From my archives — When my handyman and his wife were working at my house they would eat their lunch everyday perched on the front porch steps. I’d sit in the porch swing and we’d all swap funny stories, sending cheerful laughter into the warm fall sunshine. Got a good laugh with my camel story. I think I actually won the story telling contest that day!

One summer day, our daughter Rosalyn was out in the front yard, taking a sun bath, working on her teenage tan. Stewart, our youngest son, was playing around in the yard, too, when he saw a camel slowly walk up behind Rosalyn. He hollered to his sister, “Tootie (our nickname for her), there’s a camel behind you!” “No, it’s not!” she replies. Stew hightails it in the house, all excited and a little scared, telling us there’s a camel in the front yard. No sooner do the words come out of Stew’s mouth than here comes Tootie running in the house terrified and screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, a llama’s in the yard! It snorted on my back!”

I’m sitting there trying to take this in and Stew and Tootie start fighting over whether it’s a camel or llama! I get up to look out the dining room window, trying not to laugh, since Tootie is obviously traumatized by the snorting and no kidding, I see two chubby policemen chasing a camel down the railroad track! The camel dancing along the crossties in a fast gate with his clodhopper feet, the policemen stumbling along behind. Can’t make this up! Our whole family goes outside to watch the camel’s comical escape and a police car stops and asks if we have seen a camel and two policemen. I reply, trying to be serious, “Last time I saw them they were chasing the camel up the railroad track toward town.”

The camel was eventually caught and walked back home by his master and kept his starring roll in the local Christmas nativity scenes. We’d see him in his pasture on our trips to our family cemetery and always smile remembering his visit to our house. Sadly someone shot and killed the camel several years later.

I love researching topics on the internet or in one of Chief’s 20 plus sets of encyclopedias and the camel story made me wonder how much a camel cost. You can buy yourself a camel from $500 to $10,000. Take a trip to the Middle East and purchase a racing camel for $55,000 and if he wins lots of races he might go for $2,000,000 — highest price ever paid for a camel!

Just so you know, a camel has the emotions and intelligence of an eight year old child and is inquisitive and affectionate and attention seeking. They are really marvels of nature, drinking 30 gallons of water in ten minutes and able to run 40 miles an hour. They compete in beauty pageants in Dubai where a camel sold for 16.5 million dollars which is 4.5 million in US dollars. Let us pray!

Makes me think about the Sportplex buffalo in Alexander City that escaped and wandered in the woods behind our house but that is a story for another day.

“There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.” — Charles Dickens