My mother always said that good things came in small packages. Unfortunately, my father actually came in small packages. This was the result of a sexual compulsion and a general disdain for postal employees. He was not a normal man.
When I was ten, my father woke me up and told me he was going off to war. I cried for an entire day before he returned that evening with a musket he’d bought in a pawn shop and a certificate of enrollment in the New York Civil War Reenactment Corps. It’s long been said that war separates the men from the boys. It follows, then, that war reenactments separate the strange men from the strange boys. Imagine, if you will, being dragged kicking and screaming from your bed one morning to take up arms against an encroaching militia. Now imagine all that but with the promise of ice cream afterward. Such was my adolescence.
Stories as old as the written word tell us that sons pay for their fathers’ sins. Not surprisingly, sons also pay for their fathers’ proclivities to hunt squirrels from a snipers’ nest he build on our tenement roof. It wasn’t long before the other kids turned against me and I was labeled strange. The kids would tease me, calling me Father-Squirrel-Shooter (they were not creative) and refusing to let me play with them at recess. And so at the age of twelve, I pretty much gave up on the human race entirely and turned for entertainment to our newly adopted kitten.
Mr. Waffles was named, of course, after famed, French, 19th century philosopher Jean-Baptiste Francois de la Guerre, who I thought – and still think – looked like a man who would enjoy a nice plate of waffles. I brought him home (Mr. Waffles, not Jean-Baptiste) one Saturday morning and by Sunday night we’d become inseparable.
Mr. Waffles and I would build erector sets – I’d build, he’d advise. We’d watch baseball games and collect our favorite players’ cards. We’d go see movies (it was Atticus Finch, after all, who convinced me to be a lawyer). And as I got older we’d sit deep into the night and he’d tell me about the corners of the world I’d knew of but had never seen. His storytelling prowess rivaled that of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Gump and in those late hours when I closed my eyes I swear I could see the far reaches of the world. One story in particular always stuck with me. It was years ago, Mr. Waffles began, when he was a student in France. He’d drank wine on the Champs-Élysées and then made love to a young, Parisian streetwalker in the dying light of dusk. It was a metaphor, he told me, for the solemn truth that even in pleasure, time slips away. Also, he told me about waffles. Also, I was very, very high.
My parents are gone now and Mr. Waffles was assassinated in 1987. The veterinarians and FBI agents I summoned claim he died of old age, but I’m convinced otherwise. I have practiced law for the last 30 years and while I’ve enjoyed it, I can feel the time slipping away, much as my dear friend promised it would. With my 54th birthday now behind me, I have been thinking a lot recently about the reasons I became a lawyer. There aren’t many. In fact, had we gone to see another movie that day, I’m reasonably certain I might have spent my life scamming small-town schoolchildren with the promise of a marching band.
So, I am proud to report that I have an appointment scheduled for this afternoon with the dean of Columbia’s vet school. This way, by the age of 55, I might be on the road to practicing veterinary medicine. I’m leaving in a few minutes for the meeting and hope to have good news to report in my next post.
And so it is that I will soon set off to find myself. But first, I will set off to find myself a sandwich.
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