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the beginning
If I begin when I was a little kid, I will miss what I am looking for.
So I will start in a place where I might find myself.
This place is a suburb's suburb, one of the outer rings of the city where
I was born and lived as a child before moving to a suburb, and this one
that I am writing about today is further out from that one. This place is
a farm, not a working farm with lots of animals, although there are
some chickens and some sheep, about which more will be said later in this
story.
This farm raised children.
How did I come to be there? I was visiting a girl named Gail who was a
friend of mine. Gail and her family lived on this farm and her father was
the kid farmer in charge of this place and all of the children who lived
here.
I'm not trying to be mysterious, but I want to set the tone that I was
feeling then in this place, even then before I knew what to look for.
This was a social work farm, filled with kids, young children from ten to
twelve, whose parents did not want them. These were the children of
parents who were going through divorces and neither parent
wanted the child.
"You keep him," I imagine them saying. "No you keep him. I don't
want him." These kids had it tough.
These kids lived on the farm, in dormitory rooms. They went to the
local suburb school and they lived on the farm. Their parents did not visit
them.
I was a freshman in college, filled with myself and all the wisdom I wore
like a freshman beanie with a propeller on top. I was in college and
there was nothing I didn't know or think that I would learn pretty soon.
Little did I know.
Gail's father enjoyed talking with me. I was always good with parents.
They liked me because I was polite and respectful, curious about them
and their worlds, interested in what they had to tell me. This was the
formula for having parents like me.
My own parents had taught me to be polite and respectful although they
did not need me to be curious or interested in them. They wanted me to be
interested in god and what would happen to me after I died. This was an
important thing then, to be ready to die, for if my parents were
judgmental, it was nothing compared to their god and the judgments
he would rain down on them if they didn't raise me right, ready to be
judged at any time. Life was an exam and I couldn't pass if I wasn't ready.
I enjoyed talking with Gail's father. It was always nice to find an adult
who took me seriously, who listened to what I had to say as though it
mattered. This was the kind of parent that I wanted to be myself,
someone who listened to his kids, but this turned out to be harder than I
imagined.
Anyway I enjoyed talking with Gail's father. Here is a little story which
will tell you what that was like.
the aside
One day, when I was visiting with Gail and her family (I thought of the
father as Mr. Gail's father) Gail was nervous and anxious and her father
was teasing her. Gail was upset because she had agreed to go on a date
with a Japanese student who was visiting in her suburb.
"What will I say to him," she asked. "What do I have in common with
someone from Japan?"
"The one thing you don't want to do," Mr. Gail's father said, "Is to
mention Hiroshima, Japanese people don't like that."
Gail's date picked her up at the front door. Mr. Gail's father and I were
engaged in busy conversation. He had been in the war, the big one that
my father had been in too, and Mr. Gail's father had worked as a cryptographer, decoding
Japanese mysteries. He liked solving puzzles, Mr. Gail's father did, and I
hated to work on puzzles. They made my brain ache, my shoulders
squeeze, so I avoided them when I could. But he had lots of
puzzles to talk about with me and I enjoyed listening, and asked a good
question now and then to indicate my interest.
Here's a puzzle for you, so you can see what I mean. There is only one
English word that can be made from the letters in this word, chesty.
What is it? Need a clue? It has something to do with death.
This is one of the few puzzles I ever solved. How did I do it? I got a
dictionary the next day and read the entries for each of the letters
C-H-E-S-T-Y. I almost didn't recognize the answer when I found it and I
was even more puzzled about what it had to do with death.
Give up? Don't worry, I'll give you the answer at the end of this
narrative. As a reward, to keep you reading. And don't go skipping to
the end. That may get you the answer quickly but you will miss the painful
joys of delayed gratification. Hang on then. Hold your horses.
The evening flew by. I didn't want to leave until Gail returned and told
us about her date. Her father didn't want me to leave either because he
was having such a good time telling me stories about his part in the war
with Japan.
Around eleven o'clock a car pulled up in front of the house. Gail and
her date had returned. She brought him into the house, introduced him to
us, poor awkward foreigner meeting the barbarians in their room for living.
"This is Joe Hiroshima," she said as Joe whose last name was certainly
not Hiroshima, nervously shook hands with her father. "This is Joe," she
introduced him to me, blushing with embarrassment.
Polite pleasantries for a few minutes and then Joe left. I can't remember
how he answered my question, "How do you like America so far?"
Maybe I wasn't listening. My mind was curled around Hiroshima like everyone's
in the room.
After a polite little while the door closed behind Joe and Gail cried out,
"Dad! Why did you have to tell me not to mention Hiroshima. That's all
I could think about. Hiroshima, Hiroshima, Hiroshima. I couldn't stop
thinking the word. We went to the movies and all I could think was
Hiroshima. Poor Joe. I wasn't much company."
That's the end of this story within a story. What's the point, you ask.
What does that have to do with what you are trying to tell me? Wait
and see.
the middle
Back to the main road then. As I said before, this farm raised kids. The
only other animals were chickens, sheep, and a dog. The kids were out
back in a dormitory residence. The sheep were in the pen. The chickens were
in the barn when they weren't in the yard pecking for whatever it is that
chickens find in the grit.
I didn't have much to do with the kids. I saw them at a distance. They
were boys, younger than me, not on my screen most of the time, that is,
until the day I decided to hypnotize the chickens.
This was quite a day. I arrived at the farm in the afternoon, filled with
something I had learned at school, something I wanted to show Gail and
her father, a special kind of decoder that seemed amazing to me as I tried to
learn about the encrypted world around me.
That morning a sophomore approached me and one of my friends in the
cafeteria and proceeded to demonstrate something that amazed me.
"Answer these questions," he said. "Write down your answers on a
sheet of paper and then I'll explain to you what your answers mean."
I don't like puzzles but am always enthused about magic tricks.
These are the questions.
You are walking along a path. What kind of path is it? Is it rocky or
smooth, uphill or down, gentle or steep?
I could see a smooth path that undulated in the dappled sunlight.
There are trees around you. Are they tall or medium height or short?
I could see tall pine trees reaching up toward the blue sky.
You come to a clearing in the woods. In the middle of the clearing there
is a stump and it has a container with some kind of liquid in it. What is
the container? What is the liquid? What do you do with it?
I envisioned a sterling silver flask with fine brandy in it. I quaffed the
liquid in one fiery gulp. I had never had a drink at that time
in my life. The brandy and the flask were my idea of sophistication.
You walk on in the woods and you meet a bear and what do you do
and the bear goes away and you keep walking until you come to a house on a
hill and where is the house on the hill and are its windows and doors shut or
closed or open or what? My answers filled the page.
Then the sophomore magician decoded my answers. "The path is your
life," he said, "And how you see it." Undulating, I thought.
"The trees are the kind of people you like to hang out with. Tall for
older, medium for same age, short for younger persons." Right on the
money, I thought. I do like to hang out with adults to find out what they
know.
"The container in the clearing is what you think about your life, your
ambition, where it will lead, and what you do with it indicates what you
will do with your life's opportunities." Boy was I glad I had chosen to
see a silver flask. What a son of privilege!
He continued his explanations. The bear was fright and even I, mere
freshman, could figure out the house answers. Closed, open. Nice house,
shitty shack. Place on the hill. Mine was in the middle.
I couldn't wait to try this out on someone, amaze them and mystify
them with my Gnostic secrets and mysterious insights.
That's why I drove out to the farm in the middle of this particular
afternoon. There was something else I was wanting to try too. I was a
great reader at the time. Books were the manure to this stable boy's
shovel and I packed them away with a furious resolve. I wanted to
know everything. A little wasn't enough. I didn't want any surprises in my
life. Books were maps. I didn't want to get lost in the forest.
The other thing I wanted to try was hypnotizing chickens. I read in a
science fiction story that you could hypnotize a chicken by holding its
beak to the ground and drawing a line in front of it extending from its
beak. Even a piece of string would do. Supposedly the chicken would
not be able to move. Held prisoner by a string! Stupid chicken.
So there was lots to do this particular afternoon. But Mr. Gail's Father
was not at home and Gail was too easy an audience. She saw a glass
goblet with spring water in it. Her attention was rapt whenever she was being
discussed or analyzed and we breezed through her psychology exam as
easily as a walk in the woods. My interpretation was fluent, embellished by
little verbal flourishes I had rehearsed in the drive to the farm. She was
amazed. But her amazement wasn't enough for my needs, not that day.
I wanted to show other people.
Here is the secret of human beings, I thought. And I know it. I can
reveal it to you if you'll just pay attention for a few minutes. Even this wasn't
enough for me. I wanted to hypnotize a chicken. Talk about amazing. I
was cooler than The Amazing Kreskin.
"Gather some kids," I instructed Gail. "I'm going to show them
something amazing."
Soon we were in the yard, surrounded by eight or nine kids, boy kids,
pleased with the attention I was showing them, awed by a college
freshman, even more awed by an older kid who could drive and hang out with
girls.
To soften them up for my matinee act, the helpless chicken, I performed
my psychology stunt on them. This would show them that I had powers of
the mind, soothsaying clairvoyant older kid who could drive. Wait until they
saw what I could do with chickens!
What a sad litany of woods walking. Rusted cans, broken bottles, muddy
water, even piss, abandoned containers left behind in the clearing. Little
houses at the bottom of the hill, doors and windows shaded and
covered, locked and bolted. This really worked. I could see right into the minds of
disadvantaged kids. Their parents didn't want them. They saw rust
where I saw silver.
The kids weren't that impressed with this trick though. Insights into
their sad minds weren't what they were looking for. They wanted a
stunt, a magic trick, a miracle. O.K. That's what I would give them.
Off to the barn, surrounded by kids who saw their possibilities as rusted
cans, broken bottles, trash and garbage, sorrow and sadness. Off to see a
chicken hypnotized.
This trick didn't go as smoothly as I had anticipated. First of all, the
chickens were hard to catch, even if you weren't afraid of them as I was,
flapping, squawking, scratching creatures who wouldn't hold still, not
like kids or other domesticated animals.
I tried to enlist one of the kids to get my chicken for me. After all a
magician with my bona fides needed an assistant. My role in this
adventure was too lofty to scramble in the barn dust for a flapping prop. I needed
help here.
When I realized that no one was going to catch the chicken for me, not
Gail, not one of the kids, I cursed them for cowards and set out to grasp
some poultry by myself. Easier thought than done. Chickens don't come
to you when you cluck. This city boy was learning fast. Finally, just before
I resorted to a two-by-four to stun my prey, I grabbed one from behind,
barely holding on as it clucked its resentment and struggled for freedom.
I forced its head to the floor of the barn, pulled a piece of blue chalk
from my pocket (magicians come prepared), and drew a line from its
beak to the foot of the nearest awestruck member of my audience. Then I
triumphantly released the chicken and waited for the applause.
But the chicken was leaving faster than my audience's faith. "I'll try
string. Maybe chickens can't see blue," I told the kids. "Someone get me
a piece of string." This request they were willing to fulfill.
While they were in quest of string, I was in quest of a chicken. Another
one, I thought. That first chicken wasn't very cooperative. But they all
looked alike to me. I wasn't trained as a farm hand. Finally I grabbed
one from behind. The task was as distasteful as the first time. I hated
chickens.
Head to the floor, beak pressed down, string uncoiled. No luck. This
chicken fled as though Mr. Fox had just come to the coop.
Some of the kids drifted off.
I tried a third time, convinced there was something I wasn't doing
correctly here. Maybe I needed some magic words. Hocus Pocus,
Madam'mnocus. The chicken's ass was right in my face as it
jumped/flew to its nest.
I gave up. The remaining kids, sore in their loss of faith, straggled off.
Maybe college wasn't that impressive after all. They couldn't see my
silver flask. All they could see was the chicken's ass as it scurried away.
I tried to rescue these kids with entertainment, show them how a man, a
college man could tame adversity, face down a foe, hold a chicken to
the floor and draw a line in the sand over which no enemy dared step.
Cluck, cluck, cluck, one of the kids crowed as he sauntered off. Only Gail
was left and disappointment showed in her face.
What about me? I was disappointed too. Imagine if it had worked!
Imagine the glory that would have been mine. Goddam chickens. Fry the
bastards. I would stay away from farms in the future. My destiny lay in the city.
the conclusion
My own gloomy visage reminded Gail of her female nurturing role. "I'm
sorry," she said. "You must be sad that it didn't work. The kids like you
anyway."
I was standing there knowing how Gail had felt when she introduced
Joe from Hiroshima.
The word, if you've been waiting, is scythe. What does that have to do
with death? The old man, remember, carries a scythe with him as he
harvests each year.
The sheep? Never left the pen.
And did I find myself here? At least a part, at least a part.
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