Ping-Ping, a very resourceful little panda (2 1/4" of panda, to be exact), was already deeply into his project on the kitchen table when his friend Chocolate Chip clambered up to see what all the noise was about.
Chip promptly stepped in a puddle. "Ugh," he said, lifting his foot to examine the sole. He studied it for a moment, then sniffed delicately. "Salad dressing," he said, and took several rather damp steps toward Ping-Ping.
"Not salad dressing," Ping-Ping informed him without looking up. He mixed a blue tablet with something wet in a large, old, cracked teacup. Some of the liquid sloshed out onto the table and some of it splashed onto Ping-Ping's foot, though he didn't seem to notice. And he was humming.
Chip, sure that his friend was having a mental lapse of some kind, shook himself and ventured to ask, "Errrr, ummm, what exactly are you doing there?"
Ping-Ping, very uncharacteristically, took no offense at this impertinence and instead grinned at Chip. "I'm coloring Easter eggs," he said proudly, then wiped his face with the back of his hand, leaving a large streak of blue-green. He didn't seem to notice.
Chip gaped. Normally, Ping-Ping was the vainest of miniature pandas and would have flown into a tizzy if he had gotten blue-green ANYTHING on his fur. Perhaps, Chip thought, Ping-Ping was in need of a vacation somewhere warm. As he continued gaping at Ping-Ping, Chip realized his friend was covered with spots, specks and splotches of many colors. Red. Yellow. Hot Pink. Blue and green and puce and aubergine and something best described as "swirl".
Chip finally closed his jaw and blinked and recovered enough to ask, "How do you color eggs? And what kind of crayons are those?" He pointed at the round, colored tablets littering the table, most of them wet and sitting in small puddles of bright pigment. His nose told him the liquids had vinegar in it, which was why he had wrongly identified what he stepped in as "salad dressing". His eyes told him there were going to be colored rings and puddle marks all over their lady's oak kitchen table too. "The lady isn't gonna like this," he warned Ping-Ping.
"She won't mind," Ping-Ping announced in a smug voice that was much more like his normal one. This tone immediately worked to reassure Chip that his friend wasn't about to be carted off to the slap-happy-panda farm, and he relaxed a bit. Ping-Ping looked up from his "coloring" and raised a paw to show Chip a wire with a loop in the end. A small egg sat in the loop, and, as Chip watched, Ping-Ping dipped this combination into a cup of brilliant fuchsia dye, held it a moment and then lifted it out. It was beautiful, but...
"An egg? From a bird?" Chip quavered, being a lover of nature in all its forms and a vegetarian to boot.
Ping-Ping scowled and shook his head, "Not a real egg, it's plastic, see? It won't break or anything." Whereupon he took an undyed egg and thumped it against the table top several times, very very hard to demonstrate his point.
The whole table swayed.
Chip's eyes grew round and he looked wildly from side to side. "Uh-oh," he squeaked.
"Nothing's happening," Ping-Ping said scornfully, then he dropped both eggs and flailed his arms as the table swayed again, even more this time.
The teacups sloshed and slopped color everywhere, the dyes quickly turning the tabletop into a small lake of blending colors. Pink and teal and puce and aubergine. Orange and yellow and purple and swirl. Chip decided to run for it. As he fled, looking for a safe place to take refuge, he noticed that all the colors, when mixed together, turned into a color most kindly described as "brown". The table made a loud cracking, snapping sort of noise and Chip forgot all about the colors and squeaked out a mini-bear scream as he flung himself flat onto the table and held onto the edge for dear life.
Ping-Ping, mouth open in shock, eyes as round as Chip's, fur now a mixture of every color on the table as well as his normal purple and white velvet, kept hold of the wire egg dipper as he slid toward the edge of the now-tilting table.
"Eeeeeeeeeeeek!" he squealed as the table gave a loud creak, then a big WOBBLE and fell into two sections onto the tile floor, spilling both bears, all the teacups with the remains of the colors, ten dozen eggs and everything else onto the floor too. The spilled colors, now a large puddle of brownish tint, rained down from the sky and drenched both bears.
They drew themselves into balls of quivering fur on the floor and waited for the noise and the flood to stop. It finally did.
"That went well," Chip finally remarked when it seemed that Ping-Ping wasn't going to say anything.
"No need for sarcasm," Ping-Ping responded, dabbing at a splotch of bubblegum pink dye on his tummy.
Chip looked down at himself and saw that his cream fur with chocolate brown dots was now embellished with specks of chartreuse, fuchsia and puce as well. He hoped the extra colors looked nice because it seemed they might be there for quite a while. "Well," he answered his friend, "I don't know why you were messing around with things you shouldn't have been messing around with in the first place."
Ping-Ping sighed. "I wanted to color some eggs and put them in a nice basket with some cellophane grass for the lady as an Easter present. Now it's all ruined." He kicked at a broken plastic egg disconsolately.
"Well, never mind that, we need to clean up this mess before she gets home," Chip finally said, patting Ping-Ping's shoulder in commiseration. He and Ping-Ping set to work mopping, shoveling broken plastic eggs into a heap and somehow getting them into a trash can, which isn't easy when you're less than 3 inches tall. They worked for hours, both of them covered in streaks of color, until they finally were about to drop from fatigue. Finally, the floor mopped clean, all the broken eggs thrown away, Ping-Ping put the empty basket in the middle of the floor and stared at it.
"It's a very nice basket," Chip said, wiping his brow. "We should at least put the Easter grass in it."
Ping-Ping brightened and fetched the package of green cellophane "grass". They put it all into the basket, then found a few of the plastic eggs that weren't broken and added those. Then they found some jelly beans and put those in, and Chip climbed up the handle and tied a bow of leftover birthday party ribbon up there. He slid down and gazed up, admiring his handiwork. "It's not so bad," he announced and yawned hugely.
Ping-Ping agreed, yawning even more hugely. "Let's climb in and take a snooze for a minute," he suggested, and so they did. Only they slept for hours, not waking until Easter morning when their lady came home from her out of town trip and found them asleep in the middle of the kitchen floor in an Easter basket.
They woke to her laughing voice saying, "Oh, what clever bears! You've colored yourselves as well as the eggs, you darlings!" And she patted each bear on his head and handed each one a honey biscuit.
Chip looked at Ping-Ping, who returned the look with a slight shrug and a meaningful shake of the head, then they both sighed happily and set about munching their biscuits, basking in the praise. Sometimes you can plan and work and work and plan, Ping-Ping thought, and things don't turn out at all the way you planned them. Sometimes, he thought, they turn out even nicer.
The lady never did solve the mystery of how her expandable kitchen table somehow unlatched its leaves and fell onto the kitchen floor.
Chip and Ping-Ping decided to leave it a mystery.
 |
copyright 2008 by Marti Koeppe