To young readers: The bad king turned good



Last week a 9-year-old sent me a chatty letter on the subject of my latest column, a visit to Peter Rabbit's plastic garden. I suddenly realized that some of my readers are children and that it's about time I wrote a column especially for them. Well, this is it, guys. It isn't really a Christmas story, but toward the end it kind if changes into one and you can even sing a Christmas carol about it. It is called The Bad King Who Turned Good.

Once upon a time there lived a very bad king called Baddor. Nobody knew how he got to be so bad, because as a baby he was really cute, with big brown eyes and tiny ears. He made small gurgling sounds, blew nice little bubbles and smiled a lot. Later, all through kindergarden and grade school, he was always polite and friendly, egar to share his toys with playmates. But then, in junior high, he turned bad. He started shouting at his mother the queen and arguing with his father the king. He also told the palace musicians to play loud, thumping music that nobody liked. And at dinner he didn't want to eat anything green and healthy like broccoli, for example. All this upset his father so much that he had to stay in bed and couldn't rule anymore. So Baddor was crowned king instead.

As a king, Baddor's behavior grew quickly worse because nobody dared scold him or give him time-out. He wanted his music so loud that the musicians became deaf and played even more horribly, which Baddor liked even better. People all over the country started complaining, though, that they couldn't sleep, because of the noise from the palace. But Baddor didn't care, he did just as he liked. And to punish his subjects for complaining, he made them all eat broccoli on Sundays. Now, that wasn't clever, because the people finally rose up in anger and shouted "Say no to Brocco" and "Save our Sundays." Some even started saying that maybe the country should be ruled by a president instead of a king.

Then something very strange happened. As suddenly as Baddor had turned bad in ninth grade, he turned good when people started shouting at him. He promised that nobody had to eat broccoli anymore -- unless they wanted to, of course. He became so good that on Christmas Eve he would go out into the cold with his servant and have a nice hot dinner with the poorest peasant he could find. So people really began to like him a lot. And at Christmas time, when they sang of Good King Wenceslaus, they were thinking of Baddor.

At Random - Adrian Korpel