Sunday, June 6, 2010

Truly on the Moon (Part 2)

        Before the PhD, the tenured position at the state university, before the books and the lectures and the Nobel short-list, and way before the scandal that eventually side-tracked what was otherwise an illustrious career, Mental Dobbs grew up outside of New York City, in a northern suburb, the son of a school teacher and a community activist, both of relatively minor intelligence compared to their only son but with the yin-yang, between them, of an almost unnatural instinct for child-rearing and a penchant for living the well-lived life that gave their genius son the perfect environment, and brain-pan marinade, at every critical juncture of his early- and later-childhood-development to become the object of Truly Tess Trudy’s every affection; and she was, of course among many other things, an excellent judge of character.  
     His mother would watch him, from the high kitchen window, play quiet games in the alley behind the house, experimenting with what he called, at 4-years old, his terriformulation, the plants, animals, insects and weather-patterns of his world, and fantasizing about his role in his family life, as protector of his father’s legacy and his mother’s safety and virtue, toggling back and forth between these opposite identities searching for the one that fit best.  Little by little the outward won over the in-, and as she would look down on him his mother would imagine that she could see his head growing even as his body seemed to shrivel, until the time when he finally reached what would be his full maturity at 17, and he appeared to be like a dandelion, a green-stalk body and a wild head of white fluffy hair that would fall out, strand by strand, in the autumn, grow back in, black, by the end of winter and into spring and turn white again over the summer, falling out all over just as the leaves dropped off the trees.  
They had originally named him Paul.  When he developed the habit of not responding to calls of “Paul, dinner time” or “Paul, turn the lights off now, it’s time to get some sleep!” they chalked it up to his remarkable ability to focus on whatever he was doing and to block out “extraneous data,” as he called it, from the outside world (although Mental was always quick to add, even back then as merely “Paul,” that “really, no data can ever completely be thought of as ‘extraneous.’”)  The truth was that the name was wrong.  They had mis-named him.  It was the one false-step they had taken in what was otherwise an almost perfect childhood, from Mental’s perspective.  When one day at the dinner table, at 7.56 years old (back then Mental had a penchant for measuring his age out to at least two decimal places), he declared to his parents that he would no longer eat carrots, "or any other root vegetable for that matter."  His father cut him off before he could launch into what he knew would be a multi-chaptered explanation of ‘why,’ saying: “You know what kid?  Sometimes I think you’re mental.”  The boy smiled broadly, a rare occurrence to be sure, creasing the vast forehead on his gigantic head, and the new name stuck.  
When he eventually left home for college, he never went back and his parents never heard from him again.  They did hear all ABOUT him--first in esoteric science journals, then PBS specials and best-seller lists, and finally tabloid rags--but never anything FROM him.  He was done with them, though not through any lack of what little affection Mental had for anything in this world, but more out of a certain respect for science.  Mental knew that his parents' real natural and evolutionary usefulness, with regard to him, was as developmental guides and as biological nurturers.  Of course they had accumulated an affection for him over the years, but he knew also that this, in itself, was an evolutionary construct; that the affection they felt for him made it easier for them to part with whatever personal comfort and sense of well-being they set-aside in working their long, hunter-gathering careers, putting the food on the table, heating the bedrooms and saving the tuition the for college.  He knew his father would have been more happy as a painter, or, strangely he thought, as a landscaper, than as a middle-school teacher, a job he sensed from the sighs and window-gazes his father indulged throughout his daily paper-grading ritual, was not what his father was born to do.  And his mother was certainly a writer.  She worked at a shelter at the local church, saving souls one meal at a time, believing fully that faith without action was sin itself.  But her inner life was all fantasy and Mental read her secret writings, hidden in the third drawer of her roll-top desk, and understood his mother to be an author in the tradition of Twain, with a wit and satirical instinct that, while he could not necessarily feel, certainly not the way she did, he could nevertheless identify and categorize.    
But they set aside these avocations in the interest of providing for Mental and fulfilling their biological, if not their spiritual, destinies.  And so, when that job was finished, Mental concluded that he owed it to them to release them from the responsibility he knew they would continue to feel towards him had he continued to be an active part of their life.  For their part, while they didn’t necessarily enjoy their only son vanishing, post-graduation, they were, in truth, exhausted by raising Mental through to his college years and were secretly, and without comment (when the snakes from the media came slithering to their front porch), devastated by the scandal that sent their son into exile from just not them anymore but from the rest of the world.  Well, at least, from everyone except Truly Tess Trudy, the only person he ever really allowed inside.

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