On the Wing (33 page)

His audience loved that. They laughed, and I laughed with them.

“Then,” he said, turning solemn, “something happened near here. Exactly what happened, we cannot say. Some people who were there, and some people who claim that they were there, say that a UFO crashed during a thunderstorm. Some people in the skeptical segment of the population immediately began howling that it couldn't possibly be true. ‘Why,' they wondered aloud to anyone who would listen, ‘would the conveyance of intergalactic voyagers be brought down by earthly weather?'”

He paused. It was another of those pauses that requested a response from me. I reached back, mentally, to the stack of books and magazines on the shelves in my room at home, leafed through their pages, and said, nodding, knitting my brows in thoughtful consideration of the likelihood that what I was saying might be correct, “It could have been the effect of sunspots on the magnetomic drive.”

They hummed. They nodded their heads.

Gently, as if what he had to ask me next would cause me some pain, he said, “Would you rather we talked about something else?”

I would. I had been interested in flying saucers, and I still enjoyed speculating about their origins and the motives of their makers, but just then I was more interested in myself, and I would have preferred to talk about my travels. “Yes,” I said, “I would. I'd like to tell you—”

“That's just what we hoped!” he said. “We hoped that when you came you would tell us what we need to hear, that you would offer us enlightenment and guidance.”

“Enlightenment and guidance?”

“Pearls of wisdom, perhaps?”

“Oh, pearls of wisdom. Sure. I can do that. One that I remember from the fourth grade is, ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.'”

A collective gasp arose from the audience.

“Did I get that wrong?” I asked.

“No,” said the leader, “not at all. I think we are all just surprised to find that it has traveled so far, that it is truly a universal piece of wisdom.”

“A pearl,” I said.

“Have you any others? Please, we are here because we want to hear what you have to tell us. Teach us how to live. Give us some advice.”

“What kind of advice?”

“I am sure that any kind of advice you care to give us would be received with tremendous gratitude by everyone here assembled.”

“Okay. Let's see. I have some advice about traveling.”

“Please,” he said, with a gesture that invited me to stand at the microphone and say whatever I wished to say.

“If you're going to make a journey,” I said into the microphone, “and I'm speaking now as someone who knows what he's talking about, since I've just completed a long journey, or almost completed a long journey, you have to ask yourself whether you're going to travel with or without a map. If you travel with a map, you know where you're going, and you know where you are, and you know where you've been. If you travel without a map, you get lost a lot.”

“I take it you are speaking of life's journey,” he said, stepping up beside me and reclaiming a bit of the microphone, “and not merely of a journey in the literal sense, from one place to another.”

“I—well—both.”

“I see.”

“Life's journey
is
a journey from one place to another.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. You know those trails of slime that slugs leave behind them?”

“I'm afraid I—”

“In the morning, you see them on sidewalks sometimes, and from the trail of slime you can see the wandering path that the slug has followed in the night.”

“Very interesting. You have slugs—where you come from?”

“Oh, sure. We have slugs, snails, worms, probably everything you have here—but my point is that if we left trails of slime as we go through life, you would see a long thread of slime that stretches through space and time from birth, at a certain place and a certain time, to death, at another place and another time. It would be your slime time line, if you were a creature that left a trail of slime.”

“Turning from slime, if we could, please go on and give us another bit of advice.”

“Okay. Well—um—hmm—if you do get lost, don't try to retrace your steps. It's a waste of time. You can't change the past, so don't bother trying to go back there. Don't try to follow your slime time line—”

“Please. No slime. It's making some of the ladies queasy.”

“Go forward,” I said. “Go from where you are to somewhere else, somewhere you have never been. Go in any direction but backward.”

“Aren't you likely to become even more lost?”

“If you're where you want to be, you're not lost,” I said, “and if you want to be where you are, you're not lost. So you've got two choices: you can stay put and learn to want to be where you are, or you can move on until you come to the place where you want to be.”

“Deep, very deep. Please go on.”

“Lots of times, while you're on a journey, you think that where you're going is where you're going to want to be, and that where you are is just a place that's in your way and not the place where you want to be, but that's not always true. For instance, on my journey, I didn't stop in New York, because I thought that I wanted to be someplace west of New York, but now I think I should have stopped in New York, because I might have wanted to be there for a while.”

“They say it's a great place to visit,” he said, nudging himself over and reclaiming a bit more of the microphone.

“Yeah,” I said. I was beginning to warm to my role as dispenser of advice, and as I warmed to it I began to discover that I had many more pieces of advice that I wanted to dispense. I was also beginning to resent the interruptions of the leader. “Another thing to keep in mind on a journey is this: don't try any funny business. If you do, people will ask you if you're trying to be funny. There is no good answer to that question. If you say that you were trying to be funny, they tell you that what you were doing or saying was not funny, and you wind up feeling like—well—like a jerk. On the other hand, if you say that you were not trying to be funny, you will see a certain look come into their eyes, as if they suspect that you might be wearing a mask and they're trying to see through it, and from then on they will treat you as if you were trying to be funny by making fun of them, and they'll hate you for it. So, don't try to be funny. You just can't win.”

“Are you trying to be funny?” he asked. It was a pathetic bid for a laugh. He didn't get it.

“Are you?” I asked. I got the laugh. I was beginning to feel very good.

“Be yourself,” I said to the crowd. “Be who you are. You may be a muddleheaded dreamer. People may laugh at you for being a muddleheaded dreamer. Stare them down. Stand tall. Start a club of muddleheaded dreamers. The world owes a lot to muddleheaded dreamers.”

A sudden burst of applause came from a small segment of the audience. The few who had applauded quickly caught themselves. I saw a couple of them glance quickly from side to side to see if their neighbors had noticed that they had applauded.

I applauded those who had applauded and said, “Welcome to the club.”

People laughed. Mostly, the people who laughed were people who had not applauded. I think they thought that I was just trying to be funny.

“Don't try to talk to people about the place where you're from,” I said. “Nobody wants to hear about it. I don't know why. Maybe it sounds too strange to them. It's not what they're used to. It's not like the place where they're living or where they came from. To them, the place you come from seems—I don't know—”

“Alien?” he offered.

“That's it: alien. They act as if you came from outer space.”

This brought me a warm, satisfying laugh, doubly satisfying because I had been following my own advice and not trying to be funny.

“When you're talking to people, try to stop yourself before you say something that makes you wish you had put your foot in your mouth. There are many things that you would like to say that would, if you said them, make you find out that they were things that the people you're talking to did not want to hear. Don't say those things. At least, don't say them to the people who wouldn't want to hear them. Watch their eyes. You can tell when you're getting close to the point when you ought to put your foot in your mouth if they get that look that I mentioned before. In general, when you see that look, shut up.”

He leaned toward the microphone to make a comment. I gave him that look. The crowd roared. He didn't speak.

“When I was little,” I said, “I tried to make a model of a flying saucer by gluing two saucers together—regular saucers, the kind that go underneath cups. If you think you might want to try it, let me give you a warning: holding two saucers in that way is pretty tricky. They can slip from your hands easily and break, and if they do your mother isn't going to like it. If you manage to get the rims glued together you will have a more stable construction, but—take it from me—your mother isn't going to like that either.”

They gave me more laughter, fueling my fire.

“Recognize your failings. I'm not saying that you have to point them out to other people. I'm not even saying that you have to eliminate them. They may not even be failings, if you could get an objective opinion about them. I mean, one person's failings are another's strengths, depending on who's looking at them. But our tendency is to recognize our strengths and overlook our failings. I'm telling you that because I recognize the tendency in myself. In my case, my biggest failing is—well—I know what it is, but I guess I'm not going to tell you what it is. Let's just say that it's something that goes to show that, like everyone else, I'm ‘only human.'”

That was received with a warmth that I find hard to describe. I could see that they found it funny, but there was more than that in their reaction, and I thought that perhaps they were, individually, reflecting on their failings, and concluding that, yes, they were, like me, only human.

“Another thing: you may know something that nobody else knows. You may have knowledge that other people do not have. You may have information that is known to no one else, or only to a small group of people who for one reason or another have come to know these things that other people do not know. You know what I mean, don't you? I'm talking about secrets. That is, I'm talking about things that ought to be secrets. Maybe you have traveled through the Land of Lace. Maybe you know what goes on in the Forest of Love. Maybe you are familiar with the secret rituals of the Great Church of Snoutfigs. Maybe you own a book or two that shouldn't fall into the wrong hands. If you have secrets, if you know secrets, keep them to yourself. Don't give them away. Don't sell them. Don't even betray them by allowing yourself to smile that superior little smile that says, ‘I know something you don't know.' If people know, or even suspect, that you know something that they don't, they will hate you for it. They will. I know. I'm not going to tell you how I know, but I know.”

He leaned into the microphone again. I nudged him aside.

“Here's a piece of advice I got from someone I didn't like. I guess that shows that you can sometimes get good advice almost anywhere if you keep your ears open. And I guess that means that you should keep your ears open. The advice that this person gave me was to be aware that gravy can hide a multitude of sins. Be wary of what the gravy might be hiding. I think I will probably always be wary of any cut of meat that's hiding under gravy. As I went on traveling, though, I got a taste of some other kinds of gravy: a certain kind of smile, a certain kind of promise, even a certain kind of goodness. Beware of any kind of gravy. It can hide a multitude of sins.”

The leader coughed. He seemed about to make a lunge for the microphone. I grabbed it the way singers do, with both hands, swung it toward me as if I were dancing with it, and said, “Here's one for those of you who are waiting for ‘someday,' for that day when life is finally going to bring you what you've been waiting for, that wonderful day when your dreams are going to come true, all of them. My advice? Take what life offers you and move on. If you're offered a sandwich, take it and make a graceful exit. Chances are good that you won't be offered anything else.”

“I'm sure you must be tired,” he tried. “You've had a long journey, and—”

“I have had a long journey,” I said, “a very long journey—”

His eyes brightened.

“—and I'd like to give you a piece of advice that my—ah—that I gave myself—while I was on my journey. Don't be too quick to decide that you've made a wrong turn. It's not really a wrong turn unless it takes you away from what you're after. Most of us are after many things, so there are many, many paths that we can take to what we want. None of them could accurately be called a wrong turn. And here's a little secret: if you're not trying to get anywhere, then there are hardly any wrong turns at all.”

“You've certainly given us a lot to think about—”

“In the evening, the light can play tricks with your eyes,” I said, taking a couple of steps to one side, away from him, as he advanced. “If there is mist, the tricks can be even trickier. Somehow, the light and the mist form a kind of screen onto which your mind projects the images that it manufactures when it is engaged in wishful thinking. You may seem to see a castle on a mountain peak where there is nothing but a water tower. Don't bother climbing the mountain unless it's the water tower that you're after.”

“We'll be sure to remember that,” he said. He had gone into a crouch. I was sure that he meant to make a spring for the microphone.

“Be alert to the many meanings of the words
ha-ha,
” I said, circling, forcing him to turn his back on the audience in order to keep his eye on me. “In themselves, those words have no real meaning at all. What they mean depends entirely on the motives of the speaker. Their meaning is beyond your control. Do not try to give them meaning. Do not impose a meaning on them. Look for the meaning that they have been given; respond to that, and only to that.”