Kevin Mikles

000774328

9/27/02

 

 

An Old Man’s Advice

 

 

            It had been at least five years since the last time I returned to Mill Pond Park, or the small city of Saline for that matter.  After graduating from high school, there was nothing left for me to see in the petty town, except the promise of corporate land developers to continue plodding through the vacant farmland, turning the small country village into a swelling suburban hellhole.  Sure enough, upon my long-awaited arrival, I spied upon a new tuft of condominiums protruding deep into the grassy field across from the school, almost causing me to miss my left turn towards the park, which was thankfully still there.

            Feeling nostalgic, I attempted to recall any fond memories I had about the park.  Sadly, only an incident involving 4lbs of ground chuck, a wooden baseball bat, and my senior year Mythology class workgroup project came to mind.  I remembered that we had to videotape a faux television show based on a Greek god legend.  I didn’t remember what meat baseball had to do with the ancient empire.  Needless to say, I faintly recalled our group receiving a failing grade on the project.

            Parking my car in the concrete lot at the foot of the park, I hopped out of the vehicle and into the field.  Digging up a clump of dirt and grass, I smiled as the smell of beef wafted into my nostrils, my bat poised in my other hand.  My eyes opened from my reminiscing to a gaggle of horseshoe-tossing elderly folk staring at me not ten meters away.  This was Saline all right.

Before we had a chance to exchange words, I flashed them a quick smile and dashed into the nearby forest, eager to begin my strange school-appointed task.  Refreshing my memory with the project parameters, I began my quest for three general things: Something big and hard, something small and light, and something sticky.

Something big and hard…

Stepping out of the bounds of the dirt trail winding through the forest, I happened upon the first item relatively early in my quest: a section of a dead, moss-covered log.  Overjoyed, I snatched it up and brushed off some loose dirt.  It would be the perfect base.

Something small and light…

Tucking the brittle log under my left arm, I began to scan the forest floor in search of natural materials that would be light enough to stick onto my wood surface.  Several types of small leafy plants and flowers caught my attention.  I eventually decided on using a leafy green clover that was found in abundance throughout the forest, enabling my project to have a uniform appearance.

Something sticky…

My original idea was to collect pine tree sap to simulate glue, but I eventually realized that this was not a pine forest.  I also couldn’t recall if sap was a seasonal occurrence or not, my knowledge of nature being at a minimum.  Approaching a clearing back on the trail, I decided to take a seat in the dirt to think.  Suddenly, as if right on cue, a slug slowly emerged from a crack in the dead log dirtying my lap.  Eureka! My all-natural glue stick had arrived!

I pinched it between my thumb and pointer finger and picked it up, placing it on a testing spot on the edge of the log.  Poking it a few times to hurry up its sluggish pace (sorry, no pun intended), it eventually moved an inch, leaving a trail of slime behind it.  Testing out my theory, I was happy to see that, indeed, the clover would stick to the slug slime.  Unfortunately, it was taking the little guy too long for my liking to distribute its goo.  Worse still, in an effort that was supposed to speed up the process, I ended up killing my little friend by rolling it to death.  At least I think it died, anyways.  It may have been playing dead to end the torture.

With that idea clearly thrown out the hypothetical window, I needed to continue my search for naturally sticky things.  Berries were sticky, but not enough for longevity.  Burrs were sticky, but only to my pants and shirt.  Ground beef was kind of sticky, but there was no way for me to naturally obtain it.

The closest thing to ground beef that I could find turned out to be the moist mud found along the bank of the meandering river cutting through the park.  After exiting the forested area of the park, I placed the supplies I had already collected on a picnic table near the horseshoe tournament and began to transport fistfuls of mud from the river, elderly eyes watching my every move.  Once I finished tearing the remaining moss off of the log, I proceeded to cover it in mud.

“What in the Lord’s name are you doing, son?” One of the horseshoe champions had strayed from the game.  He stared at me with his squinty eyes, partly hidden by his Bald Eagle vented cap, safely at the other end of the table.

“Oh, this is a school project,” I said, smiling.  Mud caked my hands and clothes as I diligently continued my work.

“What do you have to do?” The nosey old man asked, bewildered.

“I have to write something using materials only found in nature,” I explained, refraining from looking up at the old hick.

“Ah, have you thought of something to write yet, son?” he asked with newfound enthusiasm. “Because if ya hadn’t, I would suggest something patriotic.  Because patriotism and nature go together like bread n’ butter.”

I almost stopped what I was doing, trying to decipher what this old-timer had just told me.  Bread and butter? What? Was I too young to understand what this old farmer was telling me? Was I too jaded from city life? I shook myself out of the thoughtful trance.

“Uh, I’ll think about it,” I replied, surely disappointing the old man.  He then hobbled away, muttering to himself.  My new mission was to write something to utterly confuse the poor man.  Because I knew he’d be back.

My first thought was to write something disgustingly unpatriotic, but I decided that I just wanted to confuse him, not offend him.  I also wanted something that would coincide with the spirit of the assignment.  Those two prerequisites, along with my utter dorkiness, yielded a phrase that would sum up the project in its entirety!

I had just finished sticking the final clump of moss to form the ending letter of ‘SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB’ when the old man approached me a second time.  He squinted over at my work of art, scratching the back of his neck.

“Somebody …set up …us …” he trailed off.  “What in Sam Hill does that mean?”

The phrase on my log was an amazingly sharp contrast between nature and the realm of the techno geek.  If there were one thing that should never be written on a log, this phrase would be it.

Deriving from an old Sega game, ‘Zero Wing’, the phrase is the unfortunate product of bad translation.  Basically, when the game got ported from Japan, the developers did a horrible job translating the game text to English, making the story laughable and causing a delayed uproar in the dork sector of the Internet community.  Joke pictures have been taken (or altered), showing phrases taken from the game, such as ‘All Your Base Are Belong To Us’ and ‘Move Zig For Great Justice’ plastered on billboards and other public places.  My log would be no exception.

            My project would represent the bridge between the natural and the epitome of man-made objects.  It would also represent how truly confusing nature can be – who really understands what goes on around the eyes of us humans? A few scientists, maybe …but how much do they really know? Was the phrase I scribed using moss part of a deeper meaning? What does ‘Somebody set us up the bomb’ really stand for?

            I sat, reflecting on the project and the situation, as the old man stood in front of me.  He stood patiently, swaying in the wind, undoubtedly awaiting an answer to his question.  Imagining humans of the past writing language symbols in soft mud, I connected my experience and realized that we, the humans of the present and future, honestly take our writing and tools for granted.

            My phrase, a sentence composed of seven short words, took me about two hours to write – including the time it took to find and gather materials.  The end medium was fragile, awkward to carry, and even more awkward to read.  In contrast, the scrawling of this phrase on a piece of paper with a pen would have taken me all of five seconds, and would have been much more legible despite my sub-par handwriting skills.  We have become much more efficient in writing as our technology advances.

            We take the distribution of out written work for granted as well.  In the far past, my log might have just been in a stationary spot.  People may have visited it to gain from its information.  Shipping the log great distances would be dangerous; the dead log and dry mud would crumble easily, thus ruining the message.  Traveling with it in a rainstorm would have been a disaster.  Copying the message to other logs for distribution would have been painstakingly slow.  Comparatively, written works published on the modern internet can instantly be viewed all over the world.  A 50-page document can be copied and pasted to another location with a few quick strokes on the keyboard.

            Eventually, I realized that the old man was still staring at me, and my train of though came to a halt back in Saline.  I had forgotten the question he asked.

            “Um, technology is pretty cool, isn’t it?” I managed to ask him.  He squinted his eyes towards me.

“You sure are a strange one,” the old man murmured to me.

Definitely.