Pale Green Pants With Anatta Inside

When my brother and I were four and five, we were obsessed with the Dr. Suess poem What Was I Scared Of?, better known to adherents as "Pale Green Pants With Nobody Inside".

This gothic thriller, in which a disembodied pair of cabbage-coloured dungarees relentlessly creeps out Our Protagonist, is ripped from the pages of The Sneetches and Other Stories. (Not literally, unless you want serious grup trouble.) These days you can also read it online, though the text is accompanied by only two of the original Lovecraftian illustrations. Suffice it to say the experience pal… I mean, underwhelms, by comparison.

For reasons I can no longer fathom, over a period of months this story completely possessed our young imaginations. At one point we actually stuffed a pair of green denim jeans with wadded newspaper and stood it in the corner of our shared bedroom, to serve as icon to our prostrations. Then we would cower on the far side of the bed, peek out at it, and scream "Pale green pants!" before diving to the floor.

Needless to say, the book itself became liturgy, to be read aloud (yet again) by any adult we could talk into it. The most memorable kokyo was my grandmother, who, having intoned the poem's macabre refrain ("Pale green pants…. WITH NOBODY INSIDE!"), remarked, "I think the pale green pants are scary enough." Commentary worthy of Mumon.

These days I judiciously abstain from looking deeply into this whole adventure, for fear of stumbling on uncomfortable truths about religion in general. But having recently recovered these memories – or recovered from them – I plunged down the Internet rabbit hole to find out if others were similarly enthralled to this scrap of Seussgeist.

tldr: Yes. Yes they were.

Far from falling into obscurity, it appears PGP is so popular today you can buy just that, stripped of epistolary padding. What's more, its illustrations – o feat of nefarious genius – now glow in the dark. Which has led one believing dad to read it to his kids under a black light. Or he did, until he was picked up by Child Welfare.

Nor are my brother and I alone in making idols unto the Chartreuse One. Another fellow stuffed a pair of pale green pants (!) and stood it in the corner of his preschooler's bedroom (!!) because the kid was afraid of the dark (!!!). OK, that guy may really be evil, but another – professional artist, this one – taxidermed some chromatically-correct britches in a relaxed yet empty posture and gave them to his (25-year-old) sister for Christmas.

Upshot: ours is not the only family to find Deep If Somewhat Disturbing Significance in this tale of tailored terror.

Surprisingly, I've yet to encounter a single Net-cruising helicopter pilot wailing, "Never let your tender darlings read this horrifying book!!!!!", or claiming that it's a thinly-veiled Wiccan conspiracy to make our children worship Satan and wear ugly pants. Closest was one mom who recommended only middle school kids be permitted to read it. Right, lady. Best get a few years under your belt before you meet The Doctor.

Or maybe that's insensitive. Perhaps the spectre of unfashionable clothing run amok has special resonance for women. I'll withdraw the statement.

In the end, it may be that the scariest thing about Pale Green Pants is its power to inspire such vague obedience in all of us who, once as children, fell under its mildly-alarming spell. It's the single thread running through every account I've collected, starting with my own: we all fear the Pants, we all cheer the Pants, we all stand ready, like an army of cereal-munching Renfields, to serve the Lime-Hued Lord. How much more exciting all of this might be if He actually wanted anything.

But now I'm back on religion. And in all candour, there may be a touch of Zen in there somewhere; a creak of the Gateless Gate in those selfless slacks. Witness this flash of Suessian insight:

I said, "I do not fear those pants
With nobody inside them."
I said, and said, and said those words.
I said them. But I lied them.

Been there, lied that.

(Adapted from Growing Up Home, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being Wrong

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got came from my dad. I was in high school, and on the horns of some dilemma.

For some reason, my dad – whose counsel trended to the brief and prescriptive – heard me out this time, as I explained my choices and why I feared I might be censured either way.

My dad nodded a few times, and after a brief silence, said:

"Well, in the end, it doesn't matter."

I hadn't expected this.

"What? Why not?" I asked.

"Because you're always going to get criticised. No matter how carefully you choose your course of action, someone's going to call you an idiot, or a jerk, or a traitor. There is literally no decision a man can take, about anything, that isn't morally reprehensible to somebody."

"Great," I said. "So what do I do?"

"You choose your critic," he said.

I raised an eyebrow, and he continued.

"Suppose you're walking down the street and a panhandler asks you for spare change.

"If you give it to him, I guarantee you somebody will say, 'Nice going, you jerk! You know he's just going to spend that on booze. You're keeping him addicted, undermining the economy, making it possible for freeloaders to live off society. People like you make me sick!'

"On the other hand, if you don't give it to him, someone else will say, 'You selfish bastard! You wouldn't go hungry tonight without that 75¢, but he might! You can't spare a handful of coins for a brother who's down on his luck? Even drunks have to eat. You're the reason life is so lousy!'

"So that's the choice: which gripe can you live with?"

In my life I've consistently found that this formula busts up ethical logjams like nobody's business. It doesn't always lead to the safest decision – to put it mildly – but it does generally reveal the one I'm least likely to be ashamed of later, even in the face of inevitable criticism.

My dad's gone now; he died in September. And since I don't have any kids of my own, I figured this was as good a time and place as any to pass on his thunderously effective mindfulness tool.

In these morally challenging times, when even the citizens of heretofore principled societies face dubious and potentially dangerous demands on their allegiance, this is the sort of advice we can all use.

(Adapted from Growing Up Home, copyright RK Henderson.)

Tough Love

Once, when I was in Grade 2, my teacher had all of us save our milk carton from lunch. Afterward we folded it into a flower pot, filled it with dirt, and planted a single bean in it. Then we lined up our little pots on the windowsill and waited.

To nobody's surprise, within a week each had produced a shoot. Our teacher then divided us into groups and issued new orders. Group Number 1 got to leave their bean plants in the sun and care for them as usual, but everyone else had to stop watering theirs, relocate it to a closet, sit it on the radiator, or the like.

I was ordered to put mine in the refrigerator.

What happened next remains as vivid to me as this morning.

I have a loving, if independent, nature, and in the few days I'd been tending it I'd conceived an affection for the bright green tendril striving upward. I also wasn't a moron. What seven-year-old doesn't know what happens to a living thing in the faculty room fridge? Years later, as a teacher myself, I could have prepared a better lesson plan than that during passing period. Using nothing more than what I had in my desk.

On a Friday afternoon.

I hung back as the rest of my group came forward, hoping she wouldn't tally us. But she did.

"Robert?" she demanded. "Where's Robert? Don't you have a plant?"

I mumbled the affirmative.

"Bring it here."

I hesitated, carton in hand.

"Do you hear me? Bring it here."

"But…" I stammered, barely audible. "I don't want to kill it."

"What?" she snapped, incredulous.

I raised my eyes.

"I don't want to kill it."

At this point my teacher pitched what can only be called a power tantrum. "Oh, I see!" she snarked, enraged beyond self-respect. "Everyone else is participating, everyone else has to do what they're supposed to, but Robert (her voice dripped) doesn't want to kill his!

"Everybody look at Robert! He's not like us! He's special!"

I began to sob, and she continued to demonstrate why I have so little respect for authority. (And possibly why my attitude toward women was for so long uncharacteristically hostile.)

"You put that bean plant on the cart THIS INSTANT!" she commanded.

I did. But I didn't stop crying for some time.


Half a century later, I'm just starting to catch a whisper of public commentary about the state of empathy on this backwater planet. Not much. Not enough. But a few writers, here and there, are beginning to question the fitness of our souls to ensure our continued survival.

Empathy is the defining human strength, the single advantage that pushed our fangless, clawless arse to the top of this heap.

But we have a knotty relationship with the stuff of our success. The "toughness" and "courage" we admire in leaders and ourselves amounts most often to cruelty, self-centredness, and indifference. Those who betray a glimmer of "weakness" – empathy, compassion, sophistication, humanity, evolutionary superiority – are abused and ridiculed. The rest of us are conditioned to look on silently.

Which is why empathy needs claws and fangs.

In my life I've consistently been punished more severely for empathy than for cruelty. When guilty of the latter, I've been disciplined; when the former, I've been humiliated, ejected, and blacklisted.

Therefore, it's increasingly critical that decent, fully-evolved human beings learn the difference between insensitivity and just pissing others off. We must refuse to pipe down when advocating forgiveness, generosity, and the objective analysis of karma, regardless of sneers and threats. The alternative is what we already have, what's killing us progressively faster: government by the least human. Whether national, local, or in some grade school classroom.

Most importantly, we must actively patrol the state of empathy in our communities, and teach future generations to honour and protect their own evolved souls and defend those of others.

So check it out, bitch: this entire species depends on the beans we produce.

Stand aside, please.



(Adapted from Growing Up Home, copyright RK Henderson. New Life [photo] courtesy of Juanita Mulder and Pixabay.com.)

1973: The Dark Christmas

This Christmas I'm remembering a December 41 years ago, when the one-two punch of an OPEC oil embargo and a dry summer in my hydro-powered state caused electric rates to soar. That winter President Nixon extended Daylight Saving Time in a bid to conserve energy reserves. It didn't, but it did make all us kids get yards of reflective tape sewn to our coats and carry flashlights to our half-lit and -heated schools, because the morning commute was pitch black.

That crisis, which set the tone for the entire decade, swims in shadows in my memory: the dim classrooms, the wet, coal-black streets, the miners' headlamps my parents bought us for the walk to the bus stop. And especially, that drab, apocalyptic Christmas.

That year, Americans were enjoined by patriotic duty to eschew all festive lights, outside and in. (The power bill alone would have beaten any renegades unconscious, but they'd likely not have survived that long; citizenry that winter gave themselves wholeheartedly to rousing rounds of Finger-The-Slacker, Siphon-The-Gas-Tank, Flush-The-Hoarder, and other Serlingesque sport normally reserved for wartime.) Some jurisdictions went even further; neighbouring – and equally dam-dependent – Oregon straight-up outlawed electrical expressions of good cheer, and in fact, lighted displays of any kind.

That year my family forwent our traditional single string of outside lights that didn't even span the front of the house, and instead of lighting the Christmas tree, we strung garlands of cranberries and popcorn with needle and thread. In this way, I learned three important life lessons:

1. It takes forever to string popcorn and cranberries with a needle and thread.

2. You'd think the birds would be all over that when you hang the garlands in the yard on New Year's Day, but in reality they could give a crap.

And…

3. Garlands of any kind are in no sense or capacity, by any law of morality or aesthetics, anywhere in the Universe, a substitute for Christmas tree lights.

It takes such penury – properly lived – to give the ordinary its due shine and worth. Fact is, I've remained a huge Christmas lights fan ever since, and never miss an opportunity to darken the room and bask in the glow of a fully-decorated, suitably illuminated tree.

I don't know why these recollections are so acute this year, but to honour them, I believe this Christmas I'll stand in my front yard and shake my cane at passing teenagers, shouting, "YOU SPOILED-ROTTEN BRATS!!! JUST WAIT TILL SOME ARAB TURNS THE GAS OFF ON YOUR DAMNED CHRISTMAS!!! WE'LL SEE HOW YOU SMART-MOUTHED NAMBY-PAMBIES GET BY!!!"

Call it old-man carolling.


(Adapted from Growing Up Home, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of downtown Portland -- famous for its luminous holiday city-centre -- in the 1973 dark, courtesy of David Falconer, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and Wikimedia Commons.)

Works in Progress

I'm currently writing three books, any one of which is likely to show up on this blog from time to time. For the benefit of readers who encounter them, these books are:

100 Days on the Mountain. There's an ancient Zen tradition, called A Hundred Days on the Mountain, of retreating to a mountain and meditating for a hundred days. Almost no-one does this anymore; the only teacher I know from the last many centuries who did was Seung Sahn, who sat his hundred days on a Korean mountain in 1948. Taking my inspiration from his story, I set out to do it myself on the other side of the North Pacific. 100 Days on the Mountain is my account of that experience.

Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands. In which I set out to trace the borders of Washington as nearly as possible in an old rear wheel drive pickup. The journey takes me into deep solitude 'way out in the middle of nowhere, where the land itself is the story, and the people I meet only characters in it. As was I. And my truck.

Growing Up Home. I've reached the age when men become grandfathers, but am not allowed to be one myself because I never had kids. (Apparently that's a prerequisite. Who knew?) Therefore, I am forced to publish in book form my stories of wisdom gained much against my will. The essays make short reading (Selling Point #1), are Certified Wise by an authentic old man (Selling Point #2), and you can put them down anytime you want and go back to your own youthful misadventures (Selling Point #3). Or your nostalgia for same.

(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and the New York Zoological Society.)

Monsters

Night filled me with dread.

That the world turned black, leaving windows like sheets of obsidian against which my little brother's face resembled something my reptilian cortex clearly remembered, was bad enough. Beyond lay strange noises, cries of marauding wolves and phantom babies that grown-ups dismissed as dogs and cats.

But the worst was the bed. There, I lay alone and unarmed, swaddled in flannel and bound in bedclothes. In such a state, I was completely vulnerable. I had no clear idea what might happen, but it was awful, and certain.

Interesting now to think that I once feared the dark. Growing, I came to prize the cover of night: the protection of a nocturnal forest, the kindness of a dark room. But at seven, that very darkness manured my nightmares. My lifeline, and the only power standing between me and destruction, was a paper-thin beam of light slicing in from the hall. The door was kept cracked for just this purpose, so that a sliver of day would fence my bed from the darkest night in the room.

As I was (and am) also an insomniac, bedtime was almost as stressful on my parents as it was on me. First came the operatic resistance, then the serial interruptions in television shows as they stalked back down the hall to threaten me with ill-defined but horrific consequences if I didn't "go to sleep right now".

As if sleep were a place to which I could simply walk, in my striped pyjamas.

One night my mother happened to glance through this narrow gap on the way to the bathroom, and saw me seated on the floor, reading Dr. Suess by that thin reed of light. The shout that followed sent the book flapping like a flustered chicken. I can only guess that she had parried one too many of my counter-recumbence tactics that night, and a vain hope of peace had been rudely extinguished.

Taking scarcely a terrestrial step I dove headlong into bed, vanishing deep beneath the covers before I'd even touched the mattress. Outside my mother continued raging, while I curled into a fetal posture and pinned my last wager on science.

For as any child knows, children's blankets are made of some advanced space-age stuff – possibly Kevlar – and are fully UL-rated against ghosts, prowlers, and middle-weight monsters. They may also be effective against parents, if, upon finding no head protruding from them, these last conclude they must not have had children after all, and withdraw.

But as no blanket is soundproof, I was able to determine that it hadn't worked this time.

At length my mother wound up with the observation that if I couldn't be trusted with an open door, she could damn well close it. Followed by a slam, and silence.

Here was trouble. I popped out, already terrified, and found the situation exact. The air was opaque as cast iron.

The door was closed.

It's hard to describe, or explain, the horror of that moment. It engulfed me like fire, and scorched away all trace of reason. I only knew that whatever hid in the dark each night, waiting for just this opportunity, was in that very instant converging on my bed. It was big and vicious, able to shred a child's blanket with a single swipe of its nondescript paw. And it was horrible.

I screamed in the dark, begged for the door to be opened, hot tears pumping down a face that had been dry. But there was no response.

For some reason it never occurred to me to get up and open the door myself. Being decapitated by a giant praying mantis was one thing; a spanking was quite another. But I was otherwise completely disabled by panic, chest heaving as I sobbed, quilt clutched to my sternum. A pounding heartbeat, maybe two, and whatever it was, would happen. And I'd be dead.

Not the dead you get playing army. Actual dead.

And then a strange thing happened. Something did surge out of the dark. It came from 'way down, 'way down to the first rung of a long, twisted ladder, a place so black and estranged to light as if it had never been.

But this thing came not from my room. It came from me.

Something angry, arrogant, powerful, climbed my spine. Undaunted. Unafraid. Something...

Scottish.

"Rrrrright, then!" it snarled, in my voice. "So et's eatin' me ye're aboot?" Well, GET ON WI' IT, ye blatherskate!"

Even in the dark I could feel my eyes burn red, my teeth gnash each syllable.

"Come 'n' get me, ye gory great monsters!" I, or It, continued. "But I'll STICK IN YER THROAT on the way doon!"

I'm not entirely certain I was speaking English. It might have been Gaelic. It might have been whatever we spoke before Gaelic. But the words came from deep, down where peaty black water laves the gates of creation, where things live that intellect denies.

And the thing would retreat not an inch. Not so much as the breadth of one unearned blade of grass.

"Och!" I cried. "STEP UP, ye pukin' milksops!"

No roar, no attack answered. Not a rustle. I sat bolt upright, quivering not from fear, now, but fury. My small fists clenched to hammers, and I was avid to ply them. To be sure, I was still aware of my tininess. I knew the big-scaries would probably just laugh and bite me in half. But this was no longer about winning. Or even survival. This was about giving as good as I got.

This was about honour.

I scanned the shadows again, fixedly, panting, but no longer crying.

I cocked my head toward the murky space beneath the bed. Nothing afoot there, either. Nothing breathed in that room, seen or unseen, except me.

Since that night it's been harder to frighten me with darkness, harder to threaten me with solitude. Lurid tales no longer run me. Hysterical exhortations to strike a shadowy enemy before it strikes me. Imperious demands that I not look under the bed, "for my own good". Because that night I learned a truth too true to be unlearned.

The monsters are wussies.

(From Growing Up Home, copyright RK Henderson.)

Growing Up Home: Swimming Lessons

My nephew fishes in the lake I grew up on

(The following is adapted from Growing Up Home, a manuscript of tales from my youth.)

In Olympia, Washington, where I grew up, people who couldn't swim were considered physically, if not mentally, disabled. So to avoid small town censure, and perhaps save our lives, my mother enrolled my brother and me in swimming lessons at the age of six and eight.

Back then, self-respecting Puget Sound kids swam in lakes, and on really hot days, the bay. I still abhor pools, reeking of bleach and God knows what.

But this was pushing it. I don't recall the precise month the course began, but graphic memory of icy grey skies places it closer to the previous Christmas than the next. The venue was Capitol Lake, a former mudflat of the Sound, dyked off in the 50s to make a freshwater reflecting pond for the state capitol dome. Black marine oobleck, stagnant river water, and municipal effluent combined there in a fermenting cauldron of corruption.

One whose temperature hovered just above freezing in that season.

Before our abject refusal even to undress in the dank bathhouse, much less enter the water, my mother bribed us with a Mountain Bar a-piece, payable after each session. And so we fell in with the blue-lipped, shoulder-hugging damned lined up in the pea gravel.

The only sound was the ominous lap of waves, from which we reflexively pulled our toes. We were all shivering too hard even to complain.

Eventually a high school kid appeared, in dry trunks and thongs, carrying a clipboard. A whistle was slung around the hood of his sweatshirt.

"Everybody in!" he ordered, stepping onto the L-shaped swimming dock.

Nobody moved.

As he rounded the corner a whistle split the air. "I said IN!"

A girl of similar years appeared behind us, urging us forward with menacing pushing gestures.

I don't know where Parks and Recreation got those instructors. Possibly they were young offenders working off community service. At any rate, when push came literally to shove, we found ourselves knee-deep in glacial sewage. Our tormentors ordered us to grip the dock and kick, to tread water, to swim across the boomed swimming area. We strove to move as little as possible, and not to put our faces in the water.

Or, God forbid, get any in our mouths.

So it went, week after week. Few images survive today beyond wretched misery; the rest have been firmly repressed. But I do recall huddling with another boy, numbly contemplating some B-movie invertebrate on the dock's slimy undercarriage. I've now spent my entire life on, in, and near water, but never saw its like again.

Mostly, I remember vaulting out of that arctic slough at lesson's end, clutching a beach towel around waxen shoulders, and simply savouring its terry cloth nirvana. Amazing how a slight shift in address can make a cold, soggy morning feel like an August afternoon.

I learned nothing about swimming that spring, but is that really the point? Capitol Lake is off-limits to swimmers now, condemned at long last by a lethargic county health department, so my nephew takes his mandated Old Settler swimming lessons in a heated indoor pool.

I worry about his moral development. Sure, he'll learn the side stroke, the dead man's float, the Australian crawl. But can the boy truly become a man without spending nine consecutive Saturdays waist-deep in a freezing mudflat while Colonel Klink snarls at him from the dock?

And will he ever know the sheer, ecstatic bliss a guy can get from a single Mountain Bar?