No Tall Tales

No Tall Tales

     by Shortense Hind-Bottom

Bunyans hurt, they say, but have never, praise God, had one myself. It feels as if someone's pulling a fish hook out of the ball of the foot. Or like hiking with broken glass under the heel. Or someone tapping a little hammer on an aching molar. 

        This is how McDairmid started off his Sunday school lesson March 5, 1009, the year Ballyhunagden castle was completed. The year that saw little King Harold the Grunter and his enormous wife, Magdridsdottir, establish their seat in its spacious courts. This was also the year peace finally came to CoMeade on the northeast shore of Bailedonague island. Till then, since the fifth or sixth centuries, wars had inevitably sapped them of energies and foodstuffs. Now, edibles aplenty in the markets. Even early already here in March produce from trade with the English had doubled since the previous year and everyone seemed happier than they had been for decades.

        McDairmid looked around the room of little ones, May, Sandra, Wanda, Wendy, Sindy, Pretzella, Dawn, Carabelle, Joy and Ron and continued.

        "See my foot, for instance," he said. He undid his laces, took off his boot, slipped off his ledderstrempf and raised his right foot, sole up high enough for the group to see it well. 

        "This foot has walked very far.  Thousands of miles has it seen the earth pass beneath itself. It has thought not one thought in all that time. No, not a single conception has it generated in its fifty-three year sojourn. What does that tell you ladies? What can you incidentally glean from that?" The room smelled of his socks and his skin. Everyone but McDairmid felt a little dizzy.

         "'Put your foot down, it smells'?" Or, "'please don't tell us. We pretty ones don't want to know firsthand what an old foot has gone through'? But halt, there is some method to this. I shall now draw a relevance, an interesting moral, from this little display and prelude. May I put my foot down now? Aaahhh, thank you."

        With that McDairmid lowered his foot, took a deep breath and told them the following.

        "Ladies, young generators of future mankind,, I wish to inform you that this foot is happy! Yes! Without bunyans, without corns or rickets, without hideous growths of any sort and without even a serious case of itching callouses it stands erect and proudly before you as an emblem of the joy of thoughtlessness. Do you begin to see my drift?" He further lowered the foot that he had earlier raised for them to inspect. Unblemished, it lay before them as calmly as a sleeping infant, as trusting as a whale pup stuck to the side of its mother lumbering through the deep.

        "Joy is not to be had by hard thinking. That is the moral for today. Joy, however, may be taken through a combination of thought and action. Viz., I run, jump, wiggle toes and so on as action and my foot sighs with relief after what it has had to endure for the previous half hour when it was being held up to my head as a catalyst for the thoughts that I've been expounding before you. So, yes, a mixture of the two works its small delights. Joy may be gotten by a predominance in you of rest and laziness where the foot sees nothing but sky and gorse and bedsheets. That is, sick, sad, resting, lazy, unpredisposed and so on, it lays about in a fallen fashion. Then, too, the foot feels joy and release from care. But, try to make that foot privy to each of your head's concerns, lifting it to your ears each time another fancy hums through the spaces between them, and it will soon complain. It hates such compulsive attention to thinking. So I give you the truth, younglings, that you will derive more joy out of a thoughtlessness than out of a busy intellectuality that engages all parts of you, even ones I have as of yet not chosen to appropriate for my small fables and lessons. That will come. Let's see. What body part should we, Fiona, make the centre of our discussions next Sunday? Well, maybe that will be clearer for you on the day itself. Class dismissed. We shall see you at 10:30 sharp next week of a Sunday.