It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It Page 3

  Anyway, I was back up in a tree today. Hair of the dog. And thinking that I wish more people spent more time up in trees, getting back to old places of well-being. Thinking about things. Old Buddha sat in front of one for a long time, and some pretty good ideas came to him. Wonder what he would have come up with if he had actually climbed up in it and sat down in its arms? …

  If a whole lot more of us spent a whole lot more time up in trees, we might alter gravity in a different sense—the tendency of older folks to be grave—and lighten up. Imagine. You and me and a lot more like us way up in all the trees in the parks on a sunny April afternoon. Thinking. Waving to each other. Rock-a-bye-baby.

  Want to join? Tree Climbers International, P.O. Box 5588, Atlanta, Georgia 30307, USA.

  THE TEACHER IS QUIET. He is thinking, I can’t believe I am doing this. He pulls on rubber gloves, reaches into a white plastic bag, and pulls out a human brain. A real human brain.

  The students are quiet. They are thinking, I can’t believe he is really doing this.

  The students are thinking, If he hands it to me I will DIE, JUST DIE!

  Sure enough, he hands it to them. They do not die.

  When the brain comes back to him, the teacher tosses it across the table to the rubber-gloved quarterback of the football team, and he tosses it to his rubber-gloved tight end. Laughter as the tight end drops the brain on the table. The brain bounces.

  To explain: In this beginning drawing class, I had been lecturing about the impact of brain research on the process of art, using pictures and diagrams and anatomy charts. We had tossed around a cantaloupe to get the feel of the size of a brain, but somehow brains remained a bit abstract. The students had that glazed expression on their faces that means this is getting b-o-r-i-n-g.

  In that moment of educational ennui, a freshman girl says, “I can bring a human brain to school if you want—my father has lots of them.” (Talk about a full-scale class alert: “She’s going to do WHAT?!)

  Well, it turns out her daddy is a bona fide research neurosurgeon at the medical school and has jars and jars of brains in his lab and he would be pleased to have us see the real thing. So, sure, I can handle this. “Bring a brain to school!” I shout at the departing class. “ALL of you.”

  Sure enough, a week later, the freshman girl, Queen Forever of Show-and-Tell, shows up with a brain in a bag.

  “Well, Mr. Fulghum, what do you think?”

  If ever there was an appropriate use of the word “nonplussed,” it is now. This is what the students call an “oooo-wow” moment of monumental proportion.

  “I have one of these things between my ears,” I said. “It is made up entirely of raw meat at the moment. It is fueled by yesterday’s baloney sandwich, potato chips, and chocolate milk. And everything I am doing at the moment—everything I have ever done or will do—passes through this lump. I made it; I own it. And it is the most mysterious thing on earth.”

  (This brain in my hand wasn’t raw, mind you—it had been preserved in formaldehyde. And no, it was not in fact icky or gross. Light beige in color, slightly damp, soft and rubbery, like clay. And just about the size of that cantaloupe we had passed around—only this one weighed almost three pounds.)

  “Now I can kind of understand the mechanical work of the brain—stimulating breathing, moving blood, directing protein traffic. It’s all chemistry and electricity. A motor. I know about motors.

  “But this three-pound raw-meat motor also contains all the limericks I know, a recipe for how to cook a turkey, the remembered smell of my junior-high locker room, all my sorrows, the ability to double-clutch a pickup truck, the face of my wife when she was young, formulas like E = MC2, and A2 + B2 = C2, the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the sound of the first cry of my firstborn son, the cure for hiccups, the words to the fight song of St. Olaf’s College, fifty years’ worth of dreams, how to tie my shoes, the taste of cod-liver oil, an image of Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers,’ and a working understanding of the Dewey Decimal System. It’s all there in the MEAT.

  “One cubic centimeter of brain contains ten billion bits of information and it processes five thousand bits a second. And somehow it evolved over a zillion years from a molten ball of rock, Earth, which will itself fall into the sun someday and be no more. Why? How?

  “That’s what I think.”

  “Oooo-wow,” chorus the students. The teacher is in a groove—got ’em.

  Once again the brain is passed around from hand to hand, slowly and solemnly. Once again it is very quiet. The Mystery of Mysteries is present, and it includes us.

  The single most powerful statement to come out of brain research in the last twenty-five years is this:

  We are as different from one another on the inside of our heads as we appear to be different from one another on the outside of our heads.

  Look around and see the infinite variety of human heads—skin, hair, age, ethnic characteristics, size, color, and shape. And know that on the inside such differences are even greater—what we know, how we learn, how we process information, what we remember and forget, our strategies for functioning and coping. Add to that the understanding that the “world” out “there” is as much a projection from inside our heads as it is a perception, and pretty soon you are up against the realization that it is a miracle that we communicate at all. It is almost unbelievable that we are dealing with the same reality. We operate on a kind of loose consensus about existence, at best.

  From a practical point of view, day by day, this kind of information makes me a little more patient with the people I live with. I am less inclined to protest, “Why don’t you see it the way I do?” and more inclined to say, “You see it that way? Holy cow! How amazing!”

  This set me to thinking about Einstein’s brain, which is somewhere in Missouri in a lab in ajar now. It was removed and studied to see if it was special in some way. (No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t his equipment, but what he did with it, that cracked the window on the Mystery of Mysteries.) When Big Al was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, a guest asked to be shown Einstein’s laboratory. The great man smiled, held up his fountain pen, and pointed at his head. (Oooo-wow).

  DO YOU KNOW ABOUT GEEK DANCING? (No, that’s not a mistake in spelling. Not Greek but GEEK dancing.) Actually geek is in the dictionary. It refers to a carnival performer whose act consists of doing weird things. Biting the head off a live chicken, for example. In current slang, a geek is someone who looks like he might be capable of doing something like that. A person who bears watching. I hear young people using the word to describe anybody who is older and independent in lifestyle. There is a kind of compliment implied. It means you’re a little strange, but interesting.

  I guess it’s true. A lot of us older types are a bit geeky. At some point your genetic code presses a switch in your head. You look in your closet to dress for the day and you say to yourself, who cares? You reach the point somewhere around sixty when you decide to just go ahead and weird out. You start out the door in your house slippers, headed for the grocery store, and you don’t go back and change into shoes. To hell with it. Or you go out to the mailbox in your bathrobe—your oldest, sleaziest, comfiest bathrobe—and don’t give a damn who sees you. Or when someone rings the doorbell, you don’t check in the mirror to see how you look. You just open the door. It’s their problem, whoever they are. So you aren’t color-coordinated anymore. So? So you don’t make your bed every day. So? Your life becomes like your old car—just as long as it runs and gets you there, who cares how it looks? Some people call this going to seed. Others call it the beginning of wisdom. Take your pick.

  But I was going to talk about geek dancing.

  When I get down and my life is logjammed and I need some affirmative action, I go where people dance. I don’t mean joints where people go to get crocked and then wobble around on the floor to music. I mean places where people who really like to dance go to do that. I like dancers. Never met a serious danc
er who wasn’t a pretty fine human being. And I enjoy the never-ending pleasure of being surprised by just who dancers are. It does me good to see a couple of ill-builts—kind of fat and homely and solemn and all—get up on the floor and waltz like angels. When I see people like that on the street and start to look down my nose at them, a better voice in my head says “probably dancers” and I feel better about them. And me.

  Anyhow. About geek dancing.

  My favorite place, the Owl Tavern, has traditional jazz on Sunday nights from 6:30 to 9:30. The geek band plays swing music from Chicago and New Orleans from the good old days. Most of the people who show up are over forty, blue-collar one-beer types who have to be at work on Monday at 7:30. Not what you’d call a rowdy crowd. Dancers is what you’d call them.

  I like to look around and find the king-hill champion geek for the evening. An old guy wearing invisible house slippers and his bathrobe. Balding, white hair, short, wrinkled. The kind who sort of lists to port when he walks. One who you might think was strictly nursing-home material if you saw him at a bus stop. But you see him here. And you know. A dancer. A dancing geek.

  And he usually has his wife, the geekess, with him. A bit younger, always fluffed up a bit for dancing and has been for fifty years. Check her shoes. If they are black with mid-heels and a strap across the instep, it’s a sure bet what she came for and what she is going to do.

  The music cranks up, he takes her by the hand and kind of limps onto the floor. It’s an act, just to set you up. And then it happens. She steps into a permanent spot formed by his embrace, the years fall away, and once again Cinderella and the Prince move to the music in the room and the music in their hearts. It takes about forty years to dance with a partner this way. Such ease, such grace, with all kinds of little moves that have been perfected without words. He dances flatfooted and with an economy of motion. She responds to unseen suggestions to twirl out and around and back. Their eyes meet from time to time, and you know that you’re seeing a pretty happy marriage there on the floor. You’d have to love someone a long time to do what they’re doing.

  Sometimes the old geek asks another lady to dance. And somebody usually asks the geekess. They make whoever they are dancing with look pretty good. And feel pretty nice, too, I bet. An eighty-one-year-old geekess once asked me to dance on such an evening. I gave her my best, and she stayed right with me. “You are real good, honey,” she said as I escorted her to her seat. I lived off that compliment for a week.

  I want to be, and I fully intend to be, an old geek dancer. And my geekess and I are working on our dance routine. I realize that is a public responsibility: to help everybody stay as young as long as they can. To set good examples. And I don’t want to die quietly in my bed, either—but at the end of the last dance some lovely night, sit down in a chair, smile, and pass on.

  All this reminds me of something I heard about the Hopi Indians. They don’t think there is much difference between praying and dancing—that both are necessary for a long life. The Hopis should know, I guess, as they have been through a lot and are still around. They say that to be a useful Hopi is to be one who has a quiet heart and takes part in all the dances. Yes.

  OUR CHURCH HAD NOT HAD A FULL-BLOWN Christmas pageant in years. For one thing, we had become fairly rational and efficient about the season, content to let the Sunday School observe the event on their own turf in a low-key way. Then, too, there was the last time we had gone all out. That week of the Christmas pageant coincided with an outbreak of German measles, chicken pox, and the Hong Kong flu. The night of the pageant there was a sleet storm, a partial power failure that threw some people’s clocks off, and one of the sheep hired for the occasion got diarrhea. That was about par for the course, since Joseph and two Wise Men upchucked during the performance and some little angels managed to both cry and wet their pants. To top if off, the choir of teenagers walking about in an irresponsible manner with lighted candles created more a feeling of the fear of fire and the wrath of God than a feeling of peace on earth. I don’t think it was really all that bad, and maybe all those things didn’t happen the same year, but a sufficient number of senior ladies in the church had had it up to here with the whole hoo-ha and tended to squelch any suggestion of another pageant. It was as if cholera had once again been among us and nobody wanted to go through that again.

  But nostalgia is strong, and it addled the brains of those same senior ladies as they considered the pleas of the younger mothers who had not been through this ritual ordeal and would not be dissuaded. It was time their children had their chance.

  And in short order, people who kept saying “I ought to know better” were right in there making angel costumes out of old bedsheets, cardboard, and chicken feathers. Just the right kind of bathrobes could not be found for the Wise Men, so some of the daddies went out and bought new ones and backed a pickup truck over them to age them a bit. One of the young mothers was pregnant, and it was made clear to her in loving terms that she was expected to come up with a real newborn child by early December. She vowed to try.

  An angel choir was lashed into singing shape. A real manger with real straw was obtained. And while there was a consensus on leaving out live sheep this time, some enterprising soul managed to borrow two small goats for the evening. The real coup was renting a live donkey for the Mother Mary to ride in on. None of us had ever seen a live donkey ridden through a church chancel, and it seemed like such a fine thing to do at the time.

  We made one concession to sanity, deciding to have the thing on a Sunday morning in the full light of day, so we could see what we were doing and nobody in the angel choir would get scared of the dark and cry or wet their pants. No candles, either. And no full rehearsal. These things are supposed to be a little hokey, anyhow, and nobody was about to go through the whole thing twice.

  The great day came and everybody arrived at church. Husbands who were not known for regular attendance came—probably for the same reason they would be attracted to a nearby bus wreck.

  It wasn’t all that bad, really. At least, not early on. The goats did get loose in the parking lot and put on quite a rodeo with the shepherds. But we hooted out the carols with full voice, and the angel choir got through its first big number almost on key and in unison. The Star of Bethlehem was lit over the manger, and it came time for the entrance of Joseph and Mary, with Mary riding on the U-Haul donkey, carrying what later proved to be a Raggedy Andy doll (since the pregnant lady was overdue). It was the donkey that proved our undoing.

  The donkey made two hesitant steps through the door of the chancel, took a look at the whole scene, and seized up. Locked his legs, put his whole body in a cement condition well beyond rigor mortis, and the procession ground to a halt. Now there are things you might consider doing to a donkey in private to get it to move, but there is a limit to what you can do to a donkey in church on a Sunday morning in front of women and children. Jerking on his halter and some wicked kicking on the part of the Virgin Mary had no effect.

  The president of the board of trustees, seated in the front row and dressed in his Sunday best, rose to the rescue. The floor of the chancel was polished cement. And so, with another man pulling at the halter, the president of the board crouched at the stern end of the donkey and pushed—slowly sliding the rigid beast across the floor, inch by stately inch. With progress being made, the choir director turned on the tape recorder, which blared forth a mighty chorus from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir accompanied by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

  Just as the donkey and his mobilizers reached mid-church, the tape recorder blew a fuse and there was a sudden silence. And in that silence an exasperated voice came from the backside of the donkey. “MOVE YOUR ASS, YOU SON OF A BITCH!” Followed immediately by a voice from the rear of the church—the donkey pusher’s wife—“Leon, shut your filthy mouth!” And that’s when the donkey brayed. If we had held an election for jackass that day, there would have been several candidates mentioned. And the vote would have been pretty
evenly distributed.

  We are such fun to watch when we do what we do.

  And though it has been several years since the church has held another Christmas pageant, we have not seen the last one. The memory of the laughter outlives the memory of the hassle. And hope—hope always makes us believe that this time, this year, we will get it right.

  That’s the whole deal with Christmas, I guess. It’s just real life—only a lot more of it all at once than usual. And I suppose we will continue doing it all. Get frenzied and confused and frustrated and even mad. And also get excited and hopeful and quietly pleased. We will laugh and cry and pout and ponder. Get a little drunk and excessive. Hug and kiss and make a great mess. Spend too much. And somebody will always be there to upchuck or wet their pants. As always, we will sing only some of the verses and most of those off-key. We will do it again and again and again. We are the Christmas pageant—the whole damn thing.

  And I think it’s best to just let it happen. As at least one person I know can attest, getting pushy about it is trouble.

  PONDER. DID YOU EVER DO THAT? I’ve thought about that word ever since I came across it in the story of the birth of Jesus. “Mary pondered all these things in her heart” is what the Scriptures say. When you think about what the phrase “all these things” refers to, it’s no wonder she pondered. Here’s a teenage kid who has just had a baby in the back stall of a barn, with some confusion about just who the father is. Her husband is muttering about taxes and the fact that the head honcho in these parts, Herod, has opted for infanticide. And if that’s not enough to think about, there’s all this traffic of visiting astrologers, sheep ranchers, and angels, who keep dropping by with questions and proclamations and chorales. To top it off, the animals who are jammed in there with her talk. Not many cows speak Hebrew, but that seems to be what was going on. It certainly would give a person something to do some heavy thinking about. I’d say “ponder” is the perfect word for what Mary was doing.