Henry Charade's Great Crusade

Right from the first time, when he was forced to do it while still a student years ago, Henry never did like it. Again, even after all these years, he still had to do it or suffer the consequences. This year, as he mentally prepared himself for the disagreeable task, the seeds of discontent sown over the years were dangerously close to bearing fruit. The cold, gray days of February passed relentlessly. Suddenly March winds rattled windowpanes, and the deadline neared. Could this bright spring day be the setting for epic events?

"Which tie should I wear?" Henry said to no one in the empty bedroom. "Maybe the blue and grey striped one".

"Come and eat before it gets cold," Henry's wife, Lucy, called from the kitchen.

He was thankful that big, good-natured Lucy mothered him almost as much as she did the kids. In front of the antique mahogany bureau with the dolphins holding up the mirror, Henry stared at his reflection, adjusting his tie. A pale, frowning oval face framed in mostly gray hair that used to be brown stared back at him. He slowly brushed the thinning strands from a receding hairline back across the bare spot on top. Eyes that drooped at the corners like a sad rabbit squinted at the bureau top and rested on the round chrome-rimmed bifocals. He tentatively placed the temples over and behind his ears, adjusting them carefully his nose twitching from side to side. He focused on the small calendar from Fred Merkel, the realtor who sold him this old, gray frame house twenty years ago.

"It can't be!" he muttered.

"Only a month and a half till the income taxes are due!"

"Yukkkk, I hate to pay taxes." A vague pain began to build in intensity in the pit of his stomach as he thought about the tax deadline. Those jammed-together words too small to see and blanks way too narrow to write in.

"Yukkkk!", he repeated.

"Henry, last call for breakfast!"

The distant chatter of young voices and drumming of little feet on the kitchen floor interrupted his thoughts as he headed into the upstairs hallway, down the worn hardwood steps into the big country kitchen from whence all the noise emanated. In one respect, Henry was a very rich man. He, Lucy and their three young children enjoyed a special closeness. Once your eardrums got used to the racket, it wasn't really so bad. But two boys and a girl in between, ages eight to thirteen, can really crank up the volume at the breakfast table.

Today, the din faded quickly as, preoccupied, Homer absent-mindedly passed off the banter with a smile. He finished breakfast, tousled a few heads and headed for the garage amid a chorus of 'So-long's'. He backed the eight-year-old rusting maroon mini-van out of the garage, listening to the usual rattle-chugg as the old, worn-out engine struggled to warm up, lurched slowly out of the driveway and ambled reluctantly down the street toward the freeway.

"This heap will have to do for awhile longer", he said to himself as, pedal to the floor, he barely accelerated down the on-ramp and into traffic. Almost immediately, car taillights blinked red as he caught up with the morning rush. The young girl in the sports car ahead was taking pink rollers out of her reddish-brown hair while the guy in the next lane helped himself to a bite of a donut, washing it down with a gulp of coffee from the cup he expertly extracted from the holder on the dash. Another driver read the