Excerpt from Today’s Show:

I also had childhood adventures with Merrell. He taught me how to bait a hook, one year, when he and my grandfather took my cousin and me fishing off the fisherman’s pier. He had a voice thick with fallen dreams and made for telling stories, and I’m sad that I never knew him as an adult, that he was, at the time he died, little more than a name to me. But I was named for him (he called from where he was AWOL in Canada to instruct my mother not to give me HIS name, as he felt it was cursed, so she used the first letter instead), and I suppose I’ve always felt it was a sort of bond between us. And he loved tinsel. He loved tinsel so much that when my mother and her siblings were growing up, putting the tinsel on the tree was his special job, just as in my house, it was mine.

Links:

MissMeliss: (MissMeliss: The Bathtub Mermaid)
All Things Girl (Sunday Brunch: Tinsel)
Holidailies (http://www.holidailies.org/)

Credits:

The Bathtub Mermaid: Tales from the Tub is written and produced by Melissa A. Bartell, and is recorded and produced using the BossJock iPad app.

Music for The Bathtub Mermaid is provided by Mevio’s Music Alley, a great resource for podsafe music. The standard opening song is “Soap in a Bathtub,” by Stoney. The standard closing song is “You Can Use My Bathtub, by Little Thom. Additional music used for the Holidailies project is “A Podcast Christmas Theme” by Tom Shad, and “Village Song” composed by David Popper and performed by Cello Journey.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:37 — 8.8MB)