The following story is true. Only the names, dates, and circumstances have been changed.
In the beginning was Buck. And God saw that Buck was lonely, so he made a deep sleep fall over him--which wasn't too difficult. God took one of Buck's ribs and made him a mate, and what a beauty she was! Buck woke up and cried, "I've been robbed--I mean ribbed!" Then he took one look at God’s new creation and said, "Whoa, man! Wo-man. That's it. I'll call her ‘woman.’ What a piece of work God made out of the flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones.” And this all came to pass on the eve of the first decade, the eve of the first century, and the eve of the first millennium, B.C., so Buck called her "Eve" and it stuck. Little did Buck know that the name Eve also means the "mother of many, the giver of life."
Now Buck and Eve were placed on the bank of a beautiful lake called the Lake of Egypt. There they had nothing to do all day but eat, drink, fish, and be merry. God let Buck and Eve fish the lake, but He warned them not to catch and eat the big fish which stayed on bed in the middle of the lake or they would be punished.
One day while Buck and Eve were fishing from a boat a good distance from shore, a big frog floated by on a lilypad. He called out to Eve, "You'll never catch the biggest fish in the lake with that skinny bug.” So he handed Eve a can of worms and ate the bug himself. "Oh, no!" exclaimed Eve. "If I catch the big fish God warned us about, I'll be punished." "You will not be punished," said the shifty-eyed frog, as he snatched a fly out of the air with his forked tongue. "God is just afraid you'll beat Him to it."
So Eve opened the can of worms, took out a big one, and baited her hook, not realizing she too was being baited. She cast out the line and it wasn't long before she felt a bite. The worm felt the bite even more. Eve reeled in her line as quickly as possible and, lo and behold, on the end of her line was the biggest fish she had ever seen. She could taste it already! "Look at this, Buck," she cried out. When Buck saw the fish, he ran as fast as he could to heat up the skillet.
And it came to pass that when they had finished picking the bones clean and were wiping their lips, Buck looked down and realized he was naked! It was Eve's words that followed that gave us our term "buck naked." They both panicked. What to do! What to do! When they heard God walking on the water, they got so scared that they ducked down in the water to hide but found they couldn't breathe underwater. When they came up for air, God saw them. "Why are you hiding from me," God demanded. "We weren't hiding; we were just swimming underwater," Buck sputtered. Then he decided he had better come clean, so he told God they didn't want Him to see them naked. "How did you even know you were naked?" God questioned. "Did you eat that fish!?" "That woman that you gave me made me do it, Lord," squeaked Buck as he squirmed around in the water. Eve quickly retorted, "I didn't want to, but the frog pressured me into it."
God turned to the frog who was now sandwiched between two lilypads in hopes he couldn't be seen. "And what do you have to say, you big toad?" said God. Well, the frog nearly croaked. With his eyes bulging from between the two trembling pads, he squeaked out a froggy cuss word that came out "Ribet." "Cursed is the pad you sit on," said God. "From now on you will be eaten by snakes and alligators. And 'Ribit' is all you will ever say." By then the frog was hopping mad, but he couldn't say a word--literally. "Ribit" was all he could say from then on.
As Buck’s punishment, God said to him, "You will toil to scale and skin fish until you need nitros to carry on. You will eat little of your day's catch, for you will have eight children to feed. Then when they are older, they will come to your house and carry your fish away--but not until you've cleaned, scaled, and filleted them."
To Eve He said, "And you, young lady, will have to first raise the eight kids that eat the fish and carry them away." "The punishment is too much to bear," Eve said. "But bear them you will," God said, "including twins. You will both be required to do double duty."
Then God made coverings for their bodies out of the fish scales, so they looked like a walking mermaid and merman. Then He encouraged Buck and Eve to be fruitful and multiply, and they complied.
And all of the things God spake came to pass. Buck and Eve raised eight children who ate the fish Buck caught so that their father was forced to fish by the sweat of his brow until, in his later years, he had to take nitros to carry on. Meanwhile God taught Buck and Eve to be fishers of men, and in that way they most surely did double duty, though they thought God's prophecy concerning “double duty” referred to the twins. And in fact God's prophecy about double duty did have a double meaning.The moral to this story is: Don't open a can of worms, and don't go fishing for trouble or your troubles might be multiplied eight times over. --Becky Overturf Wall
