If you have kept up with my postings, you already know how I feel about them. When all of my family gets together several times a year, there are stories that inevitably and mysteriously make an appearance in our conversations.
People ask me from time to time why I am the way I am. How did I get this way? There are a number of plausible theories worth consideration, but if you’ll allow me a few minutes, I’ll tell you my own theory.
In this day and age of Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, and Jenny Jones television where the guests play “Let’s see how many people I can blame for my rotten life”, it should come as no surprise to you that I intend to blame my father for the way I’ve turned out. Don't get me wrong here... that’s not a slam on my father; it’s just the way I
choose to see things.
I guess I should give a little background first. My father was a large man; at least he was to me when I was 8 years old. He frightened me sometimes, not because he was a violent man, he wasn’t. Not because he was abusive to my mother or me, he wasn’t. He did have a rather short fuse on a large temper, but even that wasn’t it, really. He worked long hours, and when he did come home, it took a while for me to get comfortable with him again. Loving? Yes. Providing? You bet. Intimidating? Most definitely. But I loved him, and I knew he loved me. And he was (and still is today) funny without always meaning to be.
This was a man who in 1960, just a few months before I was born, informed my mother that he knew everything that the newly formed Henry Family would ever need to know about politics and sports and to prove it, made a friendly wager with Mom on the upcoming World Series between the New York Yankees and Pittsburgh Pirates by announcing “
I’ll take the Yankees, who do you want?” Her reply was something along the lines of “
Who else is playing?” The birth of their first born (namely, me) a few short months later almost didn’t happen when the Pirates won game 7 by the score of 10 to 9, and took the series.
All in all though, I’m happy to have him as Dad… doesn’t mean I’m not going to blame him for the following though.
Anyway, back to the real story at hand… this is the story of a wonderful family pet. When this story is inevitably mentioned at family gatherings and other large crowded situations, it for some reason sends my sister Linda into a tirade of bitter and angry screaming towards me. She still remembers how I tormented her when she was just a little girl. I was a mean kid, all right. I tried to explain to her that this was, is, and ever shall be a natural thing for an older sibling to do. Older sisters are mean to younger brothers too, I suppose to establish some sort of pecking order in the home. Boys on the other hand, do it just out of meanness... I mean, come on, we’re boys. We actually grow out of it around the time we start growing facial hair, and our voices deepen, and our IQs dip a little, but it was just routine for me. It was something that was so much a part of me, as ordinary and acceptable as the thought of death in an automobile accident every time I put on clean underwear in the morning, a thought for which I can thank my mom, of course.
Anyway, Linda for some unexplainable reason tends to become very agitated at the very mention of the following incident, so naturally, I would like to share that story with you today.
We lived in Austin Texas, up on the north end of town, in a 3 bedroom ranch-style home on a rather large lot. Well, it seemed large to me, but then when you’re eight years old, many things of ordinary size seem large. The front yard was well manicured, nice green grass, flower beds that my father built, a front porch that ran the entire length of the house, complete with a happy little porch swing on one end where I would spend time with my friend Payson eating oranges.
The back yard however was another story. It consisted mostly of pea gravel… little stones worn smooth by years of tumbling in streams or rivers, and it comprised the bulk of our backyard landscaping. Not a huge problem to a child who was not fond of shoes though, but still not as easy on the toes as grass.
The back yard wasn’t completely devoid of grass though, as up through all that pea gravel grew little tufts of the stuff here and there in just enough places to make it look unkempt and a little disheveled and splotchy. Well, we couldn’t have this, could we? My father would take the lawnmower from tuft to tuft and would spend about 3 seconds of hard labor mowing each little patch down. The hard part was pushing the mower around on all that gravel… kinda like trying to push a chain.
Then one day my father, being an educated man, had a better idea. He drove off in his car after announcing that he was tired of dragging that lawnmower across the gravel and that he would be back in a few hours. We gave this ominous warning its due consideration by going on with our normal activities and not giving it another thought until we heard him honking the horn from down the street, and we all gathered on the well manicured front lawn to see. He came slowly down the street with what appeared to be, and we couldn’t believe our eyes that it actually could be but it certainly looked as if it was and as he pulled into the driveway it most assuredly looked more and more as if it might be and when he stopped and opened the car door and we got a closer look it definitely turned out to be, yes it was… a small but full grown mostly white Mexican pygmy goat, about 20 inches tall, complete with horns atop the head and a hungry look on his little goat face. Dad could have come home with Elvis, and we wouldn’t have been as dumbfounded.
So it was then and there that we first met Billy (obviously not his real name, his identity has been changed to protect the innocent). This was my father’s answer to the back yard grass / pea gravel problem. Makes sense, right? Goats eat grass after all, don’t they? Sure they do.
Well Billy did his job very well. He ate the grass… he ate the bark off the trees… he ate our toys… he ate the barn… he might have eaten our hunting dogs but they were in kennels. The only thing he couldn’t eat was the chain link fence that kept him separated from the rest of the neighborhood, (and probably kept our family out of court at the same time). And of course he turned the backyard into a mess.
Now those of you who may be eating in front of your computer right now while reading this will notice how delicately I’m covering this area… let’s just say that one might think that there would be quite a bit of new grass growth from all of that new fertilizer in the back yard. There wasn’t. It was just a mess.
Our only refuge from Billy was the tree house. My dad and I built it, which is to say he built it while I watched with very little interest in the building process. My job was to hand him a hammer, or a drink of water, or something of equal importance. It was about 10 yards from the back door, very close to the roofline of our house (which presented its own set of problems), and about 10 feet off the ground. I’m not sure of the square footage of this new dwelling, but somewhere around 25 sq. feet might be close…. 5 by 5-ish. There was a railing all the way around except where the entrance into the abode was, and the steps leading up to said entrance were carefully designed and crafted by nailing 2 ft. sections of two by fours to the tree trunk. In other words… it was perfect, the bestest tree house in the history of tree houses.
I loved the tree house. I would take my sister Linda (yes, that’s her real name), up there and we would have a fine lunch of PB&J sammiches and chips and cookies and milk, while safely out of reach of the all-eating Billy.
Now, Billy was another pet to me and he and I became fast friends. We respected each other. I respected his ability to eat anything and everything that I was careless enough to leave within his reach, and he gained a respect for me that only comes from torment and bullying. I was as mean to that goat as I was to my sister… well, maybe not quite because we were friends after all, but pretty close. It was all with love though… as much love as an eight year old could muster anyway.
Linda, on the other hand, was terrified of the horns. I’m not really sure how she felt about Billy himself, but the horns sent her into a frenzied panic anytime she saw them. So when Linda wanted to go up into the tree house for an afternoon tea party with her vast collection of dolls or some such other lunacy, she would begin the journey from the back door to the tree by asking her older and most loving brother, “
Lynn, will you hold the horns???” This was akin to scraping fingernail across a chalkboard because my name always came out sounding like “
Leeeeee-uuhhnnn”. It makes me cringe even to this day, some forty years later.
But… being the wiser, stronger, and loving older brother, I was always happy to assist my weaker younger sister in anything she required. I would spend a few moments calculating the odds, which means I was wondering where Mom was, and I knew it was about time for her afternoon movie, so she wouldn’t know what was happening in the back yard for quite some time. If the truth were known, she would probably be grateful that we weren’t in the house so she could watch this movie.
Oh, you know the type of movie… one of those 4 hour movies that they’ll show one after another these days on The Lifetime Network. One of those dreadful problem movies that mostly women like. One of those movies where the hero, usually a woman, not always but about 98% of the time, a woman, this beautiful and talented and smart and good and kind and happy or so it seems woman, is the star, but she has some problem that she cannot talk about because she was brought up in an atmosphere of lies… and it can be any sort of problem… she can be a kleptomaniac, she could be a workaholic, she could have an eating disorder, she could be obsessed with trees, she may be just not getting enough sleep, or fiber in her diet, or maybe she caught leprosy on a vacation trip and doctors cured it with a vaccine but now she’s still afraid that her employers and her family will find out about it and she does not know how to cope with it… and so this problem eats at this woman all through act two of the movie, and her life gradually comes unraveled and she alienates all of her friends and her family… and there’s the scene in which someone who loves her is standing in the doorway of her darkened bedroom, where she’s lying face down on the bed and the loved one is saying “What’s WRONG??? Why can’t you tell us???” and she says “Nothing is wrong… why can’t you just leave me alone???”… but she’s suffering from this terrible, terrible, terrible problem and one day down to her last few dollars, filthy, disheveled, she goes into a bakery to buy a raspberry Danish for herself, and as she’s walking into the bakery, a man with an armload of fresh bread is on his way out, and she makes way for him and as she does, she brushes against the bulletin board that is there in the entry and a slip of paper falls to the floor, and she bends down to pick it up it’s the notice of a therapy group devoted to this very problem that she is suffering from, and they meet once a week and tonight is the night they meet in the lobby of an abandoned theater, and it’s only 3 blocks away, so she goes over to the abandoned theater, where the meeting has just started, and there’s only one seat left and it’s right in front, so she comes in and sits down, and one person after another stands up and talks about this very problem that she has suffered from her whole life and never could bring herself to talk about… this tree obsessed, eating disordered, kleptomanic, workaholic, sleep and fiber deficient recovering leprosy problem that she thought nobody else had but her… and they’re talking openly and frankly about their problem, and tracing it back to it’s roots, which is an emotionally distant father… all of our problems go back to emotionally distant fathers… they’re the cause of all of it… and she’s weeping… and everybody’s crying… so she stands up, this beautiful heroine, and she tells about her problem and talks about her father who was SO distant, who was SO ungiving… and as she talks, she sees a young man sitting in the back row, and tears are running down his cheeks… for HE suffers from this same tree obsessed, eating disordered, kleptomanic, workaholic, sleep and fiber deficient recovering leprosy problem as well, and she sees the hurt in his eyes, and this is the man who she will love, and she will marry, and they’ll be happy together… and the night before they marry, they walk along the beach holding hands, and they say “whatever happens, we’ll always tell the truth, we’ll always love each other, for who can truly love and understand us except the people who have gone through the same things and suffer from the same problem… that we… suffer… from.” Ending credits and sappy music commences.
And that (or one just like it), was probably the movie Mom was watching in the front room of the house. Who wouldn’t feel safe?
So after careful analysis of the situation, which took all of 2 seconds, I coaxed the goat to me, planted my feet, and dutifully grabbed onto those horns like a bicycle’s handlebars to allow my sister access to the tree house. Linda would ease out of the safety of the house, and walk towards the tree, one cautious step at a time, carefully… carefully… never taking her eyes off those horns. I strained with all my might and held on for all I was worth. Sweat began to pour out of my body, my muscles ached, my hands cramped… the whole world became a blur and still I held on. But this was no ordinary goat. This goat, our own little Billy, was surprisingly proficient in mathematics, for he knew exactly the halfway point between the back door and the tree, and he was patient. Oh, he put on a good show of trying to escape, but it wasn’t until Linda reached that half-way point in her journey that Billy would see his opportunity, wrench his head violently from side to side causing me to lose my vice-like grip on the horns, break free from my grasp, and then brother... the chase was on. I really did do my best to hold onto him, you know. I softly muttered “oops” to no one in particular, acted all surprised at the events unfolding before my eyes, and ran up the ladder and into the tree house to have a better view of the forthcoming action.
You really had to be there to truly appreciate the moment. This was better than any roadrunner cartoon. Linda screaming, the goat bleating that goat noise, and me laughing so hard from my perch up in the tree house that I became fearful of losing consciousness. Billy could run, and I mean run fast… that dude could easily outrun even me. Me ! ! ! I knew that my little sister whom I loved so much was never in any real danger though. Even though Linda with her short little stubby 5 year old legs was no match for him, he just seemed perfectly content to stay right behind her and only chase her around and around and around the yard, chomping and gnashing his teeth mere inches from her rear-end... for dramatic effect, I suppose.
I was safely and securely positioned in the best place to watch this harmless bit of fun take place before my very eyes, contemplating the marketing possibilities of selling tickets to the other neighborhood kids, and all the while feeling calm and at ease with the world, due to the knowledge that Mom’s movie probably hadn’t even gotten to the raspberry Danish part yet.
So… you can imagine my surprise when I heard the back screen door swing open and then slam shut, and I looked down to see my mother with her apron on and her hands covered with flour looking up at me with a look on her face that made me really believe that my life would soon be over. This comedy I had created in my own back yard had just taken a hard turn toward a Greek tragedy. All I could dare to hope for was a quick and relatively painless death at the hands of my mother. Not likely though.
She began by screaming at Linda to run toward the sound of her voice, holding the door open with one hand while brandishing a rolling pin or some other instrument of self defense against goats in the other. I saw an opportunity to redeem myself so I climbed down to rescue my sister whom I loved so much. Wouldn't you know it though, they had just passed under the treehouse by the time I reached ground level (timing is everything). After they made that last lap around the yard, I jumped between them, wrestled Billy down to the ground, and saved the day once again. Once Linda was safely within the confines of the house, Mom demanded that I get my “
soon to be extinct butt inside the house this very instant ! ! !” This was, of course, laced with the sort of language we have learned to censor from our vocabulary in this age of politically correct enlightenment. I'm still not sure what she was so upset about... I had just saved the day, hadn't I?
But, being the ever obedient child, I responded to her request by placing myself inside the house as “quickly” as I could manage. She informed me (somewhat incoherently, I might add) through clenched teeth, and barely contained urges to fling that rolling pin at my head, that I would be spending the rest of my natural life locked in my room, and followed that up with the one thing this eight year old boy never, ever wanted to hear,
“…and you will wait there until your father gets home.” Oh no ! ! ! Not that. If Mom wasn’t gonna kill me, then Dad surely would.
I went to my room and laid down on my bed. I suppose that if I were to write out my will during the few short hours I had left on this earth and left everything to Linda, they might go easier on me. Upon surveying the contents of my room, however, I concluded that there were not enough items of real intrinsic value or worth to make such a difference. My only other option was to hope for leniency. I wisely spent my time in front of the mirror practicing looks of pathetic and pitiful remorse. I got good at it too. Even managed to whip up a few tears on command.
The very look on my face said it all with clear precision.
“
Oh Mother and Father, and most of all, my sweet cherished sister whom I love more than life itself… I am so sorry the goat slipped through my grasp and caused you such anguish and humiliation. I regret that I am so weak and cowardly that I ran up a tree and out of harm’s way instead of attempting to save the very being that brings so much joy and happiness to my life. Oh, if I only had it to do all over again, I would gladly throw myself between my helpless sibling and the ferocious man-eating goat. Oh Mother and Father and most of all, my sweet cherished sister whom I love more than life itself… can’t you feel the pain and suffering in my soul for having created this time of unpleasantness in our family… can’t you understand that I am lower than the dust under your feet for allowing myself to be weak and unworthy of your love… can there not be even the smallest of the remotest of possibilities that I might live another day to enjoy my place in this, the best family in the history of families?”
That should do it. That’s the look I was able to achieve after hours of face time in the mirror. I could relax now. That look along with a few well timed tears would certainly spare my life.
But then Dad got home and everything went out the window. I could hear the sobs of my sister through the walls. This was an obvious ploy for sympathy, for just mere moments before she had been playing cheerfully in her room next to mine with her dolls. I could feel the heat coming off my mom’s face as she described in her own exaggerated and inaccurate way the events of the day. I could sense the three of them coming through the living room, down the hall, and gathering at my bedroom door with glazed looks in their eyes the way a family will gather around a table with that same glassy-eyed stare at a plump Thanksgiving turkey. Oh man, I was doomed for certain.
They barged in and I feebly attempted the look of pathetic and pitiful remorse that I was so good at a few short minutes before. The look failed me miserably… I couldn’t remember if I was supposed to cry now or at the end… was my head up or were my eyes cast to the floor… did my eyebrows raise or lower during my rehearsals… and what about my bottom lip? How far out was it supposed to be? I couldn’t remember what I’m supposed to do ! ! !
I was forced to mumble some kind of apology to my sister, and then she was excused. My dad commenced to lecture me about loving my sister and how she could have been injured and wouldn’t I miss her if something happened to her and blah… blah… blah… Mom clenched her teeth and her fists while I cowered from her death stare and tried to focus on the lessons at hand, and then she explained to my father that she would be leaving me to his mercies and that she hoped she could set one less place at the dinner table from now on. She gave me one more look that said to me, “
I told you… you either deal with me or you deal with your father. He’s going to kill you now and I’m not going to stop him this time.” And then excused herself from my presence for what I thought was the last time. She didn’t even kiss me good bye.
Yikes
After she left, Dad looked at me for what seemed like an eternity, surely to remember what I looked like after I was gone. He sat down on the bed and motioned for me to sit next to him. I meekly took my place by his side and waited. What would it be? The belt? A shotgun blast? The guillotine? Would he just take me out in the woods and return to my mother with my heart in a bag as proof that he’d taken care of “the problem”? I waited.
And finally it came.
He leaned over to me, put his arm around me, looked down at me, and said in a soft but scolding tone, “
Son, why can’t you ever do that when I’m at home? Why do I always have to miss it???” I looked up at him and he wasn’t smiling, but neither was there any real anger in his face.
Hope! There was hope that I might actually survive. I’m not going to die this day.
He then gave me a gentle reminder about goat safety and trying not to send my sister to the hospital with multiple lacerations and contusions, then he told me to stay put for a while and keep practicing that look I was obviously going for, and he would call me for dinner if he could get my mom settled down a bit. If not, he would slip a little something under the door to me when she wasn’t paying attention.
It was over. Man, was I ever relieved beyond description. I could once again look forward to a fulfilling, rewarding, and productive life of happiness and success. All was right with the world once more. My sister probably would eventually forgive me, (still waiting for
that to happen) my mom eventually started feeding me again, and after a few days locked in my room for this trumped up charge of supposed transgression and lapse of good judgment, I was allowed outdoors again to resume my childhood.
Like I said earlier... I don’t know how anyone in their right mind could ever find fault with my actions. Was it not my father who encouraged such behavior by not killing me when he had the chance? Does my sister not share in the responsibility of the day’s events by putting me in such a no-win situation?
In hindsight, maybe I could have handled things a little differently, but in any case, I learned my lesson. I was after all, an intelligent boy with a decent IQ. I was eight so I was eventually able to discern right from wrong. I loved my sister and I cherished her place in our family, so I took it upon myself to be her protector and guardian… until, that is, when a week or so later, I heard “
Leeeeee-uuhhnnn… will you hold the horns???”See? Not my fault.
Until next time…
