time to nap and look out the windows.  Clem admitted he was terrible in school and took the extra time to snooze and look out the windows at the chickens.  Cynthia and Charles were the most ambitious and intelligent.  They led whoever listened to a modicum of high school education, in case they wanted to go to College or University.  Our Cindy and our Chuck were interested in going to Medical School.  The University of Illinois was only twenty miles away.  Champaign-Urban offered all the courses and would be convenient and desirable.

Adele, a beauty, was always interested in the boys and men that she could bed.  Cindy did suggest that she could be a prostitute and make a pile of money to do anything she wanted.  Chuck and Cindy taught her how to be coquettish and she learned it very well.  They also taught her all about the handling of her money and how to guard it from being stolen.  They arranged for her to make some trips to downtown Chicago; they told Clem it was for her education and he agreed to sport her to a month long trip.  She returned with a wad of money and a smile and felt so confident that this was what she would be doing when she left the Boynton farm.  She gave some money back to Clem and said she’d found a waitress job in Chicago that would be there if she went back.  At seventeen, Adele told Clem that she was ready and she left.  She left some money for her tutors, Charles and Cynthia, and offered to send more if they desired.  Chuck and Cindy smiled and said she earned it all and it was her’s to keep.  They wished her well and just asked for her to keep in touch.  Clem was satisfied that he had been successful getting this one runaway right back in normal social situations.  He also asked that she just keep in touch whenever she would have a chance.  She never missed a week without a note to Clem and Charles and Cynthia.  The Boyntons felt they had their first success and that was good encouragement for others.

Marjorie and Douglas were the chefs of the Boynton’s.  Early on, they had mixed and matched their original recipes and almost always served up some delicious food.  They’d learned to keep their secrets since whenever they revealed ingredients, some appetites were lost.  So, their attitude was, “Just taste it stupid.  If you like it, eat it.  And, if you don’t, go make yourself whatever you can find and eat it, eh?”  Cynthia conceived of opening a small café and restaurant in Livingstone and Clem was willing to try it.  They rented a small storefront in town and started with just breakfast and lunch, just before Christmas.  Douglas had the notion of a Christmas omelette.  He chopped up two sweet peppers, one red and the other, green.  He mixed in cheddar cheese and green onions.  A little salt and pepper and some paprika and it looked like Christmas colours and was delicious.  It drew a lot of customers and still was popular way after Christmas.

The income from the restaurant and breakfast café grew gradually.  Clem was able to expand and pay for more equipment.  Other Boynton’s were the waitresses and busboys.  Cynthia and Charles did share the cashier’s job.  Every Boynton shared in profits, tips and workloads, and it was considered a moderate success.  In family conferences, there was a strong suggestion that a chain of Christmas Omelette Restaurants might be successful for the future.  Clem felt pride in having launched another two, or more, careers for his big family.  What also helped a lot was that the eggs were from the Boynton Farm.

One year later, everyone pitched in and bought a small café in a southwest suburb of Chicagoland, La Grange.  Main Street was a major crossroad for the interstate original highways, 12, 20 and 49, Route 66 and near the Interstate, I-55.  They picked a store front near the centre of the city on Ogden Avenue and set up a Christmas Omelette Restaurant featuring the Christmas Omelette and many other original delicious recipes.  Clem, Charles and Cynthia managed all the cash and hosting while Marjorie and Douglas did the honours in the kitchen with the other Boynton’s helping with the waitressing and cleaning of the floors and tables.  Clem was able to obtain some English Antique furniture for the chairs and tables and the counters and to decorate the place with English scenery and woodwork with several of his teenagers who were adept at carpentry.  The café-restaurant was quite successful and drew some wealthy patrons from the City of Chicago, some of whom already living in La Grange and commuting in each morning for their offices downtown.  The success of their small business engendered plans for another branch in downtown Chicago by the Union Station where commuters would stop in to have a healthy breakfast before their long days at their offices.

Adele, by then a wealthy high class prostitute, was a frequent visitor and contributor to the Christmas Omelette and she helped with waitressing and cleaning floors and tables for them.  Clem was all aglow at his Adele’s great contribution and was glad to see she was successful in Chicagoland, not really guessing what her actual profession was.  Suffice it to say, the Chicago version of the Omelette was given a big boost and Adele herself was responsible for many of the wealthy men in her Chicagoland.  The chain of restaurants eventually was successful in Boston, New York and New Orleans.  The management was dreaming of two restaurants in Berne and Hamburg and perhaps two others in Peoria, South Africa and Buenos Aires, Argentina.  The Boynton family was flying high and having such successes that the farm in Livingstone was sold and Boynton Enterprises opened their new offices high atop the Hancock Centre.  Cynthia and Charles gave up their aspirations to be doctors and accepted highest kudos from the international communities of Business.  They incorporated and could sell their stocks and bonds in Chicago at the CBOE and other Mercantile Exchanges including on the NASDEQ stock exchange.  The Boyntons soon became the darling of the business world and were frequently a feature in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.  The President of the USA used them as good examples of how young entrepreneurs could make it big in the USA with hard work and creativity.  An invitation to the White House was in the offing for Inauguration Week.

Our Charles and Cynthia got married and they had a brood of children.  Adele did marry the Assistant Mayor of all Chicagoland and had a brood of children.  Marjorie and Douglas moved in together and had a brood of children.  Each and every quite successful Boynton, including Clem, so loved the idea of a family that they paired up or found outsiders with whom to live and make some babies, officially or unofficially married.  Each year they had a special party at the Chicago Christmas Omelette and celebrated all their stories with enthusiasm.  I should know because I was ten in Livingstone when my parents did abandon me and left me on the door step of the Boynton Farm House.  I have become the unofficial scribe for all the success stories, my own successes, included.  I have published several fictional and non-fictional successfully.  You can read them for yourself.  They’re called the “Boynton Chronicles.”

THE END

© Izzy Sommers, Md., Welland, Canada, November 10, 2013