Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou Read online

  Some of Scarry’s books have no plots at all but fall under the category of “educational books,” that is, volumes that offer counting, letters, or colors for identification. My children particularly favor these items on Scarry’s literary menu, although I rarely manage to ask and explain my way through B or 2, perhaps, when the multitude of superfluous drawings and irrelevant activities causes a logjam of confusion that would defy Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox to untangle:

  DADDY: How many airplanes do you see here?

  WESLEY: One, Two, Three!

  DADDY: No, count again.

  WESLEY: One . . . Two . . . Three!

  DADDY: No, son. Count once more.

  VIRGINIA: [quickly] One-Two-Three. There are three, Daddy.

  DADDY: It’s Wesley’s turn to count the page.

  WESLEY: Yeah, Virginia, [with equal rapidity] One-two-three!

  DADDY: No, there are two airplanes.

  WESLEY: [accusingly] What’s this one, then?

  VIRGINIA: [supportive] Yeah, what’s this one, then?

  DADDY: Oh, I see. That’s a balloon.

  WESLEY: That’s not a balloon.

  DADDY: Yes, it is. That’s a hot-air balloon.

  WESLEY: It’s got people in it.

  DADDY: Well, yeah, but—

  WESLEY: It goes up into the air, doesn’t it?

  DADDY: Yeah, but it’s not an airplane.

  VIRGINIA: Where’s the balloon. I don’t see a balloon.

  DADDY: There’s the balloon, Virginia. It goes up in the air, and it carries people, but it’s not—

  WESLEY: What makes it go up in the air?

  DADDY: It’s a hot-air balloon. It goes up because it’s full of gas.

  WESLEY: Gas?

  DADDY: Yeah, like hot air.

  WESLEY: Like in the car?

  DADDY: No, that’s gasoline. Not gas. Gas is the . . . uh . . .

  WESLEY: Hot air?

  VIRGINIA: [blowing on Wesley] Like that?

  WESLEY: Make her stop!

  DADDY: No, not like that. Like hot air. Like . . . gas.

  WESLEY: Like a poot?

  VIRGINIA: [giggling] A poot!

  DADDY: No. Well, yes. Sort of—

  VIRGINIA: Wesley pooted!

  WESLEY: Did not!

  DADDY: Look, there are two airplanes on this page. Both have mice in them. See? This one’s a balloon. It looks kind of like an airplane, but it’s not. It’s crashed anyway.

  VIRGINIA: One, two.

  WESLEY: It’s my turn to count! Make her stop counting on my page!

  DADDY: [turning the page] Okay, how many airplanes are on this page.

  VIRGINIA: One-two-three-four!

  DADDY: No, there are three. That’s a helicopter, Virginia.

  WESLEY: Can we read the Goldbug book, next?

  Usually at this point, Wesley refuses to count any more at all, and Virginia is so fascinated by what the worm, doggie, or kitty is doing with kites, flags and windsocks that she can’t concentrate beyond C or 3. Steadfastly, I am denied permission to skip pages or provide easy answers to speed things along; and as I anxiously watch the sun rising on our evening “Weadbook!” session, I wearily manage to get up to M or 9 before I attempt to distract my wide-awake audience with the offer of a midnight snack—or breakfast.

  I have never consciously purchased but one Richard Scarry book. I don’t know of anyone who has deliberately bought more than two. But only one in the house is sufficient. Amoeba-like, they multiply right on the battered pressed wood bookshelves in a child’s room, drawing nourishment, no doubt, from the plethora of questions and abundance of curiosity they arouse in developing minds. Although I read to my children nightly and did so since Wesley was three months old, I don’t really remember reading a single Richard Scarry book more than twice in a given week. But somehow, I managed to be handed one I’ve never seen before each evening’s “Weadbook!” The tiny hands and pleading eyes that accompanied the presentation of the evening’s reading matter utterly defeated my resolve to avoid at any cost another trip down the lunacy-lined, twisting imbecility of Scarry Lane.

  Thus, every night I found myself again ponderously trying to get the Pig Family from point A to point B while explaining why rabbits walk off piers, why only one out of nine boats is sinking, where the pickles on every page come from, why the kitty dropped the nails on the road to give the hippo’s car a flat tire, and how a tiny mouse can drive a giant dump truck that spilled the pickles that distracted the kitty that dropped the nails that caused the flat that confused the dog that upset the rhino who scared the worm and caused all of the problems that plague all of the characters that live in the books that Scarry built.

  ###

  So I hate Richard Scarry’s books. But my children loved them. The blue-eyed wonder these books evoked was unrivaled by any other volumes in our library; and, I must grudgingly admit, the kids learned from them; and, I must grudgingly confess, so did I. Through his multifarious menagerie, Scarry demonstrates that all people, big and little, make mistakes and have accidents; he illustrates that everyone, no matter what station in life, faces pleasure and disaster and learns, somehow, to get through the day, even so; he dramatizes the ideal that the best attitude to take is not to blame or grieve in regret, but to learn from our actions and to improve our outlook, for tomorrow’s misadventures will probably be no less traumatic and challenging than today’s.

  ###

  Most importantly, Scarry shows that there is humor and wisdom in human folly. Scarry’s genius, wit, and sense of the absurdist dimensions of life’s comedy are perfectly designed to charm and prick the imagination of the very young. They, after all, are the audience he seeks, not some grouchy adult with one eye on the clock and who would rather be sailing off with the owl and the pussycat or eating bread and honey in the court of Old King Cole than wandering aimlessly around with the Pig Family, crawling along with Lowly Worm, and finding the ever-elusive Goldbug.

  And if I had to answer a few hundred—or thousand—questions along the way, what of it? That’s what being a parent is mostly about, and what did I have to do that was truly more important? Besides, who’s a better arbiter of the quality of what Scarry does than the children themselves? The very fact that Scarry’s mindless, comic fictions excite questions, curiosity, and attention gives them the indelible stamp of worth as children’s literature of the first order. In the meantime, the House at Pooh Corner, Mount Olympus, and Shakespeare’s magical tales were still around when the children were ready for them; somehow, I think that the sweetness and delight of Richard Scarry’s fertile imagination better prepare kids to appreciate them.

  TEA TIME ON THE GREEN: OR DOUBLE-BOGEY AT 8:00

  “A game whereby one attempts to put a very small ball

  into an even smaller hole with tools

  singularly ill-designed for the purpose.”

  —Winston Churchill

  A couple of years ago, I took up golf, more or less seriously. Well, at least more or less regularly. As a youngster in West Texas, I had played on the hardscrabble courses of our county country club (I won’t ponder the absurdity of a mostly rural county having a “country club”), but I’d found the game to be more hot and bothersome than anything like fun. Fairways consisted mostly of pounded farmland covered by a bad comb-over of weeds punctuated by rocks; greens more closely resembled worn patches of shag carpeting, haphazardly trimmed; roughs in that rustic geography consisted of mesquite thickets where rattlesnakes and devil’s claw flourished; and we thought “water hazard” meant a hose the greensman forgot to roll up. There were no sand traps; they would have been redundant, as the entire county sat on top of a gritty bed of hard-packed, drought-toughened red sand. The highlight of the whole outing in those days, actually, was a chance to hang around the pool and ogle the girls afterward.

  In truth, I’ve never been much of an athlete. I played some beer-league softball in college, but only for the beer and to ogle the girls in the stands. I�
��d bowled for a while until one of my league teammates dropped a ball on my toe and terminated my enthusiasm as well as my toenail. There was a decade or so when I dedicated myself to tennis, and I actually was decent at it; but then my knees turned into a half-pound of cracked cookies, thereby thwarting any ambitions I might have developed toward doing anything in the way of sports that required more effort than it took to watch a few innings of baseball on television. Football was never in my league, and I was too short, fat, and white for basketball to hold any temptation whatsoever. I sort of liked pool-shooting—or what is mistakenly called “billiards” in today’s parlance—but mostly in bars where I could drink beer and ogle the girls. For the most part, my idea of athletics was centered on lethargy, with a healthy dose of indolence to sustain it.

  But a few years ago, I was summoned to meet some film folks in Tucson, Arizona. The idea was that they might make a movie out of one of my novels. I wasn’t truly hopeful, but they were paying for the trip, so I figured I might as well go along. After all, I played the Lotto, and the odds against success in Hollywood were about the same. The woman who picked me up at the airport to ferry me to my hotel casually noted that our “tea-time” had been moved up to eight a.m. the following morning.

  I wanted to be accommodating and show I had a sense of humor, so I replied, “That’s okay. I prefer coffee.”

  She gave me a curious look. “No, I mean tee-time. Our tee-off time is now at eight o’clock.”

  “Golf?” I asked, now understanding and totally horrified. “You expect me to play golf!”

  Indeed she did. I was added to a foursome that included three apparently dedicated duffers. They arrived well-equipped with expensive graphite clubs and matching bags and were all decked out in their athletic sartorial best for a full round on one of the nicer desert courses of the Southwest.

  To say the least, this was disheartening. I was standing there beside a bag of mismatched, rented clubs, wearing cut-off jeans, a faded Texas Rangers tee-shirt I’d brought to sleep in, and a pair of dilapidated sneakers patched with duct tape. I made a sorry complement to the group. I didn’t even know my handicap, except insofar as my fundamental ability went. They immediately demonstrated, though, that fashion didn’t necessarily ensure ability. Far from shooting a fantastic round to match their duds, none of the three broke 100. I would have felt better about the whole outing, but I didn’t break 120, myself, even with extra mulligans, generous gimmes, and liberal applications of the “foot wedge” when no one was looking.

  But in spite of the embarrassment, which they were kind enough to laugh off, I made an odd discovery. I enjoyed myself. I had a blast, in fact. I totally forgot that it was unlikely that they would make my work into a film—and they didn’t. Still, over drinks in the “Nineteenth Hole,” we took time out from ogling the girls and watched the television screen in amazement as a (then) relatively unknown young pro named Tiger Woods made a hole in one. I was hooked. I couldn’t wait to get home, drag out my old set of sticks and get out to the links.

  ###

  Now, over the years, I’d had brief spates of insanity when I decided to take up golf and find out what all the excitement was about. My father-in-law is a pretty good golfer. I think, in fact, that at one point in his life, he shot scratch golf and was a better-than-average amateur. Sometime after my wife and I married, in a misguided inspiration to find something that he and I could do together, I bought a set of clubs from a garage sale. It consisted of some heavy Wilson irons and (real wood) woods, and I had dutifully taken them out and tried to use them to build closer bridges to the family. It hadn’t worked. Even when I applied myself, I was unable to shoot anything like a decent score. It was also somewhat humiliating to be thoroughly whipped by a man twenty-nine years older than I, especially when he only carried a 5-iron, a pitching wedge, and a putter onto the course and explained that it was one of the easier tracks in the area. He usually played it “just to limber up.”

  Part of the trouble was where I was living and trying to relearn how to play at the time. I was in Beaumont, down in deep East Texas, a region of the country where (no kidding) stainless steel is commonly known to rust. Courses down there don’t have “rough”; they have swamp. Southeast Texas swamps are treacherous, as they often appear to be dry and solid until you put a foot into them. Then you sink to your knees in slimy muck and watch helplessly while poisonous amphibians swirl around your legs and people around you start yelling for someone to go fetch a boat and some rope. On some area courses, alligators are occasional hazards; more than one potential birdie putt has been left lying next to a scaly reptile that decided that a par-three green looked like a comfy place for a nap in the sun.

  Southeast Texas golf courses are aswarm with thus far unclassified but menacing fauna. On one occasion, I actually struck a ball that landed in the middle of the fairway, when some fairly large, furry, sharp-fanged creature scurried out of the forest, gave me a snarl, grabbed my ball in its teeth, then raced off into the dense greenery. I didn’t pursue. I also didn’t take a penalty stroke. Similar hazards can be encountered on courses nearer the brinier bayous, where eel, gar, and other vicious water monsters lurk to attack unsuspecting ball-hawkers. Other problems, not the least of which are mosquitoes the size of attack helicopters and the occasional backwoods poacher mistaking a duffer for a deer, are found on many back nines in southeast Texas. Golf was not designed for such environments.

  My enthusiasm came and went in waves, even so. At one point, during a tour of Scotland, I determined to immerse myself in the history of the game by playing a round on the “Auld Course” at St. Andrews. I rented clubs and shoes, bought balls and even donned a stout rubberized raincoat. You see, the course at St. Andrews, where, traditionally, the whole absurdity began, is not exactly what one might expect, even in early July, the time of my visit. The Scots’ idea of a water hazard is the North Sea.

  That July morning, the wind off the water was coming in at a comparatively light thirty-five miles an hour. The temperatures were in the low forties, and waves crashing on the Scottish coast combined with a thick mist blowing in off the ocean to insure that any striker was thoroughly soaked before he got off the first tee. St. Andrews is a nine-hole course, which one plays twice from different tips. After a mere five holes, my glasses were frosted over, and I was shivering too hard to see the ball, let alone hit it. I also discovered that sand traps there were more like bomb shelters, and there was something about a thoroughly soused green that impeded a true roll toward the cup. Somewhere on the sixth fairway, I drove a seven-iron shot directly toward the flag, but after about forty yards up into the wind, it took a U-turn and landed behind me in the wet middle of what would have been a lake on the West Texas courses of my youth; in Scotland it didn’t qualify as occasional water.

  On the seventh hole, I finally surrendered to the elements and trudged off the course; I was greeted by a local hacker, replete with plus-fours, argyle socks, pom-pom-topped tam, and nothing heavier than a sleeveless sweater against the deluge. He smilingly assured me, “This is as bonny a day for a rund of gorf as I’ve seen in a month of Sundays.” I determined that I was not cut out for Scottish golf any more than I was for the swamp golf of southeast Texas. At least the whiskey in the club house was warming, even if there were no lasses to ogle.

  Later on, I moved to North Texas, where golf is affectionately referred to as “pasture pool.” Most municipal courses are constructed on land that only a few short decades ago was home to cotton, corn, or beef cattle; or possibly, it was a city dump during some earlier era. The few water hazards are almost completely man-made. Out-of-bounds markers are sometimes constructed of electrified barbed wire, and it’s not uncommon to hit a ball into a neighboring farmer’s stand of alfalfa. Sand for the bunkers has to be imported, and it’s usually packed tighter than concrete—if sprinklers haven’t turned them to mud—and trees are, well, little more than thorny bushes rising from large patches of poison ivy. Playing golf there,
particularly in the heat of summer, is more a matter of endurance than sport. With temperatures reaching better than 100 degrees on an average July afternoon, heat exhaustion is a fair possibility, even if one is riding in a cart.

  Of course, Texas does boast some of the best maintained and most beautiful golf courses in the world. But this is not where daily duffers like myself play. Rather than being partnered with designer-clothing-attired strikers with state-of-the-art equipment that matches right down to their ball-markers, one is more likely to be paired off with a snuff-dipping good ol’ boy in a straw hat, bib overalls and work boots who only carries five clubs with mismatched grips in a homemade bag capacious enough to accommodate the better part of a six-pack. The odd thing is that he might shoot in the low seventies, even after he’s totally sloshed.

  So, after all these miserable experiences, I gave up any notions of playing the game and began deriding it with a special form of contempt. It was a silly game, I explained to my links-enthused friends. “You hit the ball, then you chase it and hit it again, and the object is to knock the ball into a hole and lose it.” I added with conviction, “Golf is sort of like daydreaming without a satisfying fantasy.” Hence, I abandoned any notions of playing golf, except perhaps the miniature version I had to endure as part of children’s birthday parties. Then came Tucson.

  ###

  My Arizona experience changed everything. I ignored the possible fact that the course I played was private, well-manicured, shadowed by gorgeous mountains, and actually had plush grass and fluffy sand in the bunkers, that the greens were carefully tended and even the fairway sod was soft enough to invite a divot. I imagined that the conditions would ultimately rise to match improvement, and I was determined to try to master the game on some level. For several years, I took lessons, practiced, and played at least once a week, with no noticeable improvement in my score, but with no diminishing of my enthusiasm. One definition of insanity, we are reminded, is to do the same thing over and over again, but to expect a different result each time. Golf, of course, is merely another version of that. It’s perhaps the most extreme example of self-imposed mental cruelty and confirmation of personal frustration and inferiority in our society. No matter how optimistically a round starts out, at some point before the eighteen are completed, most golfers are counting the remaining holes and thinking, “Just X more greens before this misery is ended.” Why anyone claims to enjoy golf is a complete mystery to me. I can think of few endeavors in life, except maybe sex, where failure evokes such feelings of inadequacy and insecurity laced with frustration and self-loathing. Even a casual observer driving by a public course can witness otherwise rational and well-adjusted men slamming their clubs into the ground or some available tree, cursing the clouds in the sky, flinging balls or even entire bags of equipment into nearby ponds, and railing like lunatics and foaming at the mouth over a missed putt or duffed chip. Of course, dedicated players will tell you that all this is relaxing. They’ll say that it’s all about getting away from the job, out into the fresh air, and, of course, exercising, that mantra of today’s health-conscious middle-aged population.