Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (28 page)

Any number of times, I have dealt with the issue of chiggers, the microscopic itch machines whose prevalence on the plains is the real reason so many Midwesterners over the years have chosen to move to New York, a chigger-free jurisdiction. I have described the duration of a chigger bite’s itch (just short of eternal) and what can stop it (amputation,
sometimes). To gauge the itching intensity of the bite, I even invented a unit of measurement, called the milamos—the itching strength of a thousand mosquito bites. (The average chigger bite has an eight-milamos itch.) I have revealed to those who don’t come from the chigger region that a tourist from, say, Joplin, Missouri, who is standing on the top of the Eiffel Tower and gazing down at Paris is not contemplating the beauty of the City of Lights; he is thinking, “Even if they’re over here, they couldn’t get up this high.”

I have had run-ins with animals that I have failed to share with the reading public. Many years ago, for instance, I was attacked by a red-winged blackbird. This was not long after the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds
, and I think the problem was that the movie had got around to the drive-ins: Birds were seeing it, and getting ideas. Bearing no grudges, I have tried to maintain a bird feeder, only to see it turned into a squirrel feeder. I was once chased by a goose, although—to distinguish that episode from Jimmy Carter’s encounter with a killer rabbit—there was never any indication that I had been singled out for attack.

So I was understandably unenthusiastic about concerning myself with dinosaurs. There was no question of staving off a Tyrannosaurus rex with a bar of Ivory. Forty years ago, E. B. White wrote about descending from his office, on the nineteenth floor, to an assembling point on the tenth floor for an atomic-bomb drill—a drop of not nine but eight floors, he noted, since a floor numbered 13 did not exist. “It occurred to us, gliding by the thirteenth floor and seeing the numeral fourteen painted on it, that our atom-splitting scientists had committed the error of impatience and had run on ahead of the rest of the human race,” he wrote. “They had dared to look into the core of the sun, and had fiddled with it; but it might have been a good idea if they had waited to do that until the rest of us could look the number thirteen square in the face.”

I offer a smaller version of White’s point—offering smaller versions of White’s points being what most of us scribblers have to settle for. I’m not suggesting that scientists should abandon their DNA research and concentrate on an effective chigger repellent, although any effort they could put toward that end in their spare time would be greatly appreciated where I come from. I do find myself thinking,
though, that it might be nice if the largest herbivores in the history of the world did not return until we had at least figured out how to keep the deer away from the begonias.

1993

When you can’t get to sleep—either because you still have the cares of the world too much with you or because you went a little heavy on the jalapeño peppers—there’s often a forties movie to watch on TV. The one I had on was one of those heartwarming stories about a plucky little girl whose pony grew up to be a great trotter, or something along those lines. The little girl was played by a well-known child star like Margaret O’Brien. The trotter was just played by some regular horse.

There was a love interest, of course, provided by the plucky little girl’s older sister—Teresa Wright, maybe, or someone with that look—and the older sister’s boyfriend, who was somebody like John Agar. They spent a lot of time spooning on the front porch. Some crooked gamblers didn’t want the little girl’s horse to win. They never do. They never seem to realize that in a heartwarming movie the smart move is to put your money on any horse owned by Margaret O’Brien. So they had sent some big mug like Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom to scare the little girl into withdrawing her horse from the big race. This is another thing that crooked gamblers never seem to learn: Plucky little girls don’t scare easily.

There was also a nice priest named O’Reilly in the movie—a friend of the little girl’s who was always there for her after her parents died and her older sister started spending so much time on the front porch. He was either a big priest played by a Ward Bond–type or an elfin little priest played by Barry Fitzgerald. I’m not absolutely clear on that point, because the print of this movie was not in perfect condition,
and my television set tends to get snowy unless a warm body is right next to it. I was too tired to get out of bed and go stand next to the television set, and after a rather unpleasant scene the week before, I had promised my daughters that I would no longer attempt to keep the reception clear by strapping their cat to the antenna.

So it’s true that I wasn’t getting a perfect picture. Also, I wasn’t paying as much attention as I might have. That was partly because of the jalapeño peppers: Reaching over regularly to grab a handful of them from a bowl I had next to the bed may have caused me to lose the thread of the plot now and then. Still, I was pretty sure I heard this odd bit of dialogue between the plucky little girl and the priest. At the time, the priest and the little girl were at the rail of the track, watching the trotter do a trial run. The priest had a stopwatch in his hand. As the horse crossed the finish line, the priest flicked down his thumb, read the watch, and turned to the little girl with a jubilant expression on his face. Before he could say a word, though, the little girl asked him, “I suppose your personal position on abortion is identical to the position of the church?”

Well, the priest was taken aback, of course. He pretended he hadn’t heard—unless he really hadn’t heard, or unless I had only imagined that
I
had heard. He just went right on and said that Bold Ben—that was the horse’s name, unless it was Old Len or Gold Ken—had come in under the track record.

Then, suddenly, Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom loomed up from behind a pillar and told the little girl that if her horse didn’t have a strong interest in being turned into dog food it had better slow down in the stretch. I expected the little girl to say something plucky, but what she said was, “The fault is really not yours. So many people who exhibit antisocial behavior are products of impoverished homes, of mothers and fathers who have never shown any interest in their children, of—”

“Hey, watch how you talk about my mom,” Slapsie Maxie said. He didn’t seem threatening, though. In fact, as he walked away, he looked as if he might cry. “Nicest old dame there ever was,” he was mumbling.

The priest seemed undecided about whether it was appropriate to offer comfort to a hireling of the crooked gamblers, but before he
could make up his mind he found himself confronted by the little girl. “Well,” she said, “do you think a woman should have control over her own body or don’t you?”

The priest tried to remain calm and friendly, although I could see that he was upset to learn that the little girl even knew about such things. He told her that this was a subject she might want to wait to discuss until she was older and in a different kind of movie. I thought he had a pretty good point. It had been a long day for me—one of those days when the cares of the world seem to be with you every second, as if you’re plugged into an all-news radio station. I figured that about all I could handle at that hour was having my heart warmed a little bit, by a combination of the movie and the jalapeño peppers, so I could be lulled into dreamland.

But the little girl wouldn’t stop. “I suppose you think I’m also too young to talk about whether the church is playing ball with some of the most repressive dictators in the world,” she said.

The priest just looked sort of uncomfortable at that, and I found that I was mumbling, “C’mon, little girl. Give us a break.”

Just then, the older sister and John Agar walked up—all excited because they had just found out that Cold Glenn was at twenty-to-one, meaning that if he repeated his practice performance they’d all win a packet and save the farm. I was greatly relieved. I figured we were back to the horse movie. But then the plucky little girl said to Agar, “Don’t you think that in the final analysis pari-mutuel betting is just another terribly regressive tax, aimed at those in our society who can least afford it?”

Well, that’s not really the sort of thing that John Agar had ever had to think about in a horse movie, so I couldn’t blame him for looking dumbfounded. Actually, he looked worse than dumbfounded. He looked as if he had just caught a horseshoe upside the head.

The priest, who had been looking troubled all this time, turned to the older sister and said, “My dear, if there’s ever a time when you need someone to talk to, I hope …”

I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. Then I realized that he thought the little girl’s question about abortion had to do with her older sister. Being a forties-movie priest, he thought that you could get pregnant from spooning on the porch.

“… for the church teaches that all life is sacred,” the priest was saying, “and that life begins the moment …”

Here’s a priest who has been in fifty movies without uttering a sentence of doctrine—I hadn’t even known that he was Catholic—and this kid’s got him started on the sacredness of life.

“Now look what you’ve done, kid!” I said. “It wasn’t enough that you made poor Maxie cry!”

She turned to me. “Although an informed citizenry is the cornerstone of democracy, the average American watches six hours of escapist television programming a day,” she said, “most of it no better than this movie.”

“You’re the one who ruined the movie, you rotten little prig!” I shouted. “I hope Moldy Wen pulls up lame!”

I jumped out of bed and turned off the television, but I was too upset to fall asleep. I thought I could still hear a little girl’s voice from the direction of the darkened set (“It’s not surprising that a cat torturer would shout at a child. Studies show that most child abusers …”). Finally, I got up and switched the set back on—to another channel. The program was a debate between two experts in Washington about whether our society will be destroyed by a nuclear holocaust or by the economic disasters stemming from ever-increasing budget deficits. What they were saying was pretty familiar stuff for someone who had spent the day plugged into the cares of the world—global warming, widespread bank failures, that sort of thing. It was so familiar, in fact, that I found it rather soothing. After a while, as my eyes began to close, I thought I heard one of the experts say, “But golly, everything would be all right everywhere if only Holding Pen wins the big race.” And it lulled me off, finally, into dreamland.

1985

A hummingbird weighs as much as a quarter. I learned that early this summer, while I was listening to a radio interview with a hummingbird expert on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The CBC interviews interesting people just about all day long, at the same time that American stations are playing the sort of music that makes middle-aged people snap at their children.

I live in Canada in the summer, so by around Labor Day I know a lot of things like how a hummingbird compares in weight to small change. People who live in Canada year-round know even more than I do. What I know tends to drain away over the winter.

The other day, somebody called me in Canada from New York to ask what I thought about the fact that the number one and number two bestsellers in the United States are books about how dumb Americans are. I said, “Hey, wait a minute! I know how much a hummingbird weighs. What’s so dumb about that?” I did admit that I’d probably be forgetting whatever I knew about hummingbird weight by around February (“Let me see, was it thirty-five cents, or maybe half a buck?”). The person on the phone said that one of the books included a list of things that Americans ought to be familiar with but aren’t, and that hummingbird weight wasn’t on it. Apparently the list runs more toward things like Planck’s constant and the Edict of Nantes.

If the people who put together that list came up to Canada and asked a Canadian to identify the Edict of Nantes, the Canadian would just ask if he could answer at the end of the week, figuring that by then the CBC would be interviewing a Nantes specialist from the University of Western Ontario or somebody who just came back from a relief mission to Nantes or maybe the ambassador from Nantes to the United Nations, and the Edict would obviously come up during
the conversation. Then the Canadian would say to the list gatherers, “By the way, did you fellows know that a hummingbird weighs as much as a quarter?”

A Canadian quarter. As far as I know, bird weights mentioned on the CBC are always given in Canadian currency. For an American living in Canada, that was, of course, a question that came to mind right away. I find that facts learned from the CBC can start an entire chain of questions. For instance, the first thing I asked my wife about the hummingbird fact was this: Do you think a hummingbird also weighs the same as two dimes and a nickel?

Now that I think of it, that particular question didn’t start a chain, because she said it was a stupid question and left it at that. But then she asked a question of her own: How do they weigh a hummingbird? Hummingbirds move around a lot, and my wife was concerned that someone who was intent on weighing one would have to dispatch it first.

“Not at all,” I said, happy to be able to put her mind at rest on this question. “You’ve seen those TV documentaries where they shoot a dart into a wildebeest to put him asleep long enough to outfit him with a radio transmitter. Well, this is the same sort of thing, except that the dart is exceedingly small, about half the size of a common straight pin. It’s surprisingly easy to hit a hummingbird with the tiny dart. The difficult part is slapping him gently on the cheeks to bring him around after the weighing. That takes a delicate touch indeed.” I hadn’t actually heard that on CBC, but it sounded like something you might hear on CBC, which is almost as good.

1987

I suppose it’s still faintly possible that those who engineered the mysterious snatching of four thousand pigeons from Trafalgar Square
had only the best interests of the pigeons at heart. There is that ray of hope to cling to.