To the Artist's Page     To our home page

To Walt Craig's previous piece

The Struggle

Only when you are ten years old are you able to completely release the bounds of your mind. Only at ten are you completely unfettered by the shackles imposed by a mindless and stifling society that insists on mindless and stifling conformance. Only at ten can the consequences of adult burdens like illness and death and mortgage payments go unconsidered.

Ten is a time of careless magic, magic like that possessed by little Alan Frank. Alan was barely ten and already he was widely traveled and had accomplished feats that would have been envied by even the most courageous had they known. Alan's many accomplishments included having flown an A10 over Iraq. Alone and wounded in a badly damaged plane he had succeeded in knocking out twenty-five Iraqi tanks. After many hours of surgery he had awakened with President Bush at his bedside thanking him profusely. As usual, he had been modest, even when the President had presented him with the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Alan had been involved in many other wartime efforts and had been wounded many times more, but his exploits were not limited to the battlefield. After braving storm whipped seas and doing hand-to-hand combat with five hundred vicious headhunters he once had discovered a pirate's treasure. The ancient chest was filled with jewels and doubloons and contained a magic dagger. The one who possessed the dagger could not be conquered. But, Alan didn't need it. He had never been defeated anyway.

Alan's adventures had led him into the realms of the mystic as well. He had destroyed a number of vampires and had once slain a mummy bent on keeping him from recovering a sacred Egyptian scroll. In all the world there was nothing that Alan Frank feared or dreaded.....except, Mr. Verity.

Mr. Verity was an unpleasant fellow. He ruled Alan's fourth-grade class with stiff precision. He was always annoyed when Alan drifted from the classroom into an adventure. Since school had started last September Mr. Verity had grabbed Alan by the collar and wrenched him from places like the Great North Woods, where he was exploring and hunting grizzly and from an unknown solar system in our own galaxy where friendly beings were teaching him to make himself invisible. Each time Mr. Verity had jerked little Alan back into the classroom the rest of the class had laughed. But Alan didn't mind. It was the friendly, good-natured sort of laughter that fellow adventurers and comrades share. Mr. Verity seemed to sense the camaraderie and that annoyed him too.

It wasn't Mr. Verity's nature to be satisfied by merely dragging Alan from his frequent odysseys. He always felt that the boy's departures from, and forcible returns to the classroom were worthy of some sort of punishment. He soon learned that sitting Alan in the hall by himself only opened another portal to destinations far from school. After much consideration, Mr. Verity decided that the best way to create a sense of responsibility in Alan would be to assign the boy a series of mundane tasks. The theory was that each little task would force Alan's attention in a desired direction, hence, channeling his mind's power toward a desired goal. Mr.Verity's ultimate goal, of course, was to temper Alan's imagination with reality. No one, he reasoned, could function adequately or make a reasonable contribution to any worthy cause without being firmly grounded in reality. So punishment had come to mean busy work.....doing things like copying pages from the dictionary and writing essays touting the rewards of labor and education. Alan performed his penance without complaint because his forays into imaginary realms eased his burdens.

On one occasion, and out of pure exasperation, Mr. Verity asked Alan what he was thinking.

"I was thinking about flying," the boy had said.

"In an airplane?" asked Mr. Verity. Mentally he was preparing a lecture concerning the necessity of a good education, concentration and discipline in order to fly a plane.

The boy's answer was simple. His voice was tinged with wonder. "No, Mr. Verity, like a bird. Sometimes I think about what it would be like if I could fly like a bird does. If I could, I'd go away and do things."

The class had laughed, but Mr. Verity did not.

"What kind of things?"

"Things like saving people from buildings that are on fire."

Mr. Verity scowled. "A regular Walter Mitty, I see."

Alan didn't know who Walter Mitty was and Mr. Verity was not inclined to explain. The conversation, however, kindled a small flame deep within Mr. Verity's mind. The light was not complete, but the flickering tabor illuminated fragments of the memories of his own imaginary trips.....trips that were taken many years before. Dimly, Mr. Verity recalled release. For a fleeting moment he felt the recollection of uninhibited freedom, then it escaped. But, for that instant he was forced to wonder if reality was really diminished by imagination or if imagination could somehow lead to greater truths. For that same fleeting instant he wondered at the value of truth if it discouraged all but discipline and survival. Reality pressed hard and he repeated the lessons that had eaten the key to his freedom.

"You've got to stop daydreaming. You'll never accomplish anything that way."

As Mr. Verity turned, the lone tear he suppressed extinguished the flickering light in his mind's eye.

To the top of this page