JON FERGUSON
My name is Ted Foster. Yes, that Ted Foster, the Ted Foster you’ve heard about, read about, and seen on TV. Yes, that was me sitting across from Larry King not so long ago, as alive as a hemorrhoid and maybe slightly better looking, telling America what he was thinking about while he spent a year and a half in a catatonic stupor not saying a word to anybody. Yes, I’m the guy who was “so depressed” that for eighteen months he rarely rotated his noggin left or right because there was nothing it wanted to look at. I suspect that the difference between me and most of the other cashews in America’s nut houses is that I am quite sure I wasn’t nuts then and I’m quite sure I’m not nuts now. Although there’s a big question as to who is to decide. That’s why I’m pecking out this book. I’ll lay the poop on the table and each of us can decide who the loonies are. When you saw my face staring at you on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle with the headline “Not a Word in 2004”, my guess is that your first and only thought was that I was a basket case. I can understand that, but I beg to disagree. I never got my fair share with the media to make a real point or two. On Larry King Live I only had about forty-five minutes and he kept changing the subject to keep his ratings up. But now I’ve got a book. I can say whatever I want to say for as long as I want to say it. Who needs hospitalization? Why didn’t I say a word for a year and a half? Why aren’t you in the loony bins? Are the learned meatheads that decide who gets admitted not just as loony as you might be and hence can’t see the forest through the trees or the trees through the forest?
Let’s get started. Introductions are usually a bore anyway. Let me make a few things clear. First, Ted Foster’s so-called “depression” had nothing to do with his unfortunate second marriage. His stint in the nut house had absolutely nothing to do with his relationship with his wife? Why should it have? Millions of people divorce, remarry, and are no better off the second time than they were the first time. Fuckless months, nagging whines, diametrically opposed ideas about what life is are no excuse for getting depressed. That stuff didn’t depress me; it just pissed me off. There’s a difference. When I met Glenda she was so different from Ruth that I thought it would have to work. But it didn’t. I went for extremes and I messed up. I chose the wrong middle-inning relief pitcher, that’s all. It happens all the time. Either you marry the same thing twice or you shoot for the other end of the lollipop. I went that route and wound up with the same result. But my staring at the wall for eighteen months had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with my lousy marriage.
Secondly, age – hitting fifty – was not a factor. What difference does it make if you’re a year younger or a year older? What’s a decade here or a decade there? I have never been idiot enough to think that my body was going to stay the same forever. I didn’t even want it to stay the same. I was bored with myself at thirty. “Bring on something new” has always been my mantra. And nature didn’t let me down. Before I knew what had happened I was sporting a sloping belly, grey temples, bad eyes, and pains every time I woke up. (The erecter set still worked, even though Glenda wished it hadn’t. Can’t blame her though. Everybody has their reasons for their predilections.) No, the fact that I was starting to look like every other over-the-hill Tom, Dick and Horny had nothing to do with my eighteen months in the loony bin.
Point three: my job didn’t bring it on either. What did I have to bitch about? I wasn’t the only one doing the same crap for twenty-five years in a row. Work was no reason to feel sorry for myself. All jobs get boring. I decided to stick with mine because it paid the bills. Period. And I was smart enough to know that most of us born in the twentieth century are lucky as hell because odds are had we come into the world much earlier we would have ended up being somebody’s slave or dying of some crazy disease before we were five years old. Me, I worked for a toy company. My job was to make sure that the toys didn’t mess any kids up. Actually it was less about hurting the kids than it was the company getting sued. I must have been pretty good at it because, though we got sued a number of times, we didn’t lose a case in the last twenty-two years I was on the job. The only one we lost was in 1980 when a kid got electrocuted when his electric train short-circuited. Way back then I had considered getting depressed about that, but I decided not to because the poor kid’s numbskull parents had set up the train in the bathroom and let the kid play with it while he was in the tub. What can you say about that? I almost got depressed about that fact that the kid, you, me and every other creature don’t choose our own parents, but I decided not to. No, the job never got me down. It was fine: made sure toys were safe: gave kids a chance to get past age twelve in one piece. It could have been a hell of a lot worse.
Fourthly, my “depression” had nothing to do with people starving in Africa or tidal waves or terrorists bombs or the war in Iraq or September eleven, or any other insane events that mug our poor brains daily. I put all this lunacy in the same basket because it’s been going on since the beginning of time. Of course it stinks and of course the world is a cesspool. But at age fifty, it was nothing to get depressed about. You can go off about these things when your fifteen years old, or maybe eighteen, or even twenty, but not after that. If you do, it’s only an excuse to feel sorry for yourself. Either you get off your butt and go help the starving and the suffering or you shut up. The world’s horror show is as old as the world. Getting depressed about it after adolescence only reveals a shopping cart full of self pity. Just last night I was watching a TV program about beavers and how men used to kill wagon-loads of them for their pelts. What can be worse than that? A nice little beaver swimming down a river and the next thing it knows, its throat has been slit and its skin ripped off. The world has forever been a slaughterhouse and forever will be. If you haven’t figured that out after two decades on earth you’re problably just dumb enough to go around feeling sorry for everybody and wasting other people’s time talking about it.
So why was I “depressed”? What threw me off the deep end? Why did I not utter a word nor respond to visitors (except my daughter) for a year and a half? Why, other than eating, sleeping, and toilet events, did I do nothing but stare at a wall or a ceiling for eighteen calendar months of my life?
It was because of a snake. I didn’t even used to like snakes. I still don’t really. But here’s what happened:
My daughter was three. I was pushing her in a stroller down the infrequently used street that ties our house to our two neighbors’ houses. It was a lovely summer day, warm with a gentle northerly breeze keeping things comfortable. I had two weeks vacation and we weren’t going anywhere because Glenda refused to let anyone stay in the house to take care of the dogs and I refused to put the dogs in a kennel when we could have somebody stay in the house. We were both bullheaded so we usually ended up not going anywhere. I didn’t really mind because going places with Glenda had become less and less agreeable. Anyway, about a hundred yards down the road – it’s really more like a lane – my eyes were attracted to a dark blotch on the left side of the pavement. There was a dead snake that had been hit by some kind of tire, from a bicycle maybe, or a motor scooter, or even a small car. The snake’s skin was black and the remaining guts were red and pulpy, some of it looking like shrimp with a tablespoonful of blood or sweet and sour sauce poured on top. It was a small snake, probably not more than a foot long in its slithering days. I looked at it and kept going.
The next morning I took my daughter on the same walk. Like the day before, we were going to meander through town and end up at the public swimming pool. As we approached the dead snake I noticed that what I had seen the morning prior was not what I was going to see then. There were only a couple of small dried lumps of flesh, about the size of baby teeth, squinting at me out of the shiny red stain on the blacktop. I surmised that a bird or birds had made a snack of the snake and I pushed the stroller on ahead.
That night there was a storm and it rained hard.
In the morning the sun was back and after breakfast I again packed my daughter and the swimming gear into the stroller and down the lane we blissfully went. As we approached the spot where the snake had perished, I expected to again apprehend the snake’s remains. I looked down, forward, backward. There was nothing there. Had I gone too far? Not far enough? Neither was true. Simply there was nothing left of the snake. Absolutely nothing. Even the blood had been washed away. I froze at the sight of the clean snakeless street and felt right then and there the first tiny beads of something begin to clog my pulpous skull. Brothers and sisters, princes and ditch-diggers, dogs and cats, friends and enemies, in three days that snake had gone from happily cruising around the neighborhood to absolute nothingness. No corpse. No carcass. No coffin. No stain. No nothing. Now I know all you reincarnation or recycling types are going to jump up and tell me that everything is okay because the snake went through the birds’ stomachs and the birds digested it and their excrement tucked it back into the loins of mother earth etc., etc., but I’m not buying a word of it. That snake was gone. Nothing. NO THING! ZERO! NILCH! NADA! NIENTE!
I don’t know how long I stared at the spot. However long it was, my daughter didn’t say anything. She patiently waited for the stroller to be pushed anew. But I was catatonic. That’s the only word for it. I took my daughter to the swimming pool all right. I was on automatic pilot and went through the motions of being a good daddy. But within a day, the beads of whatever it was had grown cancerously and had filled up enough of my brain that the next morning at breakfast I just sat there over my plate of scrambled eggs and stared ahead with my mouth open. My wife tried to talk to me. She turned on the TV and radio. She laughed. She shouted. She slapped me. She swore. She threw water at me. Then she called the doctor.
2
The idiot flips out over a little useless foot long snake. He stops talking. He stares at the wall for a year and a half. Talk about wasting away your life.
3
I had absolutely no idea where they were taking me when the ambulance crew packed me off and away to my new home. I still don’t know where I spent my year and a half. I didn’t look at any signs and didn’t ask any questions. All I can tell you is that other than a few needles in my arms and a few unpleasant electic jolts, everybody was very nice to me. I ate food, had a bed, went to the toilet, and looked at whatever was in front of me, usually without seeing it. I didn’t see the people because all I could think about was the moment when they wouldn’t be there. When doctors would be in front of me I wouldn’t see them. I should say that I saw them when they weren’t there. Glenda certainly came a few times, but she wasn’t there when she was trying to do her spousely part in trying to get me to snap out of it. All the nice nurses weren’t there either. They were scooting around all right, busy as bees in a patch of flowers. But they weren’t there. They had been washed away with that little black snake. They were part of that clean asphalt slate.
Once somebody put a mirror in front of my face. Not a bad idea. I remember seeing a flash of a ten-year-old kid with wavy hair and a dimpled smile in a fifth grade class picture. Then the screen went white.
I remember that the first while that I was wherever I was, I thought a lot about love, in particular my love for that snake. I was, in all likelihood, the only creature in the universe to have witnessed its end. Only I was in a position to pay homage to its life and death. Every time I thought of its shredded guts on that warm summer street, its blood caked to the blacktop yet shimmering in the morning light, I was filled with overwhelming love and devotion. I was its last link with anything. I knew that if I went, it would really be gone. With love comes responsibility, in my case the responsibility of being the only survivor to hold the deceased in mind. I had to keep it there, alive in thought like a last yellowing photo of a long defunct great aunt in a family album.
I mingled thought of snake love with daughter love. I didn’t love the snake at the expense of my daughter. She popped on and off the screen with regularity. Let it be known that without her Glenda and I would have been history years ago. But she got pregnant and I wasn’t man enough to leave a pregnant woman. And she wasn’t woman enough to leave the man who had knocked her up. So we had Gloria and stayed together. We were, however, beginning to have serious differences about raising our little daughter. (I had wanted to name her Jodie, but there was already the actress Jodie Foster. So we took the next best name: Gloria.) One day before the three walks to the swimming pool I counted how many times my wife had said “No” to the kid. One hundred and forty-eight times. Can you imagine what that was doing to her little brain? Probably as much damage as the Virgin Mary will do to her vagina if She ever finagles Her way into her life. It was “No” when she wanted to taste my coffee. It was “No” when she wanted to put on her basketball shoes. (My wife insisted she wear sandals.) It was “No” when she wanted to help wash the morning dishes. It was “No” when she spilled orange juice on her goddamned useless one dollar t-shirt. It was “No” when she wanted to eat her cereal in front of the TV. It was “No” when she wanted to ride her tricycle in the house. It was “No” when she wanted a candy bar after breakfast. (When my wife finally said yes, it was “No” when she wanted to take the wrapper off herself.) It was “No” when she wanted to hold the candy in her lovely fingers. It was “No, look at you” when she smeared chocolate all over her mouth. And it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. In all I counted one hundred and forty-eight “No’s”. The kid’s only awake about ten hours a day. That’s fifteen “No’s” an hour. And I wasn’t even home all day. I went to Wal-Mart to take a break for an hour. I met Joe Marsh and talked to him. We were standing between the picture frames and the toilet cleaning brushes. My wife always wanted new toilet cleaning brushes every month, so I had decided to pick one up. If you went to the toilet and left any kind of remnant of what you had done, she would go categorically crazy. She would call you into the bathroom and with a long trembling finger show you a piece or two of stuck brown shit. She was scatalogically obsessed. Of course it wasn’t her fault. Nobody spends their time worrying about such things because they want to. Her mother was the same way. Genetics isn’t freedom. But that didn’t change the fact that she was a pain in the ass when my anal reflex worked, but my toilet cleaning one didn’t.
I loved my daughter and I loved the snake, but for very different reasons. I’ve already told you why I loved the snake: I was it’s last link with Being; I owed it one. I loved my daughter because she was the only person I knew well who wasn’t messed up. My wife was dutifully trying hard to bring her into the human herdal slop, but as far as I could tell, she hadn’t succeeded yet. My daughter still could spill yogurt on her t-shirt and laugh about it. She could still have a delicious mini-tantrum when I’d turn off the
TV that she wasn’t watching. She could still insist on napping with six precisely chosen stuffed animals. If she didn’t have those six she wouldn’t sleep. She could still go to a dinner party with us and – for three full hours – refuse to talk to anybody.
When my wife brought my daughter to visit, I didn’t see my wife, but I did see my daughter, just like I saw the snake when I stared at the white wall. The first while they were really all I saw until one day when I saw two blind people making love. (This was one of the things I tried to talk about on Larry King Live, but he detoured the conversation.) The blind man and the blind woman were living in a home for the blind who were learning how to read braille. I watched the blind man crawl very slowly into the blind woman’s room in a tender penubrous light. He found her foot and started licking her ankle, like a dog would. She slipped off her shoe. He removed her sock and he licked her foot and toes. Then he went up her leg, first with his hands and then with his tongue. He licked all the way to her pussy, then went down the other leg to the end where he took off that shoe and sock and licked that foot and those toes. By then she had undone her skirt and had slipped off her blouse, and now was fingering for his shirt to pull it off. All the while she had been sitting on a low bed and he had been on his knees on the floor. His shirt off, he stood and pulled down and off his pants. He fell on top of her and they rolled. She tongued around his neck and shoulder and a hand of hers bumped into his steel joint. She grabbed it hard. Then she had it with both hands. She gently released it as she climbed on.
Thinking of the blind couple now reminds me of what I was living then before the snake incident. Maybe I should fix time as B.S. and A.S. – Before Snake and After Snake. Why not? Makes as much sense as anything else. So the years 1, 2, and 3 B.S. had been the driest of my adult life. Even with my first wife we never went months without properly fingering for each other’s goodies. With Glenda, Gloria’s birth had been the death of my flesh. She wanted none of it. When she’d give me a rare kiss after work, her lips really felt like hard rubber. What I did instead of crying about it was to take the occasion to imagine how the Pope – and everybody else who’s supposed to cut the flesh out of life – must feel. I basically could conclude only that it makes sense that the old Pope believes deeply in God and paradise and all, where those vestal virgins will all be waiting to cut the ropes loose and give him an eternity of shenanigans in the heavenly hay. In my case, three years, from 3 B.S. to 0, of never jingling the pocket change, never slipping that 5 AM silver hammer into the jelly bowl, never getting to gnaw on Glenda’s rose bud and lick the grease back into my mouth while the silver hammer settles into her mouth, sure had me hoping for an afterlife. I guess you’re supposed to get used to abstinence. I never did. Fortunately, when I was in that loony bin there was a Mexican nurse who for some reason liked me and who plucked me out of the freezer once in a while when nobody was looking. I did see her when she was down there working the log. In fact, I should put her in my will. And I won’t lie. I did say two words in those eighteen months. Two words to Maria. I said them a few times. “Thank you”. Each time she just smiled and went back to work.
4
What’s the point? Who cares about some whacko getting blow jobs in a mental hospital?
5
I think what started things was the way I began seeing the other people at work. This was a few years B.S. I had already started not to see people anymore. That is, I’d look at somebody and I didn’t know what I was seeing. This was for the simple reason that, like most of us, I had been taught in church that people were children of God, and then, in school, that they were the summit of a million or so years of an evolutionary chain. In both cases they had status. Being God’s creations, they were supposed to be hot tuna. Being at the top of the evolutionary totem pole wasn’t too bad either. When I hit forty-five all that changed. I saw people as being neither God’s offspring nor the cream in the animal vat. The qualities I had heretofore attributed to mankind seemed unfounded and meaningless. I didn’t believe in God and evolution seemed no more certain than the old belief that the earth was flat. I simply no longer had any idea what a human being was.
Not only that, in earlier days, the people around me seemed like they belonged where they were. At work, for example, the toy company seemed where they were supposed to be. But that too changed. I suddenly felt that everybody was where they were because of an infinity of random circumstances. Chance seemed everywhere, especially in the office where I spent eight hours a day and at home where I spent most of the other sixteen. Everybody had ended up in the office thanks to an incredibly complex set of haphazard circumstances, none of which fit into any sensible logic. In my case, I got my first wife pregnant while I was working on my doctorate in civil engineering. I decided I’d better get a job and save some money. I dropped out of the program and all I could find was what I then proceded to do for twenty-five years, to wit, keep children safe from their toys. I could have ended up a million other places. But kindly Ruth had let me in past the vulval playground on our third date. That only happened because our third date was a friend’s wedding and she got sauced on the champagne and her roommate was out of town and her apartment was a perfect spot to relax after the wedding. Et cetera. Et cetera.
In any case, it took me forty-five years to put into brackets everything I’d been taught about people and life. People were supposed to be special and life was supposed to be some reasonable creation. Neither was case for me anymore. For a few years before I saw the snake, going to work was like going to an insane asylum. Nothing made sense. The whole office looked like a fuzzy bad movie. The whole scene melted messily before my eyes like an unfortunately dropped ice cream cone on a summer sidewalk.
When the ambulance took me away that morning I really was only going from one asylum to another. That’s how I felt anyway. There was no culture shock, no real adjustment period.
Think about it: are there only two possiblilities? Creation or evolution? Is that all we can come up with to explain ourselves? When I got out of the nuthouse the papers were full of Bible-belted Christians and slick scientists throwing tomatoes at each other about what should be taught in our schools: “intelligent design” or “evolution”. All I could think of was: Is this all civilization has come up with in five thousand years? Are we that obtuse? Are our imaginations that retarded? Are we that short-sighted? Do we have no perspective? Can’t anybody step back and say man might be something that has nothing to do with any of that? The universe might have no beginning and no end? We might be pork chops on somebody’s plate. Time might be man’s most ingenious idiot invention. We might be bad television for some cosmic deformed eye. We might be a good laugh or cosmic indigestion. A billion years might be less than a drop in an endless ocean. We’re so anthropormorphically myopic that we’re still hung up on “creation” or “evolution”.
Anyway, before I saw that snake, I was already starting to slip off the treadmill. I was already having trouble finding someone to talk to. I was already jettisoning the cards in the wastebasket.
I did have Gloria. Her babble was water for a thirsty man in the desert. She kept me getting up in the morning and going to work. Besides, I still had to send money to Ruth for our son Dexter who was twenty and studying sociology at Berkeley. Ruth worked with handicapped kids in Oakland. She was forty-seven. Her house in Piedmont was a mess. She listened to Bach and read Roth and psychology magazines. She watched Public TV. She had plants everywhere, some half dead, some dead, some looking at a few more years of being green. She had a shady porch where she sipped Chardonnay with her boyfriend named Charlie. He taught Spanish in high school. He’d be dead in twenty years.
6
What kind of jabber is this? Why make everything so complicated? Surely life is either left or right or in the middle somewhere?
Like politics.
Exactly.
7
I know I was in the institution eighteen months because people told me so. I got out in February 2005 on good behavior. I never messed with anybody and finally I decided to talk again. One day a nurse – not Maria – was changing my sheets and I said, “The sheets in here have been wonderful.” She immediately called for the doctor. When he arrived I said, “The sheets in here have been really wonderful.” He said, “Ted, Ted, I think it’s time we turned this ship around.” I said, “You know which way the breeze is blowing.” He smiled and obviously felt good about himself. He jumped right in the opening and asked me to tell him what I was feeling. I told him that I wanted to take my daughter to the swimming pool. He said it was too cold for swimming. I told him I knew that. He asked me what my daughter’s name was again.
Gloria.
How old is she again?
She should be about five now. Depends on how long I’ve been in here.
And your wife?
Oh, what is she…? Maybe forty-one.
No, I mean her name.
Glenda.
What does she do again?
Last I knew she was scrubbing toilets.
You mean she is a cleaning lady?
No, I mean my memory of her is someone who scrubs the crap out of toilets.
What else?
She keeps a clean kitchen.
And?
She wears a lot of green and orange.
I remember that when she came here she was wearing green. Why didn’t you talk to her?
Do you really want me to tell you?
Yes.
Because I didn’t see her.
What do you mean you didn’t see her?
I didn’t see anybody except my daughter and she only came three times. (I didn’t spill the beans about Maria)
What do you mean? Many of us were here, including your wife, and you didn’t see us?
No.
But why?
Because you weren’t there. (I here decided that in order to get out I would need to say a few things)
I don’t understand.
I’ve been in here how long?
Almost eighteen months.
Okay, for almost eighteen months people were phantoms for me. Their reality was only in their not being what they’re supposed to be.
What are they supposed to be?
People. But I didn’t know what a person was anymore.
Schopenauer actually went through something like that. Did you ever read Schopenauer?
No. But I’m glad to hear it. I know I’m not crazy. I just stepped out of the world.
What brought it on?
The world.
Can you be more precise?
Well, if you want to know the truth, a snake.
Do you – or did you – have snakes?
No. I saw a small one dead on the street. The next day I saw it again. Most of it was gone. The next day I came back to look at it again. There was nothing there.
I’m not sure I understand. Certainly you’ve seen many dead animals in your life. Why did the dead snake cause you to lose touch with the world.
I suddenly realized that it had gone from life to death to nothing in three days.
Does that matter?
If you’re the snake it does?
But we’re not snakes.
Yes we are.
8
Arnold Schwartzenegger is the governor of California. Can you believe that?
I know. Do you think Jennifer Lopez’s tits are the ones she was born with?
I don’t know. I doubt it. It looks like the Forty-Niners’ first round draft choice, Alex Smith out of Utah, might end up being a bust. What did he get? Fifty million?
Give him time. What do you think about New Orleans? I wonder how much Bush was responsible for the fiasco.
He should get us out of Iraq.
You and I aren’t in Iraq.
You know what I mean.
9
So the doctor and I spent a couple weeks chatting before they let me go. I spoke perfectly normally and calmly and told him a few things about my past of which he knew very little. He knew I was married for the second time, that I had one child with the first wife and one with the second, that I had worked for a toy company in an engineering capacity, that I had no history of mental health problems (nor for that matter did anyone in my family except a dead aunt), and that I spent most of my spare time doing ordinary things like going to WalMart or cutting the grass. He wanted salient facts to make sense out of my eighteen months of silence:
You say that the disappearance of this snake kind of set things off.
Like I said, when the snake disappeared, that was the last straw.
Last straw to what?
To me and the world.
You keep talking about the world. What do you mean by world?
The one I live in. The one I’m supposed to be a part of.
And you’re not anymore? A part of it, I mean.
I don’t know. I’ve been here for eighteen months.
And here you didn’t see anyone. No one except your daughter.
I’m looking forward to seeing her.
I’ve told your wife that things are looking up and that you might be coming home soon.
Things were never looking down. They were always the same. I just suddenly saw them differently.
I see. But why did that keep you from talking?
Because I had absolutely nothing to say. There wasn’t a word I could say that made any sense to me.
So people and language lost their meaning.
You could say that.
I suddenly realized that not one thing anybody said really meant anything. Words tied people together but didn’t mean anything. Just like people can be strung together but the ropes don’t have any higher purpose than holding the people together.
Did you ever study philosophy?
No.
Where did you get these ideas?
Just thinking.
When you talk to me now, how do you see me?
As a nice person or plant or whatever to have around.
Which is it, person or plant or whatever?
I told you, I haven’t decided and I probably never will. But to call you a person or a plant or whatever doesn’t change anything for me. You’re pleasant to be around.
Maybe it changes something for me?
Oh, I won’t call other people plants. I just thought you, being a doctor and all, were above all that and were wanting to be talked straight to.
I do.
Then I will.
(I figured maybe I could tell him about Maria, but then I realized she might lose her job.)
For someone who didn’t talk for eighteen months, you didn’t seem to lose your command of the English language.
It’s like spinning a basketball on your finger. Once you can do it, you never lose it.
Let’s go back to what you saw. You didn’t
see the people in front of you, but you say you saw other people.
Yes. Like the blind man and woman making love.
You saw a blind man and woman making love?
Yes. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.
Would you like to elaborate?
Not now.
What else did you see?
A lot of old people just before they died. A lot of them had missing teeth.
How could you see that?
When they smiled.
They smiled before dying?
Yes. A lot of them seemed happy to go. They were all very old.
Where do you think they go?
Under the ground.
To do what?
To rot to nothingness like the snake.
I thought the snake was eaten.
Same thing.
Maybe it isn’t. A chicken that gets eaten at a dinner table and a chicken that gets run over by a tractor might be two different things.
The tractor chicken will probably end up eaten too. Little people will eat it instead of big people.
Are you calling bugs and birds or whatever little people?
Oh, sorry.
What else or who else did you see?
Actually I saw lots of people. Just not the ones that were there.
Like whom?
Fred Astaire.
Fred Astaire?
When he was dancing up and down the walls and across the ceiling in that movie. It reminded me that up and down are human terms. The universe has no up or down.
Are you sure about that?
More or less.
Did you see Ginger Rogers?
No. Actually I did. A flick of her. She flicked on and off. Especially that skirt that sticks out to make her legs look long and nice. Like the high heels.
Her legs were long and nice.
They aren’t now. I wasn’t sure if she was in the movie.
What made you think of Fred Astaire?
Same thing that made you think of the chicken.
10
Where are you going on vacation this year?
Maybe Hawaii.
Was that Ginger Rogers or Leslie Carron?
I don’t know.