The summer before I left home to attend the Ringling Clown College in Florida I rebelled against going to Mass on Sunday. I told my mother it was all a meaningless rigmarole in Latin. She gave me a glare that would've bored a hole through duranium, but didn't insist on my attendance. She must have realized that at seventeen I was ready to make up my own mind about such things.
So every Sunday that summer I took a stack of books, a pitcher of lemonade, and some sandwiches out into the backyard, where I could lay in a hammock made of green canvas with dull brown tassels down each side and read to my heart's content.
Despite hormones, acne, angst, and bone-deep intellectual laziness, reading books was my biggest ambition as a teenager. Next to making people laugh; but that pursuit usually ended in people gawking at me in alarm, not guffawing in good humor. My sense of humor needed quite a bit more work before it reached the professional levels finally achieved with Ringling Brother.
A day spent in reading was a day spent in bliss. Now that I'm retired and in my own little apartment that is only four blocks away from the Provo Public Library that same happy obsession is overtaking me once again.
I started my Sunday summer reading spree with Dickens' Pickwick Papers. I relished each page of sprawling nonsense and came to love the beautiful fools Dickens led about on an affectionate leash.
I positioned the hammock under our weeping willow for shade, where I constantly battled the wasps that liked to crawl mindlessly up and down the drooping willow branches and fall into my lemonade pitcher. Instead of being rendered speechless with joy at finding an ocean of sweet stuff to guzzle, the wasps would hum angrily while crawling out and then make a murderous attempt on my bare arms and legs. I kept an old splintered ping pong paddle handy for these attacks, sending the brutes off into left field (and kingdom come).
Next I almost got a hernia from trying to hold up and read The Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was about as big and heavy as the telephone directory. And that is where I got my first taste of Mormonism, from A Study in Scarlet -- wherein the brainy Holmes attempts to foil the sinister machinations of some Latter Day Saint vigilantes from Salt Lake City.
How well I remember starting a paperback copy of Cervantes' rollicking Don Quixote! Sometimes you can just feel the awesome imagination inside a book, even a shabby paperback like I had, and you can't wait to dive in. That first Sunday with the knight of the woeful countenance was all I had hoped for -- I wriggled with glee in my hammock. And something whispered to me that I, too, would someday play the Sancho Panza to a rollicking crowd somewhere.
But storm clouds were gathering about my literary Shangri-la. It started with a casual remark from my mother as I carried out a tray of pimento loaf sandwiches and a pitcher of lemonade to begin my second Sunday with Cervantes:
"Why don't you take an hour to mow the lawn first?"
I silently shook my head no; I was in a fever to find out what happened next to Quixote and his stooge Sancho Panza.
And so it began.
Mothers, I have since learned, are congenitally hostile to their offspring taking it easy in a hammock on a peaceful Sunday afternoon. They don't like it, and they intend to put a stop to it. And Catholics have no compunction about mowing lawns and painting fences and such like on Sundays. I imagine the Pope weeds his garden on Sundays over there in the Vatican.
My mother began to nag me every Sabbath:
"That lawn looks awful; it's an embarrassment to your father and I! The whole neighborhood's talking about it. Please, I'm begging you -- just leave those old books alone for an hour and give the lawn a quick going over. Is that too much to ask?"
"Can't it wait until tomorrow, mom? I'll do it then -- I promise!"
"Oh all right -- I'll put up with the humiliation one more day . . . somehow." This statement was followed by a martyred sigh that would have won her an Academy Award if we had lived in Hollywood.
One Sunday she actually came out and started doing the lawn herself, on the theory that it would shame me into taking over. It didn't. I simply waved my book at her in serene greeting.
Not a smart move on my part. She put the mower away with the lawn half-done and stomped back into the house, where I could hear her expostulating with my dad in ringing tones that shook leaves off the elm trees as far away as Como Avenue. By this time I was chuckling over the inspired inanities of P.G. Wodehouse in
Carry On, Jeeves. Nothing in the world mattered to me except how Jeeves would extricate his master Bertie from the next contretemps.
I also discovered a wonderful book called
">Center Ring, written by Robert Lewis Taylor. Not much info on clowns, but a wealth of quirky detail about Ringling circa 1954.
Next Sunday when I went to make my sandwiches I was met with someone I dimly recognized as my so-called mother, in, as she would have put it, 'a snit', standing in front of the fridge with her arms akimbo.
"No you don't, buster!" she snarled. "First mow, then you can stuff your face."
I was stunned at her heartless determination to let her own son starve to death rather than allow him to cultivate his mind. As gracelessly as possible I slammed open the garage door, started the mower, and ran over all the lawn furniture and the little brown garden gnome statue by the rosebush in my sullen determination to get the damned work over with.
Had I been a weaker person the triumphant glare my mother gave me when I came back in to make my sandwiches would have stolen my appetite -- but the blood of a hundred adamant Norwegians ran thick in my veins, so I made double the amount of sandwiches and choked every last one down as I lay in the hammock, my distended stomach as hard as a basketball.
After that confrontation my Sunday reading marathons didn't have the same charm as before. The last book I read that summer of scintillating Sundays was John McCabe's Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy.
It gave me very definite ideas -- and a few weeks later I was on my way to Venice, Florida to try my luck as a circus buffoon . . .
