“A few figs from thistles…”

by Howard A. Tabor

The Land Between

As a child of ten or twelve, I was struck by Scarlet Fever, a streptococcal infection whose bright red rash put me in bed in a darkened room for at least a week, as I recall sixty years hence. What the consequences of bright light may have been I was never told; children of that age, after all, are spoken about, never spoken to. Whatever pain may have been involved has carried no memory; what I do recall was a great deal of reading in the Junior Classics, a set of ten books on the small bookshelf beside my bed. Reading in that darkened room may have done more damage than the fever, but what I read has done me nothing but good.

It was an eclectic mix of authors and literature types. There was “The Gold-Bug” by Edgar Allen Poe, for example, and “Robinson Crusoe”. There was also “The Land of Counterpane”, a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Stevenson’s realm was familiar long before I encountered the poem. I might as well have been an only child (my sister was two years older), and a feral one at that, which translated in my case to a lot of time alone. The patchwork quilt that wrinkled and draped between my legs had long since become a land of lost and found, whose vistas rippled into the distance, fold after fold, to the horizon (i.e., the edge of the bed; guess I was a Flat-Earther at that age). But that landscape was uninhabited; no toy soldiers, no tractors or dump trucks, simply a world to wander.

Soon I did have a “traveling companion” in the person of Frank, the dog, equally curious about the world. And our exploratorium was Frank’s old neighborhood in Mesopotamia: trips to the FCC Grocery for mom, and that summer I tended the store for Mrs Pirtle; weeding our garden plot along the Milwaukee Road tracks; fishing below the weir with my friends Artie (Butch) and Bobbie (never, ever call her Roberta!). I got to know Mesopotamia more intimately than other parts of town, and its people, too; and how the rhythms there were different, slower, without being casual, than elsewhere. And there was a social structure, too, one that accepted me after a while as a benign invader — without a need for countervailing antibodies.

Until junior high school, Bobbie and Artie and the others went to Darrow school, while I was at Darwin, which made for a different sort of friendship, more purposeful, since we saw each other only “by appointment”. But Bobbie was check-out clerk at Cermak’s Market and Artie became a mechanic at Cliff’s Garage, businesses not actually in Mesopotamia, but decidedly on the wrong side of town — which is probably why I hung out there. It was Albert Camus who observed: “Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend”. We did. They were.

If you can tell me why someone is your friend — someone who knows you too well but likes you anyway and expects nothing but your own acceptance of them — I wish you’d share that wisdom.