“Si and I”
Ol’ Si and I went to the circus, we did go.
We bolted into the big side show,
And there we saw a kangaroo, a monkey, and an elephant too!
And in the corner we saw a two-headed cow!
Ol’ Si reckoned he knowed how that cow came to have an extra head,
It was sewed on! That’s what Si said.
Then we heared a terrible noise,
And we ran outside to see what th’ deuce the noise was!
And there was a big balloon and a man going higher than the moon!
Oh Si thought that that man would surely get killed,
And he ran up to him and yelled, and as sure as my name is “Soap”…
We got our feet caught in the rope!
Up went Si and up went I,
I’ll tell you we were getting pretty high!
Ol’ Si took out his knife and cut the rope,
Down through the clouds a heckety bent!
We lit right in that man’s big tent!
The man wanted to know how we’d got in his show,
We hadn’t paid a dollar a piece,
And doged if he weren’t a-going to get the police!
Ol’ Si broke into a terrible rage,
He backed up against the monkey cage!
The monkey!… He got rattled at the fuss, the little cuss,
And grabbed Si by the beard!
Ol’ Si cussed worse than I ever heared!
Ol’ Si couldn’t stand for the crowd to scoff,
So he took out his knife, and he swhacked his beard off!
No more to the circus will we roam,
No more will Si,
Nor will I.
And if we do,
I hope we DIE!
Eli interviewed his dad, Uncle Lavelle Nielson, on Sunday, May 21, 2023 about his mission, the origins of “Si and I”, and how his dad met his mom, Aunt Lisa Lyman Nielson. Below is an excerpt from that interview.
“Lavelle: On my mission in 1977 I went down into St. Joseph, Missouri and got a companion and that is where I began to pick up little sayings and it was through the mission that I learned these little things like ‘Si and I’.
Eli: What was the point of ‘Si and I’? Was it to keep the kids entertained so that the parents could focus?
Lavelle: If the kids wanted us to come back then they’d let us come back. So we said ‘we’ve got some things that your littlest to your oldest and you included might enjoy because we believe in the family unit, strongly. This is what we do. So if you’re interested, we could start with a little bit now and tell you a little bit about who we are.
Eli: So ‘Si and I’ was kind of an ice breaker?
Lavelle: Right, right. We did it on Family Home Evenings; we’d do it on a Monday. So on Family Home Evenings it was not necessarily a lesson, it’s just a fun night. But that come later after you had a few conversations. You know, when you got to know them and you trusted each other.
Eli: Yeah, coming in completely cold with ‘Si and I’ might scare a few people off.
Lavelle: Yeah, yeah, that come later. But it all evolved over several companions. But I had this one companion from South Carolina and he had a real strong accent, real strong. And he taught me a lot of these songs.
Eli: So you’d do things like ‘Boil that Cabbage Down’ and do ‘Si and I’ among other skits that you’d do?
Lavelle: Right, and the kids just loved it. I was always the best at ‘Si and I’. It just was one of those things where I didn’t care. If the kids liked it, I didn’t mind. Doing those kind of things helped people.”
The 52” rattlesnake Uncle Lavelle killed while on a hunting date with Aunt Lisa before they were married. See interview above.