« March 2005 | Main | May 2005 »
April 29, 2005
heaven, mowerless
After running several errands today, I rushed home, hoping to change the oil in my lawn mower and mow an acre of grass before the rain began. The maintenance was quickly done. As I clambered onto the mower, I felt a few drops falling on me, and I confess I prayed the rain would hold off for a bit. I headed for the front yard, hoping to at least complete the areas most visible from the road.
As I mowed grass for the first time this year, I reconnected with the pleasure of it. I use my time on the mower to ponder, and to savor the therapy of progressive bands of low, smooth-cut grass; order comes out of chaos as I sample Adam's charter, achieving dominion over some tiny part of God's green earth.
And my neighborhood is beautiful this time of year. The fields around my house, though still brown and bare, nonetheless stretch away into the distance, and somehow the space calms me and lifts my spirits.
I said thanks to the Creator. And soon after that I thought, I hope there is mowing to be done in heaven, and I hope I get to do plenty of it. Whereupon I began mentally to devise my paradisal mower. It would be a large contraption, but not noisy, smoky and greasy. No, it would glide over emerald hills with only the quiet whisper of blades against grass.
A few minutes later, however, I realized I had thought an unworthy thought. No, not the mower design, that's a good idea, and I'm still musing on it. I mean the thought before that: I hope there is mowing to be done in heaven.
I had had this thought because just before that, as I hurriedly mowed beneath the cool gray sky, I had thought to myself, I shall not always have this house, and this mower, and this yard. It was then, with a sigh, that I thought of mowing in heaven. If I surrendered to God the hope of mowing here on earth, I wanted, in exchange, an IOU for more, for much more of this particular pleasure. But while the grass may be greener on the other side, the truth is that heaven has already begun for us in moments like these if we are content with and thankful for the moment itself. And with these thoughts my grasping nature is cut down to size.
The threatened rain has still not begun to fall in earnest. My heavenly mower is coming along nicely; it's now automated, needing no driver, which also removes the necessity for a cooler for canned beverages (I don't say "beer," for there is some question whether there is beer in heaven. That's why I drink it here.) Of course, the lawns in heaven are perhaps managed more simply; say, by a whole bunch of billy goats. After all, they say we'll all be surprised at who's in heaven.
Posted by joel at 05:44 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
April 21, 2005
only one is beautiful
I recently began a self-directed crash course in diamonds, and have discovered that while they may be a girl's best friend, the buying of diamonds is a pursuit designed for left-brained men; the statistician, the accountant, the engineer is quite at home with shopping diamonds. If you care to know what you're buying, and have an analytical bent, it's a snap. Every attribute is qualitatively measured out, stone by colorless stone. Every aspect of these rocks is classified, each facet of their natural states, every detail of their subsequent preparation. Every flaw is confessed on paper, and certified by experts. And this blizzard of information is neatly summarized (for those of us less inclined to analysis) in a single number which is always easy to find on any invoice, because it is prepended by a dollar sign.
But these numbers really help with diamond hunting, especially to my inexperienced eye. When I look at one diamond, I am dazzled. When I turn and look at another, I am dazzled again, and I have forgotten what the first diamond looked like. To get the very best I can afford, I must look at the numbers, the classifications, the codes which are recorded and certified by the master appraisers.
Women have no such papers. They come with numbers, to be sure, and some men seem very preoccupied by these numbers. But rulers were meant to be bent or even broken; there is no set of numbers for which Eve's daughters have not fielded an army of beautiful exceptions. And the trouble with measuring a woman's beauty becomes even more problematic since so much of what would have to be certified is not numerically describable. What womanologist could assign a number, a code or a category to the dusty smudge of flour on her brow when she's just burned a third batch of cookies in a row? How could a woman's resilience in adversity be compared to that of any other, unless precisely the same adversity were imposed upon them both? How do you place her face on a chart at the moment she laughs at something silly you have said?
In our culture, all the expert quantification, qualification and classification of beauty is done by people who have no business with beauty in the first place. They may very well measure prettiness, but not beauty. For beauty cannot exist in abstraction. To see beauty in a person or a thing, you must, in some way be connected to it, even to the point of being absorbed in it. To see beauty requires something from the beholder as well as from the one beheld. It is not true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, for this presupposes that what one man sees in a woman is not truly there, and only exists in his imagination; but it is approximately and partly true, for the magnitude of what he sees will never be visible to others.
I believe everyone is beautiful, but I also know I'll never see the greatest beauty in everyone. Comparison is not only odious, but obfuscatious. Set two side-by-side, and you cloud up your vision; soon you are back to comparing numbers again. A man has only one container for the appreciation of women's beauty. When his cup is filled to overflowing with wonder and mystery, he cannot then fill it twice without spilling what he had before. To see and enjoy the greatest and the truest beauty he must look at only one.
Posted by joel at 01:39 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
April 18, 2005
beverage
I once knew a man named Beverage who drank a two-liter bottle of Coke-A-Cola every single day. He drank it warm from a travel mug, keeping the bottle within easy reach on his desk. He was the first person I ever saw consume a Spicy Chicken Sandwich from Wendy's, and his was the first review of that sandwich I ever heard.
Although he was tall, he was not exactly a cool drink of water; his figure was hulking. His long hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and invariably some heavy-metal band album art or concert tour information was visible through his dress shirt. He had an apparent fondness for The X-files, and a confirmed lust for Gillian Anderson. He listened to music which was noise; not the banging fuzz of the acid metal which old folks dismissively call noise, but real noise, like static mixed with the tearing of metal from metal against a rhythmless backbeat of randomly imploding paint cans. I told him about the time my friend and I had tweaked a synthesizer so that it created cacophonous and often surprising sounds, chaotically morphing over five minutes from the slobbery flatulence of the earth heaving up goey slabs of magma, to the stuttering groaning of an airplane wing as it is slowly ripped apart by unimaginable forces, and culminating in a rising screech which died in a tiny, almost ultrasonic piercing whine, like gnats dive-bombing your eardrum itself. Beverage listened to all this with unbroken interest, and encouraged me, with no trace of irony, to bring a sample to work so he could add it to his personal queue.
He was my elder technologist back in those days when I was first starting to become knowledgeable about computers. I'd pitch him the particularly perplexing questions on the back stoop of the office, next to the loading docks, where the smokers always smoked. He always delivered his answers concisely; yet he was thorough, never leaving out important details. He always ended his knowledge transference with the expression, "Thank-you, drive through!" Many of my questions came with funny anecdotes about the techno-illiterate souls we were charged to serve, and on relating any of these to Mr. Beverage, he'd simply take a drag on his cigarrette, look out across the parking lot and say, "People are such idiots."
Posted by joel at 01:56 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
April 14, 2005
a slight case of hooky
For the second day in a row, I took my lunch on the pond near here. The roadside bank is lined with gleaming cars, half of which contain commuters who have stolen away for a few moments from the office's florescent hum, to sit behind the wheel and munch on sandwiches.
Such was my custom until today. As I did yesterday, today I strolled around the little lake, but this time took my lunch with me. I sat at picnic tables opposite the cars, and stared across the water at the fishermen and fisherwomen and their frolicking fisherdogs. I finished my lunch at a leisurely pace, and then finished my circuit at a still more leisurely pace, pausing to watch two ducks ducking about among the duckweed, darting through the dark water beneath the low hanging branches at the bottom of my escarpment. They couldn't have failed to detect me, for the gravel path crunches out my progress no matter how carefully I tread, as though nature was so quiet before I arrived that my passage is Big Happenings; thus I am watched.
The afternoon beckons me to stay; not to labor or even to play, but to join all the fisherpeople at the substance of their enterprise, and to excel them in all its finer aspects save in the actual catching of any fish. And if you're reading this, my plan for playing hooky was put away at length; it never really amounted to a plan in any case, but just a fetching wish.
Posted by joel at 04:21 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 13, 2005
orpheus ascending
Roger walked into the living room just as a plume of flame shot out of the television and engulfed Shirley, his wife. He stood absolutely still for a moment, digging his way through the utter shock of it, and finally fell to his knees and started screaming. His wife, now blackened, sizzling and covered with sheets of blue and orange flame, sat perfectly, horribly upright, in a posture of shock herself. Then she tilted her head inquisitively, and asked, "Roger? Are you alright?"
From the back rooms of the house came the wail of a baby. Roger was sitting on the floor now, gasping and choking with surprise, tears standing in his eyes, occasionally shaking his head and sobbing. "Roger!" His wife was standing over him now, beautiful, conflagrant, terrible. He looked up at her and started to hiccup. She turned and headed for the nursery and the crying baby. Roger stared blindly at the floor, and muttered, "I'm ok. Everything is ok." But of course it wasn't. When Shirley returned with Courtney, their eleven month old daughter, Roger couldn't look at them. He saw the flickering shadows of the floor lamp thrown against the wall, and he could feel the heat of his wife's fire, although she was ten feet away.
"Roger, what's wrong?"
"I'm hallucinating."
Shirley was confused, and began to be a little afraid. "What do you mean? I'm right here, Roger, what's the matter?"
Roger got up, and made his way into the kitchen, clutching the bar as he walked around it. He desperately wanted to be busy at some trivial task, but he couldn't even think of one to do. He stared at the bottom of the sink, as dark blue oxygen-deprived flames rippled around the garbage disposal. He stood still for a minute, breathing slowly. He looked up at Shirley. She was blonde, tanned, healthy, and cool as a cucumber, but concerned. Courtney's eyes were getting bleary the way sleepy babies' eyes do, and she leaned her forehead against Shirley's face.
"Should I call Jeff?"
"I don't think I need a doctor right now. I will go and see a shrink tomorrow if I can get an appointment."
"What happened?"
"I'll be ok."
~ ~ ~
Roger's shrink liked to take walks, especially if he had patients who seemed restless, as Roger did today. His offices looked out into an indoor terrarium of glass and steel above an upscale shopping mall. They were on the second level of the mall, because it was quieter.
"Have you ever experimented with hallucinogenic drugs?"
"Some LSD in college."
"How long ago was that?"
"About 15 years."
"Anything more recent?"
"No."
"How frequently did you take LSD?"
"I only did it about a half a dozen times."
"Anything else?"
"Pot, of course."
"Alcohol?"
"Yes."
"Anything else? Mushrooms? Cocaine?"
"No. I only did LSD a few times and then I quit."
"Did you have a bad experience?"
"Nothing too crazy. It just started getting out of hand, and I didn't like it, so I quit taking it."
"What do you mean by 'out of hand'?"
"It just gave me a bad feeling. I felt like I was not in control of my environment."
"Have you made any recent changes in your lifestyle, such as diet or physical activity?"
"I just started eating vegetarian about 2 weeks ago."
"Ah. So, no meat. Do you eat poultry, fish or eggs?"
"Well, I'm not against eating meat or anything. But for the last couple of weeks, no. Mostly I've been eating salads, and fresh juice from fruits and vegetables. Most of what I've been eating is raw."
"Have you lost any weight?"
"Actually, yes. I've lost about 25 pounds in the last couple of months."
"I see."
~ ~ ~
"Where's Courtney?"
"She's at your parents'." Shirley set down the colander of steaming pasta, walked over to Roger, and hugged him for a moment. Her pasta sauce started to bubble and splatter, so she hung from his neck and leaned over to turn down the heat. She turned back to look up at him. "So what did the shrink say?"
Roger tore his gaze away from the blue gas flame on the stove, and squinted at her. A wry half-smile teased the corner of his mouth. "Plum loco."
She smiled back, her eyes laughing. "We already knew that."
He kissed her on the forehead, and moved toward the fridge. "He said it's most likely a cleansing reaction brought on by all this crazy raw-food stuff you've gotten me into."
"Aha. So this is all just a scheme to get out of eating your vegetables!"
"Seriously. Sometimes drugs get stored in fat cells. Losing weight from a diet consisting largely of this junk," he rummaged between bags of celery, and carrots, looking for a diet cola, "can result in further effects from those drugs as they leave your system."
"Drugs? What drugs have you got socked away in your fat cells?"
"Maybe the LSD I took in college."
His grad-school paramour was squinting skeptically at him, fighting off her own smile. "Really, Mr. Hamilton, I had no idea you were such a party animal."
"Sure," he backed out of the fridge with a carton of orange juice. "It makes coed nude mud rugby so much more interesting."
Shirley laughed that laugh that he liked so well as she turned back to her pasta sauce. It was a monosyllabic squawk that somehow conveyed humor and intelligence both at once. "Well, you've been doing a terrific job on this new diet. So, tonight's spaghetti." She turned and presented him a wooden spoon of sauce to taste.
~ ~ ~
It was a gorgeous autumn day, and Roger, in his corner office, found he couldn't concentrate on the brief in front of him. The beautiful 100 foot tall maple outside his windows had turned a brilliant ruby red. And he had discovered that he could set it on fire. It was incredible fire, never consuming the tree. He could turn it on, and he could turn it off. He could shape it, color it, or vary its intensity.
It still bothered him when Shirley or Courtney caught fire, but he was learning to cope with it. His shrink was a little surprised it hadn't cleared up by now, and Shirley was more than a little worried about it. Roger found he mostly didn't want to think about it. He was learning to work his way around it, and to enjoy the moments between the unpleasant spots.
It seemed, lately, that Courtney was always on fire when she cried. He had almost lost his sanity the first time he had gone to comfort her after the onset of his hallucinations. He could still see, in his mind's eye, his screaming infant child engulfed in vicious, searing fire. When he lifted her, the pain was almost unbearable. He wanted to throw her into her crib and flee, but he steeled himself, and changed her diaper. He calmly and carefully applied ointment for the rash he couldn't see for all of the scorched and burning skin. It had made him want to mourn, as if she were gone, as if he would never see her again. He laid his whimpering daughter back in her crib, forcing himself to move slowly and carefully. He wound up the antique music box Shirley had found at some flea market, and as the delicate, chiming melody started, the room went strangely silent. He looked down at Courtney, and she was whole, healthy, pink and quiescent. He bent to kiss the thin fuzz of her blonde head, and paused there, breathing in the smell of her infant skin.
But such moments were becoming rare; the problem seemed to be getting worse. He had long since abandoned the diet which his shrink believed may have brought the problem on. Shirley didn't believe this was the right thing to do, and at first he agreed with her. If his body was purging out remnants of the drugs he had taken in younger days, better to just have them out and be done with it. But that was a week ago. Now he just wanted it to stop. He wanted Shirley to stop asking him about it. He wanted things to go back to the way they were before.
~ ~ ~
"Roger, what did you say the name of your shrink was?"
"What?" Roger seemed startled, looking up from the legal pad he had brought home with him from work. He thought for a moment. "Peterson."
He looked up at Shirley as she crossed the room to sit on the arm of the sofa. He noticed that she was trembling, and that she clasped her hands, clamped them between her knees, and stared at the floor. "There's no psychologist with offices at the mall."
Roger paused for a second, and cleared his throat. "You checked?" He sounded hurt. When she finally looked up at him, he saw that she had started to cry. "Which mall did you check?"
"You said Eastgate."
He got up and moved toward her around the coffee table. "No, no, honey," he put his arms around her. "I'm sorry if I said that. It's downtown."
He held her for a moment, both disturbed by her weeping, and thrilled by the smell of her hair. "Are you worried that I'm losing it?"
She looked miserable, and couldn't look at him. "I don't know what to think. I know you're suffering, but Roger, this is hurting me too."
"I know, baby. I'm sorry." He kissed the top of her head and held her closer. "Maybe you should come with me to my next appointment. Peterson might be able to give both of us some pointers on how to deal with this." Roger saw that she was growing calmer. "I'm so sorry, honey. I know this is really hard."
She reached for a kleenex, dried her eyes, and peeked him a shy sidelong smile. "Yeah," she said, as smoke started to coil, serpent-like, from her clothing, "after all, I'm the one on fire." This bit of levity didn't have the effect she intended. Roger's eyes started to fill up, and he pressed his thumb and forefinger against them, as if to staunch the flow. He willed himself to continue to hold his wife, even as her flames surrounded him.
~ ~ ~
"Roger, you still haven't told me about the fire."
Roger opened his eyes, started, and looked around him. He realized he must have drifted off. Very strange, he thought, to have dozed off in the middle of a session with the shrink.
Shirley sat next to him, on the edge of the bed. Bed? How odd to be in bed at the shrink's office. But he liked the feeling of her there, the pressure of the blanket squeezing his thigh because she was sitting so close.
"Roger." The psychiatrist paused, waiting for his attention. "Perhaps you could tell me about the fire."
"The fire?" He was bewildered. That's not Peterson. "Where's Peterson?"
"Peterson?" the psychiatrist asked.
Shirley said nothing, but just gave him a sympathetic look, and slightly shook her head no. No what? No Peterson? Could I have hallucinated Peterson?
"Roger," the psychiatrist who was not Peterson was talking again, "You are really making some great progress here. Would you like to talk about the fire?"
"The hallucinations," Roger said, somehow knowing it was the wrong answer even as he said it. Shirley confirmed this by shaking her head again.
"There was no fire." Roger felt panic rising in him. There was something about this situation, this conversation, which seemed all wrong. Something was out of place, and he didn't like it.
The psychiatrist waited patiently. "Roger," Shirley finally spoke up, "I think it's time for you to talk about the real fire."
Suddenly the room blurred and his eyes burned, and he was crying. He fought back massive sobs so that they surfaced only as glottal grunts. "Roger," Shirley said, "everything is going to be ok. But you need to talk about it. Courtney needs you."
"No!" Roger lashed his head his head to the side, sucking air through his teeth. He breathed heavily for almost a minute. Gradually he became quieter; not calmer, but simply tired. He began to sense a terrific pain somewhere inside of him, like a weight on his chest. "Everything is not ok."
"What happened in the real fire?" The psychiatrist pulled his glasses from the front pocket of the white coat he wore, and put them on.
"There was a fire," Roger said, barely able to steady his voice. Shirley gave him a beatific smile, rose and kissed his face, right below his left eye. "There was a fire," he repeated, gazing at her.
The psychiatrist sat still, listening.
"My wife...there was a fire, and my, my wife..."
The doctor was silent for several minutes. Roger did not speak, but looked up at the ceiling. Suddenly he grimaced, and then silently wept.
"Roger, I'm so sorry about what happened to your wife. I know it's painful."
"And Courtney." Roger inflected this somewhere between a statement and a question.
"Courtney is ok. She's been staying with your parents. In fact, today is her birthday. She is a year old today."
Shirley smiled at him, picked up her purse from the foot of the bed, and walked toward the door. She opened it, and then turned back to look at him. I love you, she mouthed, and then she was gone.
Posted by joel at 06:55 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
April 09, 2005
war games
A Monkey Story in the tradition of the tales I used to tell when I was a boy...
ORKO WAS PATCHING UP the last corner of his specialized tank armor. He had proven wrong his more erudite siblings and cousins by pulverizing 8 shanks of high-grade "indestructible" rock liver, and he had done it with hammer and nails no less. He-Man was evidently annoyed, as this wasteful demand of their supplies could mean they would be left more vulnerable later in the weekend, as the exercise went into the final stages, but, as Orko had correctly pointed out, they couldn't leave a hole there, it would look dumb.
Orko raised his graphite hammer high over his boldly {and primitively} sculpted face, and began his downward swing just as Perrier slapped at a mosquito on Clarinette's face, who kicked the left pedal of their heavily modified APV. Orko's aim was spoiled by the lurching vehicle, and he chipped a large chunk from yet another panel of rock liver before tumbling overboard into the dry grass. The APV lurched to a stop as quickly as it had started, and everyone fell silent, looking around. He-Man squinted into the distance at nothing in particular.
"He-Man, look." Orko jabbed at the dirt at his feet there in front of the APV. "Landmine."
There was an earthshattering roar as a column of dirt and dust shot up and out from the locus of Orko's gesticulations. The bulky chimp was thrown backwards into the front of the APV where he impacted with a grunt. Everyone was silent again, amid the clatter and hissing of falling dirt and debris.
Orko slowly slid down the grill and sat on the ground, fiddling with the paper casing of the landmine's detonated "fuzzy" charge. Two hundred yards behind their APV, Orko's hammer landed on a rock-liver tank armor panel on APV number 2, instantly pulverizing it. He-Man's radio handset squawked.
"He-Man, this is Houston, come in, over"
"Houston this He-Man, out."
"No, He-Man, say over. Over."
"I said out, because I'm already done talking. Out."
"But I called you, over."
"Over where? Out."
"Nevermind. Over. Did you get hit?"
"Hit? What do you mean? Out."
"Team blue says they planted a mine near your position, and it's GPS locator no longer indicates the same position. Say again, did you get hit? Over."
"Ahhhhh. Hmmmmm." He-Man peered over the front of the front of the APV at Orko, who was looking around in the grass for his hammer. "Negative. Out."
"So you did not get hit, but the land mine did go off? Over."
"We dispatched a, ah...a specialist, and he, ah, he defused it. Out."
"Ok, roger that, thanks. Out."
"Sure thing, out."
"Over and out."
"Out and out."
Orko rose and grinned sheepishly up at his commanding officer as He-Man clambered down from the APV. Orko wobbled for a second, then fell heavily on his seat again as He-Man walked around to the front of the vehicle. It bore a surreal image of Orko at this moment, whose hair was plastered outward in a fan shaped corona around his head. There was a clean, distinct silhouette of his hulking figure, framed on the front grill by dust and grime."
Clarinette, Trombone, Frogger, get up here and help me clean up this mess."
The three piled out of the APV and came over to survey the damage. They immediately burst into laughter. Undeterred by the lack of any cleaning supplies, they simply scooped up dirt and ground it into the clean space where Orko had blocked the blast, and soon the front of the APV was again uniform, albeit with a different mien than before.
Meanwhile, Grace Kelly had trotted over from APV number 2 with Orko's hammer, and He-Man had intervened in the matter of further repairs, and scored a semantic victory by proposing that the panels be attached with liquid nails. Perrier had done the honors, but had to revisit the task twice, since Orko insisted on "setting" the panels with his hammer.
Back behind the wheel, Perrier again turned to his primary function of DJ, and complied with He-Man's orders to play "Flight of the Valkeries" at twice the usual volume, speed and pitch. His hands were now fouled by the gooey remnants of the liquid nails he had just administered, however, and he consequently ruined the CD. He-Man was only momentarily flummoxed, before he regrouped and ordered up a similarly inspiring number: the theme to the Hannah Barbara cartoon, The Jetsons. However, the liquid nails proved to have ubiquitously infected Perrier's personal effects, including the CD player itself, and eventually an irritated silence settled on the crew. The haunting strains of "Edlewiese" came floating up to them from APV number 2, until He-Man tersely informed them via radio that they were to run silent.
None of them could have imagined that this turn of circumstances had conspired to hand them an early victory that sunny mid-afternoon. They sat side by side, just behind a ridge, while they stopped for rations for the 10th time since lunch. Clarinette had finished her rations with characteristic efficiency, and was idly chewing a blade of grass, when her talented ears picked out the sound of her favorite song from the soundtrack of James Cameron's Titanic. She swiftly aligned the turrets toward the sound of the music.
Team blue's lead APV surged over the ridge, catching air briefly before slamming to the ground, as Celene Dion's voice rang out "I know that my heart will go on." Clarinette never missed a beat, but launched a fuzzy salvo squarely into the middle of the vehicle, causing it to shudder, and slow to half its speed. She followed that up with another shot, this one from no more than 20 feet away, as the blue team's APV slowly rolled abreast of them. This second shot tripped the klaxxons in the blue APV, and it's siren lights began to spin, indicating that it was officially out of commission.
The noise of this cannonade did nothing to alert the crew of blue team APV number 2, as they burst over the crest of the hill amid the blaring Beatles tune "How can you laugh when you know I'm down." This APV caught team Red by total suprise, as it hurtled toward their number two APV, and rammed it head on. There was a dusty coughing interlude of relative silence, during which blue two's engine died. Then somebody fired the gun on red number 2, which happened to be pointing forward, and blue two's sirens immediately went off.
Posted by joel at 08:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
on telling stories
I always pause for a long time before telling a story to my son. I have a basic construct of an intrepid groundhog Beanie, his brother Jerry and his genius (for a groundhog) friend Roger. The humor in those stories generally relies on the suprising perspective of discovering the human world through a small furry mammal's eyes. Of course the chaps are personified, but they have quaint and unknowledgeable ways of viewing the world which my son often finds very entertaining. He has, on occasion, laughed uncontrollably.
I've also made my brother and sisters laugh uncontrollably, with a series of stories labeled the "Monkey Stories." The humor in those stories relied upon over-the-top absurdity and slapstick. We used to lay in our beds when we were supposed to be going to sleep, and I would spin yarns about a band of speaking monkeys who were lavishly rich, endlessly playful, and predictably destructive. I used their wealth as a cover-all for the damage they invariably did. The premise: a scientist had discovered a way to enable monkeys to talk before tragically passing from the scene. This troop of 100 or so monkeys inhabited every cranny and nook of their deceased scientist friend's house. They did strange things like nailing all the furniture to the ceiling. The washed all the dishes in the large circular above ground pool in the back yard. The prized bottle tops over money, they had invented a nearly indestructible substance called rock liver (a composite of liver and egg whites, liberally burned) and they believed in several simple axioms such as "nails can fix anything, including eggs."
Their nails fetish was even enshrined in rhyme:
Nails, nails,
Nails are good for a number of things,
Nails, nails.
They loved specific foods such as smurfberry crunch. They adopted names of cartoon characters for themselves. There was a puny monkey named He-Man (who became a leader of the monkeys and eventually their mayor) and Orko, his lumbering, brutish side kick.
They drove cars, they built houses, crashed boats and carried out war game exercises with an endless supply of an explosive but non-destructive powder called fuzzy. (Fuzzy bombs were a staple of their daily machinations.)
Those were simpler days. I never worried about anthropomorphism or speciesism, or violent content in those stories. I simply focused my mind on evoking the most laughter possible from my spellbound victims, and often I succeeded in spades.
I and my two sisters (we were the 1st, 2nd and 3rd born) moved to Oklahoma to stay with relatives while my brother and youngest sister moved with our parents to South Carolina. This move was the harbinger of the end of the monkey story. We all missed each other terribly during that year, and I tried to buck up everyone's spirits by concocting monkey stories in one or two letters, but the going was harder without that instantaneous feedback of sibling cackling which told me if the humor was still live, or if the content was lapsing into the technical, and causing minds to drift.
And indeed, there were, occasionally, the largely unfunny monkey stories, which were purely epic tales of wars, and heroes, and lovely hairy damsels causing distress. But without an audience, the monkey stories didn't seem to build, and I suppose, that my failure to export their manufacture to the dusty hillocks of the Cimmarron valley was also a harbinger of another kind; the harbinger of my problem with writing. I haven't written anything longer than a poem or a journal entry since.
When we returned to South Carolina my siblings used to beg me for a monkey story. And it wasn't just the younger two, it was all of them. We all were reaching backward for a simpler time, a time before a year of separation had started us on subtly different tracks whose distinct experiences were not intimately shared, but rather only conveyed by the simple mechanisms that children use. We began to become grown-ups.
Most of my siblings' experiences after that point were not so closely related to my own. I heard about my brother's unutterable rage toward certain bullies at school. I knew those bullies, and I knew exactly what he felt: I had had run-ins with those bullies' older brothers. I don't remember if I ever said anything to my brother during that time. I saw my sisters date some good guys and some jerks, and eventually I saw two of them marry. But I am thirty-two now and am just beginning to grasp the importance of reaching out to others in their hour of need. And I am a sensitive child.
We have come, now, to separate adulthoods, and have begun the struggle back towards each other. In some sense it seems to me almost as if we are long-lost from each other. The hearkening back to earlier days is so poignant to some of us, and may seem pointless to others of us. I don't know what all my siblings think. I'm one who feels the poignancy of a childhood I wished I had done more to enlighten, delight, protect and prolong.
I previously had this published on my website, but never on my blog. My apologies to my readers who have read this "reprint" before.
Posted by joel at 11:27 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 08, 2005
well met
 |
Posted by joel at 10:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 01, 2005
leaving on a jetplane
Welcome, Dawn Patrol readers. I'll be out siteseeing New York for the next few days, and visiting Dawn Eden, so probably not much blogging will get done. Meanwhile, if you've never been chezJoel, take a look at these topics:
I'll be back and blogging on Thursday.
Posted by joel at 11:25 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack