Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays

A Remembrance of Gravies Past

124 A Remembrance of Gravies Past In the same way that our radio and tv broadcasts will apparently bounce around forever in the physical universe, many things that fragment and grow faint in the mind don’t disappear entirely.They can be retrieved, if you have the right equipment and can find a quiet place to listen. At the rehearsal dinner before a recent wedding, I sat next to my cousin Shirl and her husband, Hank, and was overcome with childhood memories long forgotten: attending Shirl’s graduation from Southern Illinois University (a master’s in piano,so lovely and impractical in such a place) and being allowed to take photos with Hank’s professional cameras. Mopping the floors of Hank’s photography studio after his partner ran off with their money and he tried to keep the business afloat. Feeling sorrier when Hank burned down part of his mother’s house warming frozen pipes with a blowtorch and, later, using my toy metal detector to look for Shirl’s wedding ring in the charred wreckage of their own house after Hank had thawed those pipes.They took me to a Buckminster Fuller lecture, tricked me into eating beef tongue, and lived on a fallow farm not far from siu’s Touch of Nature Environmental Center. In complicated ways, they’re important to my sense memory of the 1960s. As we chatted, I remembered one event so clearly it was like having a flashback. My mom and I had gone to an aunt’s house—Shirl’s mom and mine were sisters—and Shirl and Hank sneaked me a comic book called Primal Man? Most of my comic books at home were hand-me-downs from a remembrance of gravies past 125 my sister: Richie Rich, Caspar, Little Dot, Little Lotta, and Wendy the Good Little Witch.This was something new. The front cover said it was “Volume 6”of a series called The Crusaders, and it showed an enraged mastodon attacking a caveman, who was about to fall off a cliff into lava.The artwork was grotesque, garish, and violent.The back cover listed profiles of the two main characters:Tim Clark,“Ex-Green Beret, he met someone in the jungles of Viet Nam who changed his life,”and James Carter, “Ex-crime boss, he ruled the streets in Chicago, until he met his match.” Cool, I thought, and crept behind the couch, out of the gaze of my mother, to learn how a Green Beret would deal with a mastodon. (“Caution: This set of books could change your life,”the comic book said.) Greedily, I began to read. By page eight, the battle between Borg and the mastodon is revealed to be a movie in production. Our two heroes, Clark and Carter, have gone to the set to meet their old chum the lead actor, handsome under his caveman mask. They bring with them “Dr. Lind,” who tells the movie’s director, producer, and moneymen (from the “International Geographic Commission”),“I believe evolution is one of the cruelest hoaxes ever invented!”Their responses are,variously,“What the?”,“Gasp!”,and “Hey . . . who is this joker?”When the film’s science advisor says,“Dr. Lind . . . you don’t believe that God created the universe, do you?”, Lind testifies that he does,and someone says,“I bet he even believes in Mickey Mouse ...and that wierd [sic] little old tooth fairy! Haw Haw Haw!” The grownups in my aunt’s living room were droning to each other in the uninteresting way they do,but I heard Shirl ask my mom offhandedly,“You and Oronte want to come to a dinner tonight?” “To dinner? Or a dinner?” my mom asked suspiciously. “A dinner.” “What kind of a dinner?” “Oh,it’s for our church,”Shirl said.“We’ll have a speaker,and it’ll be fun. It’s at the student center at siu.” In the comic book, the crusaders are working out on godless Hollywood types (“I thought we’d go out swinging tonight with some chicks!”). The battle begins to turn in their favor: “I can’t believe it . . . you prayed to get rid of Dexter . . . and he’s going out the door . . . that’s really heavy!”Despite 126 a remembrance of gravies past a minor setback (“Come on, Tim! He was born in a stable and died on a cross . . . do we have to go through this...