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174 f r o m g o u r d s e e d a u d i e n c e One of the family legends in our little group of five, Mama and Daddy and Herb and Betsy and me, is Dad’s laughing all one night after a speech he gave to the Rotary Club. Dad was headmaster of a boy’s preparatory school for forty years and very serious about the moral growth of the young, but every now and then, at enormous intervals, his trickster would erupt. The subject was Education, of course, and he had come across a very subtle satire of self-important holding-forth, a deadly treatise that sounded like it was about something, but wasn’t. It was, in fact, similar to the Monday afternoon chapel talks he gave. He knew that and figured a little Polonian high sentence would amuse his peers at Rotary. But no one got it. They sat politely through one gust of fustian after another, like church members at some imaginary picnic on the North Atlantic, holding their outrageous chapeaux. • • • 175 f r o m g o u r d s e e d And having gone so far, he had to bluff it through, so as not to insult them, and accept their heartfelt appreciation for years of service and thoughtful consideration of the issues. He barely made it to the parking lot. He hooted all the way home. We heard him coming in, a noise somewhere between the funniest joke and a howl for his life spent mouthing maxims. It was good, flat-on-your-back, don’t-nobody-have-a-clue, ocean laughing and ocean weeping, and we tried to join him in it, but nobody could. He was hilariously alone there in his bedroom, adrift and at the mercy of a profound audience that kept swimming back by in the wallpaper. ...

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