Bobo and Tex, Part One

When I was in college, a long, long time ago, in some freshman sociology class where everyone thought the teacher (who had a lyrical Armenian name, Broudian, Proudian, Saroyan?) was a total hot shot, I learned that the perfect number for a group was five. What the professor neglected to tell us or I conveniently forgot to note as I doodled away in my spiral notebook was that this pentagon of individuals did not necessarily ensure that the group would function as a unit, or function at all. There are, as it happens, five characters in this story: two loosely defined adults, one alter-ego, one child and one blue teddy bear. And even though this little narrative is eons away from a time when writers like Harper Lee and Margaret Mitchell and Mark Twain and possibly William Faulkner might use the word irascible, I must alert you that irascible is exactly the term called for as I begin to introduce my characters in the next paragraph. Reading this over, I am also wondering if anyone actually uses that word anymore, and if not, why not? Is it that although we love seeing these old fashioned, subtly nuanced descriptors in print we often are unsure of how to say or use them? Or is it because we know that once we start verbalizing something as opposed to just thinking it, then it must be true. . . .