Walking Stick

My mother had resisted telling me who my father was. When I had been younger, she had been able to ply me away from this question with a variety of delicious sops such as ice cream sundaes made to order or a toy airplane that had working propellers and people that waved from the windows.

But now I was getting older and though I never saw my mom with any member of the opposite sex and had done deep excavations around the house seeking hidden photographs of my theoretical progenitor, I was getting nowhere. My mother caught me doing this on numerous occasions and her pique grew. One day, she took me brusquely by the hand, loaded me into the car and drove me to the Insect Museum.

I remember it was a day marked by terrible rolling thunderstorms. I looked out the passenger side window and worried at the angry looking clouds like large smudges of charcoal which were lighting up by turns like a sort of pinball machine with an invisible ball thundering around. Mother wore her weird black sunglasses though it was such a dark day with no sun.

The docent at the Insect Museum fretfully pointed out that we had arrived just twenty minutes before closing time but mother poo-poohed her and waved the young woman away. She led me to a certain aquarium several rooms into the building which was nearly empty of visitors that rainy afternoon. When I tried to stop to watch the dung beetle in one aquarium rolling a decent facsimile of the earth, she just yanked me away, driving onwards. She clearly knew where she was going.