To Norman

To Norman,
     by Douglas the Unknown
 
Oh, yes, buccaneers and buried gold! I remember that feeling of treasure hidden somewhere on an island and the longing, the overwhelming desire, for an adventure that would take me away from the mundane endlessness of life in my home. I remember Gordon Friesen and myself dreaming about having each a horse and riding south over the border and all the way down to Texas on it. We were fairly serious about it at the time, aged maybe fifteen, (actually studying maps and making lists of the food we’d need and clothes to bring), and that will have been just at that cusp of maturity where we were beginning to feel the power and possibilities of individual accomplishment. (Horseriding across America! How strange an (im)practicality. The impractical presenting as the practical! You had that real practicality much earlier, as the completion of the treasure Island sidearm indicates to me. And you had other accomplishments (small, sometimes, but real)  such as the making of corncob pipes. Yes, I did make one myself with you, but I remember that it was your idea to go in the cornfield and find big cobs for the bowls. I don’t think I was overly assertive in my imagination and thus did not actually initiate or accomplish specific practical activities. I was more able to effect the visualization of dreams, daydreams, such as wending my way deep into some lonesome woods and building a log cabin where I would spend my time collecting and burning firewood, reading books, writing an odd love poem and, of course, making and drinking homemade wine. As far as practical accomplishments went I can’t remember any that I initiated. This is not a lament so much as an observation about how I existed. About the modalities of my (and your) existence. 

In 1969

 In 1969
     by Douglas the Blind

In 1969 Marty travelled with me to British Columbia by CN rail at Christmas time. She had never been to British Columbia before and I was excited to show her the mountains. Marty had just turned 19 a month before and, being as young, intelligent and pretty as she was, I had the most agreeable companion I could have wanted. The  intention was to visit my parents who lived in Abbotsford where they had moved the year before. Our excitement was exquisite and that excitement can even now always be revisited in the letters that I have kept from those days. The ones I wrote are gone but the ones Martha wrote to me I still possess. 
     As I am sure you know, the ride to BC begins in Manitoba with farmland now all covered in snow, flat as the proverbial pancake. By the time the locomotive enters Saskatchewan no sign of trees exists at all but only the flattest of countrysides where, as they say about such a geography, you can watch your dog run away for a whole week. 
     Alberta arrives as expected with the only new feature in the landscape being the donkeys pumping oil. All throughout Alberta’s flatland these pumpers rise and fall, rise and fall, arriving forever in the distance ahead and disappearing in the distance behind. Eventually, however, the donkeys disappear and instead the antelope zip about among hills that increasingly rise higher until they no longer may legitimately be named hills but just low mountains; and then, sudden as a tidal wave, they plunge upward and become Mount Robsons and other such impressive promontories.
     Of course, Marty had seen hills before but when we saw our first mountains she grew keenly interested. That wonder only increased as we passed Banff and then eventually came to the area around Revelstoke and Golden where the mountains and valleys rise to such great heights and fall to even greater depths.
     Eventually we made Hope and then Abbotsford and the home of my parents. The following day was Christmas Eve. I don’t recall everything that happened that evening but I do know that it was a joyful time. None of us children, none of the five of us children, knew the penury under which my parents labored. They graciously hosted us as if they were not pinched for money. But that is a story for another time. 
     Christmas morning came and the opening of presents. I had purchased Marty a special gift that, on looking back, I see typifies me and my personality and more than hints at the irregularity of the decisions I tended to make in those days. During the course of the distribution of the presents my turn came to give mine to Martha. I handed the package to her. She pulled out the gift and held it up for everyone to see. It was a sheer and very short nightie and bottoms set, lime green in colour with pink piping throughout. Even I felt a great sense of embarrassment at this moment, at the effect it had on everyone else. My father and mother were speechless. My brother and sister were quiet. Martha said not a word. I looked about and said something like, “She said she didn’t have anything to wear for the nighttime so I thought I would buy her something.” The embarrassment is long gone but I still sense its feelings when I remember it. 
     But most important, I had purchased a ring for Martha back in Winnipeg and the previous evening we’d had dinner at a restaurant, The Villa, on the outskirts of Vancouver. And, when I proposed, she said, “yes.” That evening left me deeply humbled and joyful. So, the giving of the nightie I thought was appropriate considering our great news, news that we were now a couple.
       That is the story of both my first trip to visit British Columbia with my love and the moment that I and Martha became engaged. Ent sohw jink et met uns en deij doejw ant en deij tieet. 

Not Hamlet

 Not Hamlet

     by Dr. Polonius Shelley

Down in a little village near the ancient city of Kiels lived a young man whose father had recently died and whose mother was about to marry again, even though the funeral had so recently passed (attended by members of all classes from dozens of miles around). Colin, as he was affectionately called by all who knew him well, was not the only sad one in the village. His brothers, too (and there were many), all grieved equally with him. It was Colin, however, whose grief took precedence and made impressions. He sighed, equivocated, spoke of murder and mayhem, called out to friends importunate things that made them out to be responsible for it all, and thrashed about in bed at night.

    The story of the death is easily told. An uncle, Merlin Whelps by name, of Colin‘s father’s side, his father‘s eldest and by no means most handsome brother, had arrived on a visit at their fair village in the springtime exactly a year before, bearing gifts for both royal father and mother. For father it was the French razor he had always admired and had considered on occasion, in his cups, to send an emissary to Paris to obtain. For mother it was two gifts: a négligée of filmy, pink silk brought up some years back from Istanbul by daring traders and sold to Merlin’s grandmother’s husband, a Mennonite whose Russian homeland had by then long lost all its hold on him, both hereditary and supernatural, and whose laughter at all things bedroom astonished the court and attracted the farming girls living nearby at the foot of the castle hill. The second was a shell of exquisite colour and texture, a creamy lacquer thing as smooth as smooth as can be, with the oddest shape imaginable, long and slender as an egg laid by a snake who wished to be a duck. When she held her ear to it she could hear the seas’s wave’s ebb and rise, faint, and beyond the pales of anxiety. 

     No one knew the disaster to come, nor how near it hovered, lurking in time’s shadows. No one guessed the horror about to drift down over their lives all, and none could have seen, without the help of seance or druid, the terrors about to break their sky-crafted chains, chains even Hephaestus would have been proud to call the product of his own hammer. 

     One morning, Colin, lying in bed still asleep, woke to the roar of his father’s voice from another part of the castle, near the keep. He could not decide whether to get up and go to his assistant or to leave him alone. He had on other occasions made the mistake of arriving to help his father when help was not needed, and decidedly unwelcome. Now he waited. Then the roaring diminished. Finally his mother knocked him up and the two hurried round to see what was the matter.

     The king was dead! A pale liquid draining down the side of his cheek under one ear provided the only sign of unnatural activity. Mother and son rolled him over. They cried. They held each other in dismay. And they began a long search for the murderer. Murder it seemed likely to have been. They did in the end ask vainly of Merlin to advise them, though they told him nothing of their suspicions, for by now uncle was king and their heads would have rolled had he even inhaled the smallest whiff of suspicion. Soon, though, too soon, Colin‘s mother married the new king. What was she to do? There was no other remedy. The queen must be for a king, a king must be for a land, and a sad prince must be for the death of a king father at the hands of a most unkingly uncle. Colin‘s lover, Soffula, already conditioned to expect years of odd behaviour from this family, made herself scarce and immediately departed for a year-long stay at a sanitarium abroad when she heard of her lover’s desperate difficulties. That was fine by Colin. He had hurts to resolve, griefs to console, without the busy requirements of a teenage relationship.

    He grew sadder and less joyful as the year rolled on. His mother’s wedding had taken all the salt remaining to him out of his blood. Now, pale, lacking sanguinity, uncertain about his next move or the state of heaven’s moods regarding kingly death, he waited. He waits still, moody, deranged, sadly pondering himself and the wrongs heaven has done him. He will die before forgetting that fathers, kings or not, die

Mr. and Mrs. Stoez (Friends for Life)

Mr. and Mrs. Stoez (Friends for Life)
     by Mr. Safety R D 

Good people these two. Our neighbours on the north. The Stoezes. We felt closest to Mr. Stoez. He loved having us over to his house. Norm, Ronn and I would sit on the floor in front of their little TV set, backs against the couch, and watch two or three episodes of “Gunsmoke,” “Have Gun Will Travel,” or “The Rifleman.” And….we’d smoke our pipes!
     Yes, we actually sat there smoking our homemade corncob pipes at the age of 14 or 15. Unbelievable, really. And old man Stoez had no criticism of it or us. He himself continuously smoked Old Chum roll-your-owns. He enjoyed our company I could tell. The living room itself was dark as dark could be, with wallpaper ancient and tobacco stained, with a couch almost as venerable as the house. And with Mrs. Stoez periodically standing in the kitchen doorway watching the television set while she was also peeling potatoes, sweeping the floor or cooking something on the stove. She wore always what must have been her only dress, a dress in which fashion had never played a part. And Mr. Stoez. So taciturn he barely ever said a word. He wore the same outfit day after day, year after year: a green jacket faded with daily use, an old checked shirt beneath that and 30 year old pants with suspenders and a button fly. But what I remember most about his attire was his tie. He wore it every day, without fail, a tie that must have been colourful once but now shone black with handling, like my own and only church pants, ironed so frequently they reflected light.
     These two kind friends not only tolerated us three boys but encouraged us, gave us courage to be alive instead of only determined by our moral environment, and enlivened us by not telling my parents about our activities. They thought of us as people. If my mother or father smelled the tobacco smoke on me, I would simply explain that Mr. Stoez smoked all the time inside and that’s what they were smelling on my clothing. I would go to the trouble of inventing a lie because in my house smoking was not allowed. Smoking was a punishment offence. Smoking was somehow equated with sin. Norman, Ronn and I never felt sinful about our use of tobacco, although we felt, or I should say I felt, guilty about having to lie to my parents. But I did not feel guilty enough to actually quit smoking and quit lying. Our neighbour’s house with its ancient smells and furniture and wallpaper ambiance was a haven for this 14-year-old. Here I was certainly happy! And that’s probably why I still like to smoke to this very day.

Unsettled

Unsettled 

      by Stranger Doug  MA PhD

So unsettling, so ludicrous, so stupid! This misadventure of my mother's begins earlier than I had knowledge of it. I know about it only from that moment on when mom is blindsided by the sudden development in her life that destroys her hopes. What she has counted on to provide new joy, to free her from the worthlessness she has felt ever since she was sent away from home at a tender age to work as a maid for another family is a chimera, a mirage, a blinding instead of a clearing of sight.

    Mother arrives unexpected at her fiancé’s house to surprise him with a rare evening together. She and he (call him Cornelius for now) have been engaged for some months now and she has been preoccupied planning their upcoming wedding. Of course she’s looking forward to the day when she will be able to say goodbye to her cloying life in an overlarge family. So, eager and hopeful, she knocks on Corny’s door. But no one seems to be home. Because the door is unlocked she steps inside and calls his name. No answer. She feels that something isn't right so she opens his bedroom door and walks in on Corny having sex with her best friend. 

    Hers has been a house of cards. She runs outside and begins to walk. Cars stop and people offer her a ride but she hardly notices them. She walks and walks and eventually becomes conscious of the dark and that she is heading in the direction of the town closest to her home, a distance of maybe ten miles. In her best shoes. She arrives there, but that may well be the last place she ever arrives anywhere, really. 

     Eventually, she meets my father and they are married. It is a marriage of convenience for her. It allows her to put a sort of good light on her future. But growing up, I always wondered why my father worked away from home morning till night, 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM six days a week. He was seldom home. 

    When he did come home late, mom would tell him about this or that bad thing that her children had done, and ask him on occasion when the misdemeanour had been bad enough to go downstairs and give Douglas or Rudi a spanking. He did that. He obeyed her in that, though he hated to. Shame. The shame a good man feels when he knows that he’s been away, and away and away, in order to not see his wife’s troubled eyes. He spanks out of personal desperation at himself and what he got himself into in life, he, a man so filled with the desire to do good and to find love. To find love, that was my father. So he runs from unlove in his wife. From the unlove that trauma has forced on his wife. Catch twenty two if ever there was one. 

     I recall in myself more sadness and irritation about my life with my parents then happiness. I don't know if there was any happiness in me concerning my family. And this from a being full to overflowing with the need to be loved and to love in return. Oh, there were some good times such as Christmas but that is always a good moment for a child when there is a tree decorated, with the knowledge that a few presents will be under it on Christmas day. I remember enjoying playing table tennis with my younger brother, Rudi. I loved driving Old Henry, a 1951 Ford flathead that dad had bought so mom would be free to get around without having to wait for him to get home from his Raleigh’s sales. But most of all, I enjoyed the fun that I had with my friends in the village of Altona, Norman and Ronn. And there was also my friend in the next yard, Lorna. She and I had a special shout that would let the other know when we were able to come over to play. Mom seemed outside of this world, nervous, easily upset, judgemental, preoccupied (as traumatized people tend to be) not especially kind, and worried mainly about where dad might be at any time of the day. I found my happiness away from home.

I Learned To Swim at Nine

 

I Learned to Swim at Nine

     by Frogleather Doug 

I learned to swim at about nine, in Buffalo Creek, a half mile west of Altona Village. I waded in and got down on my hands and knees and crawled along with my chin up to keep from swallowing water. The water was cloudy and thick with mud churned up by the cows that came to this pool to drink. Weeds at the bottom tickled me and my hands and knees sunk into mud at each movement I made. I remember not enjoying the sensations, until I realized with a great shock that sometimes I seemed almost to be floating and then that, by flapping my arms some, only my knees needed to touch. My upper body stayed above water! Then, after a bit of this I began experimenting lifting my knees and at the same time flailing my feet and legs a moment while I held my breath, to keep the swamp water out of my mouth. I remember the lurching of joy in my chest, the pure pride exhilaration that flowed suddenly through me! I was free of the ground, skimming (sort of) a little above earth without any part of my body touching it! I kept silent about it, as if announcing my new skill would somehow burst it apart. Happily I float-flapped along until we kids headed home on our bikes. Ah, the secret pleasure of the knowledge of me swimming, me, as i peddled homeward. I can swim, I can swim, I can swim I chanted quietly to myself all the way to my house. 

Sent from my iPhone

Jonathan and the Muskellunge

Jonathan and the Muskellunge

     by Douglas Reimer (the lingering lunger)

Jonathan would have been 18 or 19 years old when he had a memorable fishing experience at our holiday property on Blueberry Lake, Northwest Ontario. The country there teems with black spruce and white pine. Frightfully high granite cliffs border water the colour of the light blue skin of blueberries  He arrived that summer together with his friend Dietrich and the two of them set out one afternoon down the sluice which empties into Blue Creek. Jon’s desires had been influenced by stories he had heard of huge muskellunge in Blueberry told by our neighbour across the bay. This neighbour, Ben Peters, sometimes recounted a fishing instance when he latched onto one so large that, when in desperation he jammed his feet up against the boat transom and tried reeling in, the musky just kept taking out more and more line until finally there was none left on the reel and it tore itself loose. When he reeled in his now weightless line he saw to his astonishment the hook bent almost straight. This heavy muskelunge hook he hung on the wall for anyone to see who wouldn’t believe him. Jonathan will have been duly surprised and excited seeing it there. Definitely a believer! To get back to Dietrich and Jonathan and their fishing experience. Once they reached Blue Creek they began throwing in their lures. They walked along the riverbank and cast and then walked some more and cast some more until suddenly Jon had a huge hit. The way he  told it, Dietrich kept calling advice encouraging him to get his rod tip back up and to keep the fish from moving towards some overhanging and submerged tree branches. Once the fish got to the branches there would be no chance of getting it into the open again. Jon did his utmost to contain it, knowing for certain by now, considering how tenacious and feisty it was, that it was a muskellunge. Then, sure enough, to their huge disappointment, it got itself into the tangle of branches, and though Jon tried with all his skill to shake and pull and jimmy it out of there, nothing could free the fish. Finally, he had to tear the line. So it isn't true, Jon sometimes announces, that I have not caught one of them. I did catch one. I just didn't get it in. Jon also tells me almost every summer that he still has not brought a muskellunge into the boat. Maybe we will have to change that this coming summer. Maybe we’ll have to drift out towards Printing Lake where they say this elusive species are the biggest and the most plentiful! We’ll see what the future brings, eh Jon?
 

These Are

These Are
    by Weeping Willy Reimer

Very important stories, the ones that made my mother sad, the ones that disabled her, the events that took her quiet and replaced it with unquiet. These stories made her and then made me, since the life the mother lives causes the life the child lives, as surely as the froginess of a frog foretells the froginess of its offspring.  Not presuming to know my mother’s sorrow, I am able still to rake together a few of the incidents that produced it and that willy nilly became my sorrow (as if, true to the rules that govern the maternal, she conceived it, gestated it and bore it). This sorrow, my own sorrow, I am able to know. 
    First (after her mother's death) among those events that left their scars on her, that constituted her being smacked about by history, was her father’s precipitous remarriage. Picture this. Mother is ten. She has just lost her mom and is left with only her father and eight siblings. She is the second oldest girl and now, instead of having to help her mother with some of the housework, she must not only plan but do all of it. The mother who loved her, who gave her that wonderful warmth of protection from all uncanny things suddenly gives way to a needy father whom duty requires her to nurture and love a father who in no way knows how to take over the duties of child-protection. A father preoccupied with the throbbing of his own losses. He soon remarries and takes to wife a woman who brings with her six more children and then quickly “enriches” the recreated family with four more. The original children (Mary/mom among them) experience only the new mom’s practicality. No motherly love. No, “There, there, Mary. Everything will be all right again and, you know,  you will always feel your mother’s love from where she is looking down at us in heaven.” Insead, in a blur of time, twenty bodies crowd around their mealtime table, a table of strangers she has to help feed. Oh! the resentment! Oh! the “Why me!” Way too young for such a load of responsibilities, she takes over the duties of caring for a huge family that a short time before she had simply to belong to. No belonging now, just duties. What was benign is now malignant.
    Then, the most terrible thing happens to her. For reasons that she never made clear to me, she is chosen among all of the eighteen children to be the one who has to leave home to go far away to work for another family as a scullery maid. 
     This she told me, she resented being selected to leave home and hearth. She resented it so much that she repeated over and over the fact of her abandonment. Why me, why not Tina, why does it have to be me that they chose? I hated working for that family. They treated me like dirt. If something went wrong in the family, something like, for instance, a broken dish or a burnt shirt from ironing, I was always blamed. It might've been one of the other girls that did it, but I was blamed. I was never good enough for that mother. She disliked me, she made her own girls feel important, but they were lazy. They did none of the hard work around the house. I had to do all the washing up of clothes and dishes, I had to make meals, I had to milk the cows and shovel manure, and on and on. Then, to make matters worse, there was a hired man who would come into the barn when I was milking cows and he would try to do things to me. I won't tell you what, but I couldn't do anything to stop him. The mom and dad wouldn't believe me even when I told them. They blamed it on me as if I wanted his attention. And I became so bitter that I had to be the one working away from home and the others could happily be at home together sharing the workload. I was so very sad inside. And I had no one to comfort me, nobody to listen to me cry and I cried and cried and cried.
    This is the context of my own life, this, these first three traumas that hurt my mother in her childhood. But there were more than three. A few more factors contributing to my mother’s early heaurtache and thus to my longings will occupy some of the writings to come

 Cottonwoods and Tiger Lilies
     by Big Blind Dougie Thornton 

Mother wiped my nose, snotty with crying, put iodine tincture on my cheeks where the bleeding had stopped and sent me back outdoors, three bandages on my face and glasses taped up in three places with white roll tape. 
     We neighbourhood kids had been playing tag. There were Norman Schmidt, Ronn Enns, Larry Enns (brother to Ronn), Jolene Toews, Helen Ginter, Gwen Reimer my sister, Lorna Klippenstein my next door neighbor, her sister, Verna, myself and Peter Hiebert. My turn to chase the others came around. After finally tagging someone I’d spend the “escaping” time in frantic action, running here and there in sudden, frequent, short-lived  bursts of determination, like a deranged Amelia Bedelia, repeatedly and irregularly jumping up and down, turning cartwheels and somersaults and sundry other frenetic, affected tumbling feats (enough to make the head spin dizzily for much of the game.)
     Now, at some moment during my "itness,” tearing along for all I was worth, I made a huge error in judgement. I ran headlong and face-first into one of the massive centenary cottonwoods, of which our lawn had four. One second I sped effortlessly along; the next I stood stock still, briefly reflecting on the cause of the change of my momentum before the screaming started. Oh! The pain! My, oh my, the agony accompanying the sudden flattening of the face! The cottonwood’s two-inch thick bark, deeply grooved and  rougher than that of any other tree I know, grinds and flays the skin of the face when it contacts it, especially at a boy’s top speed. I later found my glasses in three pieces nearby. My face needed attention from mom, I knew.  Since I intended to keep playing after going inside for repairs to my face, but didn’t know what to do about the broken specs, I looked around for a safe place, laid them down and promptly forgot the location.
     “Mom! I can’t find my glasses.” Me. I looked so silly at eight, sporting ankles too thin to hold up socks, cowlick, very big ears sticking out at ninety degrees to my head, a pinched expression on my near sightless face, uncertain where to search and whether I’d see them if I did find the right spot. 
     “Where have you looked?” Mom. She knew, of course, how sending me sans eyeglasses to find anything was pointless. I’d wander aimlessly about the yard as only a myopic kid can do who could see nothing without visual aids, mindlessly peering into the rain barrel, climbing the tree to the treehouse because maybe I’d left them there (as if!), intermittently circling the last place that I remembered seeing them, at the scene of the accident and, in between moments if searching, performing a series of cartwheels and handstands to stave off boredom. Soon many of the kids playing tag had returned at our request to help search. Hardly an inch of the yard remained unscrutinized. But nothing. And then a cry went up from Gwen that she’d found them.
     “Where were they!” Mom, her hand on my upper arm, pinching hard enough to keep me at attention. 
     “Mom! That hurts!” I hadn't yet learned the desire of the frustrated parent needing to exact some small gesture of revenge at the sort of unnecessary distraction I’d mindlessly forced on her. 
     “Under the tiger lily.” Gwen. At 6 years old she found all the eyes on her exciting. Jumping up and down she called it out in a clear, high voice. Mom, of course, needed to hear it again. Gwen led the whole bunch of us to the edge of the garden, lifted the branches and leaves and pointed to the exact spot. It all seemed so stupid now, knowing that I’d done such a pathetic thing. Emblematic. A foretaste of many, many other times in decades to come when I grovel and slink because I’ve broken something I shouldn’t even have touched, been found out at one of my various transgressions, been unluckily unable to state my disagreement clearly when someone follows a religious opinion with “Right?”, or been accused by someone of ignoring important boundaries (having thought I was not being observed). Ah, humanity. Ah, humanity!
     

No Cad

 No Cad
     by the Reverend Leigh James Douglas                  
     Brown-Reimer

Nesbitt wished that he’d taken communion Syunday when he’d decided against it at the last moment. He chaffered now in his guilt and felt a modicum of shame. Not enough of shame, however, filtud in for him to hurry anywhere to make up for it. No need to attemd church unlesse you felt the need for it in the very sould of your beeing, he thought distractedly. 
     “Any way you cut it,” he said aloud at the mirror, shaving, “one must decide for or against church-going in the end.” He had been a religious man for many, many years, faithful to the communion, to the tithe, to the charitable codes, and to the various requirements that the Catholic institution possted on the foyer bulletin board for its members.
     A robin sat at his window now, regaling him with song, telling of a sweetheart lost in the South, nevermore to be found. It told then also of brotherly love and the ruin such passion brought to the hapless individual. 
     “Do not love your brothers,” he cheeped with insistence and flew away.  
     “For goodness sake,” Nesbitt said aloud to the walls. “Do we have to bring in gray sex each and every time we speka with anyone? For the love of Pete!” He turned from the window and put on his hacket. He would walk as far as the whaarf and back again for his constitutional. He took it rain or shine, and usually lit his pipe for the hour outside. Today his meerschaum with its intricate carving of an Asian holy man. Birds immediately spoke to him, a dog followed for a short distance, nearly at his heels, a duck quackered in the alley beside the tobacconist’s, and further down the street near the haberdasher‘s, gunfire erupted, but it came from a television set in a house with a  window open. He got to the docket and turned and went back home where he entered his garage and backed his car out. He would travel for a while, a day or maybe more.
      I will return by Suynday is that if what I want, he thought. If not, I will not attemd church again until the need for it returns to me and then I will re-decide. He came home Monday, a day after Suynday and that solved the immediate problem. So, this week he had not attemded church, and when next Suynday came around, he again travelled and did not attemd. He became in this way a non-attemding churchgoer who seldom ever again in his whole life stuck his head inside a holy buidling. He lost all interest in churches, in church history, in travelling to see the holy lands, in Mesopotamia, in Muslimo-Christian relations, in bilbical allusions, in the story of the three wesimen cameling to Bethlehem to see the holy baby, in the innocence of lambs, and in all things religious or iconographic.
      Now, on April 2, 1986, on a clear day with the birds beginning to chant once again, he left for a rendezvus with Satan. Satan met him and proclaimed him his own. Nesbitt resisted the black-dressed apparition and told him that if he persisted, he would begin attemding church again. The devel backed down and left him. Nesbitt went to the chocolate shop close by to catch his breath and decide what to do and then went home to selep. His dog, Nester, barked at him, unaccountably. The canary lay on its back in the cage with its legs up. The tap in the kitchen ran at almost full volume. The radio would not work and he had evnetually to buy a new one. The appliances all quit that summer and by the fall he had a house full of new toasters, TVs, gadgets, exercise equipment, and lights. Then he dieed and the church buried him in a cemetery near the tobacconist’s.
     After he passed his friends and relatives remembered him at his wake.
     “He was a handsome man,” a female acquaintance remarked. “He stood 6 foot two in his stocking feet.” She nodded and looked about but no one else seemed interested in his physical satture so she gave it up. 
    “I never saw him get irate,” the priest from the Catholic church said. Everyone agreed and nodded and began to speak at once. He seemed, as far as the general opinion went, to have been a saint and one whose personality demanded resect. He had once  been bitten by a dog and no one had heard even a single curse word. A bird once shat on his corned beef sandwich in the park as he ate it and he refreained from loud reververance. Kids might walk across his grass in the spring and he spoke not a phrase in anger. Never had he done much to impress the opposite sex that he was a cad or villain.
    All agreed that he was clearly someone worth burying and they did that, and he slept peacefully for many a year.