The Bumptious Blue Yonder

I’m not sure exactly when my kids first started bothering me to go see the

Reine des Rivieres

in Quebec City. A part of me would like to link thatdiscouraging period to a particularly horrendous hemorrhoid I suffered from or when I finally admitted to myself that the disturbing patches of scalp I could spot beneath my hair were not the fault of a cheap shampoo, a heavy cream rinse or anineffective boar bristle brush, but it was because I was going bald. The truth is,though, that it was nearly two years ago, after my oldest, Denise, began learninghow to read.Denise liked to demonstrate how she was coming along with her new foundfaculty by plodding through my wife, Cynthia’s, muckraking fish wrappers like

Whispers

or

The Teller

, both of which she received by mail every Thursday.Cynthia had asked our mail carrier to carefully roll them into a tube and bind themwith rubber bands so as to lessen the chance of any of the pages folding over—soas to lessen the chances of having precious syllables of slander and libel lost to theexpanse of a catastrophically misplaced crease.Denise often delicately spread the papers out on the floor in front of thefireplace, looking as though she were comparing carpet samples. While croucheddown atop them, she would sound everything aloud as she slid her pencil-thin pointer finger over every word of every story until its tip was sullied with ink as black as my loathing for the scandalous subjects she’d just absorbed.

When she finished studying these trashy Talmuds of talebearing, she wouldoften be caught unintentionally smearing a swarthy trail of fingerprints across suchthings as walls or slices of bread squeeze-tested for freshness or my shirt sleevesand collar; the consequence of her indulgence in gossip stained everything withwhich it came in contact, including, it seemed, her developing soul.Behind this soiling was yellow journalism, which, as an establishing shot,glorified the

Reine des Rivieres

as if it were a golden calf, but on a more intimateclose-up, fed Denise a heap of whiny reasons—in the form of easy-to-present-to-me-at-breakfast charts and graphs, maps and artist conceptualizations, stats andforecasts—that I should bring her to see the abomination recently tagged by

TheTeller

, “the long awaited ninth wonder of the world.”She’s seven now. My son, Douglas, is five.My wife and I carefully planned this relative proximity in their ages so wecould deal with their adolescent rebellion, angst and ignorance in one giantmigrainous ball of ache, so to speak, and then be done with it while we were stillfairly young and—with luck—sane and—with greater luck—still married.I’m thirty. Cynthia, twenty-nine.My only steadfast plan with regards to our children’s upbringing is to try toshoulder them both out the front door with a strong lack of disillusionment stuffedin their back pockets like a one way bus ticket to tomorrow. And then—asserts my

wife

, after she’s gorged a mountain of sugar and caffeine and come to a phantasmagoric

semblance of purpose that completely contradicts the findings of my own lifetime of examination—go in search, ourselves, for something asworthwhile as the

Reines

to fill our remaining days.

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******I remember words like RARE! and PURE! and EXCITEMENT! started to be written in capital letters followed by an exclamation point back when I wasmuddling through the motions of university. Those words and their kin in type andtone had become such a RARITY! in usage by then—due to the apparent

lack

of situations to use them

in

—that the handful of remaining linguists and lexicologistsin North America had hastily called a “code red” meeting in Des Moines, Iowa,and decided to try an OUTRAGEOUS! means to attempt to improve our, as theyso ELOQUENTLY! put it, “flat and dying tongue” as BEST!, quickly and simplyas possible.Or at least the look and sound of it.Shake things up a bit. Make a change for changes’ sake, knowing that people were born suckers for anything with NEW! stamped across the front of it.Beneath this rather GLIB! explanation, though, lay more a complexreasoning. Basically, they had hoped that by doing such a thing, people might

re

discover certain lost words, and then, in turn,

re

discover certain lost feelings.“Words reflect our mental HEALTH!” I remember they argued, with red faces and bulging eyes, as if they MEANT! everything they said.I remember the president sucking his bottom lip and shrugging hisshoulders before a roomful of television cameras after a reporter had asked himwhat he was going to do about these intellectuals’ WILD! and CRAZY! demands,and him saying those three little words that will

now

get you a $50 fine—for

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