Glenn, during the war
On a beautiful day in spring a young man came walking down the sidewalk. He played a wooden flute and joined the girls in hopscotch. He wore a white cap with a little plastic seagull on the top, and he had a baby's red mouth which he tried to hide behind a large mustache that drooped and then curled up at each end.
He introduced himself: Glenn Miller, toymaker. Later we found out that he had driven a truck for a toy company for a few days until he was fired. He liked to play in the backyard with the little kids who lived in the flat above ours—intricate games of House and Horsie.
I thought he was crazy at first.
He was an artist. He showed us his old drawings, which were precise and surrealistic. He showed us a tiny news clipping about his winning first prize in an art contest in New Orleans. He did a portrait of my mother which we kept up on the wall for a whole day. Once he went wild and started chasing everybody, trying to mark our faces with a red felt pen. We took him to the beach to give him more room, and he pushed one of my sisters into the ocean.
He told us about his past. In New Orleans, he had been in the Air Force. He had signed up to be a medical technician, thinking that it might involve drawing. Medical technician meant bedpans. There were complaints to the authorities about his tardiness, his association with the patients, his failure to get haircuts, his failure to complete his assigned duties. When questioned about the latter, he said that he hadn't performed the assigned duties because he didn't feel that he should. The authorities concluded that he had an impoverished personality which was incompatible with the military way of life. He was given a psychiatric discharge.
One day Glenn walked into our house carrying a bucket of Colonel Sanders' fried chicken and a paper bag. Inside the bag were a white suit and an Erik Satie album. He went into the bathroom and came back out wearing the suit, and we all ate chicken with biscuits and coleslaw and listened to the album. Glenn said he was leaving in the morning, hitching to Boulder, Colorado, taking with him the puppy he had just acquired. He said he would stop by on his way out of town to see if anyone was up.
The next morning when I finally got up I found Glenn's Paul Siebel album lying by the front door. It had that song that he liked:
Oh sing for us you children, tinkle bells
and rhyme the purple, green, and blue,
and think of us as fighting fools
who wintered through the seasons loving you.
Oh we can give you nothing, nothing
but survival in a desert bare,
but you can teach us how to love
and live and tie bright ribbons in our hair.
He introduced himself: Glenn Miller, toymaker. Later we found out that he had driven a truck for a toy company for a few days until he was fired. He liked to play in the backyard with the little kids who lived in the flat above ours—intricate games of House and Horsie.
I thought he was crazy at first.
He was an artist. He showed us his old drawings, which were precise and surrealistic. He showed us a tiny news clipping about his winning first prize in an art contest in New Orleans. He did a portrait of my mother which we kept up on the wall for a whole day. Once he went wild and started chasing everybody, trying to mark our faces with a red felt pen. We took him to the beach to give him more room, and he pushed one of my sisters into the ocean.
He told us about his past. In New Orleans, he had been in the Air Force. He had signed up to be a medical technician, thinking that it might involve drawing. Medical technician meant bedpans. There were complaints to the authorities about his tardiness, his association with the patients, his failure to get haircuts, his failure to complete his assigned duties. When questioned about the latter, he said that he hadn't performed the assigned duties because he didn't feel that he should. The authorities concluded that he had an impoverished personality which was incompatible with the military way of life. He was given a psychiatric discharge.
One day Glenn walked into our house carrying a bucket of Colonel Sanders' fried chicken and a paper bag. Inside the bag were a white suit and an Erik Satie album. He went into the bathroom and came back out wearing the suit, and we all ate chicken with biscuits and coleslaw and listened to the album. Glenn said he was leaving in the morning, hitching to Boulder, Colorado, taking with him the puppy he had just acquired. He said he would stop by on his way out of town to see if anyone was up.
The next morning when I finally got up I found Glenn's Paul Siebel album lying by the front door. It had that song that he liked:
Oh sing for us you children, tinkle bells
and rhyme the purple, green, and blue,
and think of us as fighting fools
who wintered through the seasons loving you.
Oh we can give you nothing, nothing
but survival in a desert bare,
but you can teach us how to love
and live and tie bright ribbons in our hair.
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