Storytellers II

I am on location in the balmy winter air of pre-Super Bowl Jacksonville. In actuality, I just learned that the Super Bowl was going to be here today, because keeping up with football is to me as keeping up with tacos is to a green parrot. Now that I've got your attention, and your inquiries as to whether I'm legally competent enough to drive, I'll tell you that I have the most uncanny ability to be coldly logical at the wrong time. When people I love have every right to be as beyond-the-brain as I am most of the time, I say to myself, "Why? Why in the world do you have to be this way?" It's a perfectly logical question, but that doesn't make it a step in the right direction.

It's vacation time for me. This generally means that I drive quite a bit and move but little. I sat down and read Roverandom by Tolkien and some short stories by Hemingway, while I was at my future in-law's house, whiling away the hours that should be spent reconnecting to reality through my Father's loving eyes, instead of visiting worlds of fantasy that I spend too much time in anyways. I like stories, a lot. In my freshman year, I received a kindly deja vu experience when some storytellers came to Carson Newman. It wasn't the real deja vu, it was incredibly reminiscent though, of kindergarten. Storytime in kindergarten, when we all sit indian-style on carpet squares that are about three-hundred years old. And you run as fast as you can to get the blue shag one, because it feels great to sink into that two by three foot scrap of old carpet that smells like your great-uncle's creaky house where you go every Thanksgiving. You run hard to get it, until the teacher reminds you and everyone else that running is forbidden, so you must go back to where you were and start again. And you turn around and almost go back, to about ten feet from where you were. Then you turn and walk stiffly as fast as possible, like a little pewter toy soldier - only being stiff to prove that you're walking when you can really only run that fast. And you get to the stack of carpet squares first and with the most excitement and it's the fifth one down in the stack, the only blue shag carpet square in the whole bunch. And you tug hard at the corner that's sticking out from under the others and the four on top of it come crashing down on the floor to bring the teacher's programmed reply, "Pick the other ones up and put them back..........Adam." But I didn't mind. I got the blue shag carpet square and I held it under my arm even though it was three-quarters of my size long, and I picked the others up the best I could. And I didn't even mind when Mackenzie Taylor came and tugged at the blue shag carpet square under my arm, even though I had gotten there first, hadn't I? I owned it by rights until the story was over, and nobody could take it from me justly, and justice was never wronged, was it? But I said, "It's mine," and I jerked it away, and walked proudly to my place in front of the teacher, where I sat on it - there in the presence of the adjudicator of all things kindergarten, not even Demetrius Patterson could take it from me, not even Joshua Tolls could take it from me, I was the king of it until the story was over. I sat on it leaning against the shelf with the plain wooden blocks on it, and I got one in my hand - a triangle - while Ms. Smiley (that really was her name) read Ms. Nelson is Missing, because we were going to have a substitute tomorrow, but we didn't know it yet. I held that block where Ms. Smiley couldn't see it behind my leg, and I felt the coolness of the corners, so my hands could do something instead of getting me into mischief. And I sat on the blue shag carpet square that smelled like my great-uncle's creaky old house, and I held a triangle woodblock and heard a story, and I was king.