Read Online Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life by Tom Robbins - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Tom Robbins
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and a boy to boot, my attitude toward them had naturally been one of indifference. Benign neglect. Now, however, having suddenly been put in charge of their physical survival, I was totally prepared to shepherd them into the forest and shelter them there; to guard those girls all night if necessary. All night? Maybe several nights. Hey, maybe a week! Who knew how long the fiends in that car -- be they slobbering maniacs, a band of robbers, or, more likely, Japanese spies (the war in the Pacific was raging then) -- would occupy our home? At some point, I might have to sneak into the house and cut Mother free of the ropes with which they’d surely bind her, particularly if, while stealthily foraging for food scraps in the garbage can out back, I should detect sounds of torture, a situation that might necessitate hand-to-hand combat.
Armed with a dull kitchen knife and a keen imagination (the wild horse was out of the chute now and good luck to the cowboy who’d try to break it or the rodeo clown who would distract it), I was projecting one heroic scenario after another onto the screen of my mind, reminding myself that I was born for adventure.
It was right about then that Mother returned to announce that the car had started up and driven away. “Maybe they’ll come back,” I said. Judging from the scowl on Mother’s face, she was all too aware of the note of hope in my voice.
Though she never said as much, our intruders probably had been young townspeople in immediate need of a secluded spot to swallow alcoholic libations, each other’s saliva, or both. It would be a few years before I learned that illicit drinking and making out were also adventures of a sort, ones for which I had alarmingly more aptitude than for the thwarting of Japanese spies.
9
fright or lite
One Halloween midnight when my father was in his early twenties, he and some buddies went to the home of a slightly older, recently married friend, quietly dismantled the fellow’s new Model T Ford, climbed up and reassembled it piece by piece on the roof of the house. (Cars were not so complicated in those days, but it was still quite a feat.)
The following morning, as the distraught groom was telephoning the Blowing Rock police to report a grand theft auto, a wildly gesticulating neighbor rapped on the window and beckoned him outside. As the men stared up at the shiny black vehicle, perched now like Edgar Allan Poe’s nightmare between two chimneys, they could only shake their heads and mutter, “Halloween.”
If in their voices there was consternation, there was also resignation and even a poorly disguised trill of admiration: it had been a daring, perfectly executed whopper of a prank on a night consigned to pranksters, a night ruled by the Lord of Misrule, a night when unsettled spirits of the dead squeezed through a crack in the space-time continuum, demanding notice and a bit of mischievous fun, often temporarily occupying the all-too-willing bodies of young Western males.
Nowadays it’s Halloween lite, all treats and no tricks, the dead driven back into the underworld by candy companies, liquor stores, Hallmark-card sellers, costume merchants, and understandably concerned owners of vulnerable private properties. Believe me, I’m seldom one to pine for the “good old days,” but when I was growing up much mischief was afoot on October 31, and ol’ Jack was alive in the lantern. Privies would be overturned, gates unhinged, penned chickens liberated, tires deflated, doorbells mysteriously rung, lawn shrubbery festooned with toilet paper, homes pelted with eggs; and every shop window in town thickly soaped, generally with pseudocryptic graffiti resembling today’s adolescent “tags.”
With long roots in antiquity and the human psyche, Halloween was the one night of the year when humanity openly acknowledged universal dread, honoring the departed even as it trembled at the rattle, real or imagined, of their bones; a celebration in which
Armed with a dull kitchen knife and a keen imagination (the wild horse was out of the chute now and good luck to the cowboy who’d try to break it or the rodeo clown who would distract it), I was projecting one heroic scenario after another onto the screen of my mind, reminding myself that I was born for adventure.
It was right about then that Mother returned to announce that the car had started up and driven away. “Maybe they’ll come back,” I said. Judging from the scowl on Mother’s face, she was all too aware of the note of hope in my voice.
Though she never said as much, our intruders probably had been young townspeople in immediate need of a secluded spot to swallow alcoholic libations, each other’s saliva, or both. It would be a few years before I learned that illicit drinking and making out were also adventures of a sort, ones for which I had alarmingly more aptitude than for the thwarting of Japanese spies.
9
fright or lite
One Halloween midnight when my father was in his early twenties, he and some buddies went to the home of a slightly older, recently married friend, quietly dismantled the fellow’s new Model T Ford, climbed up and reassembled it piece by piece on the roof of the house. (Cars were not so complicated in those days, but it was still quite a feat.)
The following morning, as the distraught groom was telephoning the Blowing Rock police to report a grand theft auto, a wildly gesticulating neighbor rapped on the window and beckoned him outside. As the men stared up at the shiny black vehicle, perched now like Edgar Allan Poe’s nightmare between two chimneys, they could only shake their heads and mutter, “Halloween.”
If in their voices there was consternation, there was also resignation and even a poorly disguised trill of admiration: it had been a daring, perfectly executed whopper of a prank on a night consigned to pranksters, a night ruled by the Lord of Misrule, a night when unsettled spirits of the dead squeezed through a crack in the space-time continuum, demanding notice and a bit of mischievous fun, often temporarily occupying the all-too-willing bodies of young Western males.
Nowadays it’s Halloween lite, all treats and no tricks, the dead driven back into the underworld by candy companies, liquor stores, Hallmark-card sellers, costume merchants, and understandably concerned owners of vulnerable private properties. Believe me, I’m seldom one to pine for the “good old days,” but when I was growing up much mischief was afoot on October 31, and ol’ Jack was alive in the lantern. Privies would be overturned, gates unhinged, penned chickens liberated, tires deflated, doorbells mysteriously rung, lawn shrubbery festooned with toilet paper, homes pelted with eggs; and every shop window in town thickly soaped, generally with pseudocryptic graffiti resembling today’s adolescent “tags.”
With long roots in antiquity and the human psyche, Halloween was the one night of the year when humanity openly acknowledged universal dread, honoring the departed even as it trembled at the rattle, real or imagined, of their bones; a celebration in which
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