In the Beginning

published in Trop Magazine--


In the beginning, at the starter's gunshot of all beginnings, there appeared a bearded and cherry-cheeked giant who wore bright red suspenders. His was the first breath, his the first ray of sun, his the first drop of ocean. This gentle giant created it all: the mountains and rivers, the dusty road down to the lake, and the weather in all its extremes and all its airs in between. He created the pretty blond Dutch girl chasing her runaway goose, the plump and mustachioed butcher with a string of wieners around his neck, the serious boy who rode a unicycle.

At least that's the way it seemed to me, at the age of five, armed with blanket and bear, when my father or mother opened up A Treasury of Children's Stories at bedtime. The book cover showed an enormous and happy giant, relaxed and peering over a mountain to observe the silly people in the valley below. All the colorful characters from their own chapters were there to behold, and the giant took great delight in watching as their audience. To open this book was to celebrate the foibles of these sweetly flawed human beings.  One was too fat and another too stingy. One was too thin and another too grumpy.  The giant loved them all, and I loved the giant for loving them so.

Their creator was invisible to those valley folk, just as God was invisible to me. To exist in such gigantic human form, to step across the land with footprints arriving in adjacent counties, to stand tall among the clouds, why, I felt that this had to be God Almighty himself. And within the ticking of my five year-old skull, those bedtime visits to the Treasury persuaded me that the happy man behind the mountain was the One behind it all.

And so as my family sat down for supper, and together we recited our blessing, to me it was that large bearded fellow I was addressing: "God is great. God is good. Let us thank Him for our food. By his hands we must be fed. Give us Lord our daily bread." And I imagined a wink from above as I dipped a spoon in apple sauce.

I frequently spoke to the giant in those days. Just as the characters in their stories played out their impossible plots to happy endings, I felt I was just such a player within the chapters of my own world, within my own Hundred Acre Wood.   God the Giant was my audience too, and when I was alone after a new and peculiar thing had occurred (and to a five year-old, most things are new and peculiar), I would stop, turn and face that invisible mountain, and remark aloud about the curious and curiouser nature of this wacky wonderland, and especially about the characters who were my family.

I narrated the story to help him understand, and God wholeheartedly agreed that, yes, I certainly had a good grasp of this worldly comedy. That, for example, yes indeed, my little sister certainly was a snot-faced sassy pants. And before I would turn to enter the next scene, God would guarantee that more strange encounters lay ahead.

Such was the secure and comforting company the giant provided me. He was my biggest fan. He felt sorry after my mother swatted my rump for urinating a beautiful yellow rainbow from off our elevated porch outside. He worried with my father down at the lake when I would not be stopped from swimming over the deep and out to the raft. He laughed when I mugged with mouth wide open for the family photograph. And every time I commiserated with him about yet another of the world's bewilderments, he seemed to admire that I was growing in wisdom.

God stayed home during the few times I attended Sunday school. The preacher's son was in my class, a boy who gave off an acrid and bleachy smell.  All the children adored him, it seemed, because he was the preacher's boy.  But in the summer down at the lake, I saw that he was too afraid to wade in above his ankles. These were not my people, and the frightening Old Testament tales were not my stories. Every Sunday morning I complained and complained of a nauseating stomach ache until usually I was allowed to stay home.  The real God rejoiced that I got my way by steering clear of that foreign and troubling place.

I have friends whose five year-old son had similar fits on Sundays. Tim is short for Timothy, and having immersed himself in Japanese monster movies, Tim assumed when he heard about God, that the name was short for Godzilla.  Whenever talk of religion and God entered his ears, sinister images of a fire-breathing, mutant dinosaur came to mind.  A table prayer might have ruined his appetite:  "By Godzilla's hands we must be fed. Give us Godzilla our daily bread." What a queasy insecurity Tim must have felt. That a volcano's fiery eruption might swallow a village in its path: perfectly explainable. But what confusion when learning on a Sunday that God(zilla) created the heavens and God(zilla) created the earth.  "And, Timmy, the most wonderful thing is this: God(zilla) can be found deep inside of you, too."  Perfectly troubling.

I found refuge from monsters and Sunday terrors by seeking the private counsel and audience of an imagined man in red suspenders.  In a long year or two, of course, his image and that sweet time of playing the actor faded away, just as Christopher Robin one day let drop the paw of Pooh.   Those storybook characters were left to sleep on the dark pages of chapters before some other child, armed with blanket and bear, might release them again to the light.

As for the origins of the heavens and earth, the mountains and rivers, and the weather in all its forms: many would approach me over the years with fantastic explanations.  But in the end, the explainers all seemed a bit angry about the subject.  Instead, my spiritual beginnings came as an accidental thing, cast by the long shadow of a gentle giant.  Joy came to be found in all of us, in the characters of the valley, in our sweetly-flawed selves.




Comments are welcome at tombohn2@yahoo.com




    

Runner

My next door neighbor has a dog, a big, bouncy golden retriever named Runner. One day, Runner, having to go, must have been in a quandary. He sat on the property line between his owner’s yard and mine, and must have surmised the following: “My yard gushes with lush green grass, where my master’s little children frolic hither and yon, where their tender bare feet encounter only the silky soft cushion of the finest Kentucky bluegrass, where nary a nasty thing is allowed to grow, and where my master toils day-in and day-out and spends thousands to keep it so.

“Now on the other side, that guy’s yard is fraught with an endless lattice of abandoned mole tunnels and thorny species of weeds that thrive in his sub-Saharan conditions. There is a prodigious crop of quack grass and great expanses of brown nothingness, parched and shimmering in the heat.

“I pledge,” Runner must have continued, “that from this moment forward, I shall dump all my dumps in that guy’s yard.”  Runner then paraded over and promptly put a pile right where he promised he would. And fresh every morning, a heaping and steaming mound, along with the paralyzing rants of a local cardinal family, greet the brand new day.

Runner’s expulsions caused me to harken back to an episode from thirty years ago. Back then I had a small dog named Josephine, a loyal, sweet, smart, and hiddeously ugly beast (many commented that she resembled a walking turd), who on her own would make the daily neighborhood rounds. One morning, I received a telephone call from Bernice across the road, a scowling and wrinkled woman, who relayed unto me a fairly concise message.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Get! Your! God! Damn! Shitting! Dog! Out! Of! My! Yard! Right! NOW!!!”

Oh, the shame I felt!  That I would sully another’s space!  I ran over immediately, and fetched up Josephine who was now in another neighbor’s garden rolling in soon-to-be-spread cow manure. I kept better tabs on Josephine after that, and mailed Bernice a heartfelt card of apology. But Bernice never forgave and avoided all eye contact before I moved away for good.

Canine defecation had created a thunderstorm in the harmonious weather of the neighborhood. I didn’t want to be a Bernice to my neighbors, but then again, I grew quite weary of flinging shovelfuls of Runner’s business into the back forty. Where Bernice responded with foul-mouthed aggression, I let the resentments fester. Oh, sure, I fantasized about hurling said heaps back at the neighbors’ vinyl siding, but I am, well, a timid kind of guy. My therapist advised me to “become more assertive” and “own my feelings” and “protect my space” by using “I messages.” She recommended that I model Goldilocks, that my communications with them should not be too cold or too hot, but, you know, just right and to the point.

And so, as I stood one Sunday morning at the kitchen window and again observed Runner’s ritual squat-and-trot, I knew it was time to act. With heart pounding and a dry mouth, I marched next door to “share my concerns” about Runner’s bowels and his daily misadventures. But when my grinning neighbor and his grinning wife and his wide-eyed children greeted me at their wide-open door, my voice transformed into another’s. Suddenly, I was Bernice in her telephone tirade and I spewed her words that came out as my own.

“Get! Your! Dog!… um… Get! Your! Dog!… um…”

My neighbor responded brightly, “Who? Runner? Why, he’s right here. Where are you, boy?  Runner? Oh, he must be outside. Runner! Runner! Come here, boy!” In a few seconds, the culprit appeared, galloping across their driveway and around to the front door, smiling and wagging, looking all brushed and golden like a champion, like a dog hero on a Wheaties box. And the little children ran out on the porch and strangled Runner with hugs.  One of them picked up a tennis ball and threw it out onto their flawlessly deep green lawn, and they all bounded after it, with Runner in the lead, in a suburban swarm of grassy delight.

You know, I don’t really mind hoisting those accumulated turds after all. One time when I was charged with some piddly misdemeanor, I can’t remember which one, the presiding judge there accidentally referred to me as Mr. Turdhoist.  What a premonition.




Comments are welcome at tombohn2@yahoo.com