Learning to Crawl

By Ken Eckert

A young teacher who feels he's getting old. A time-traveling daughter's sacrifice. The first humans on earth, and their discovery of death and free will. Fractured stories and time traveling bard-watchers. A disappointed rock guitarist and picky demons. A.I. problems in a post-work paradise! Naughty narrators and Newfies. A textual mystery. Did God err in giving my life the wrong choices? Ken Eckert's Learning to Crawl is the followup to Shorter of Breath, and features ten stories ranging from light to dark humor, to reflections on the nature of free choice and God, spanning pre-historic man to a post-apocalyptic future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Moldy Rutabaga Books
• Release date: Apr 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781775023456

Ken Eckert

Shorter of Breath is the first novel by Kenneth (Ken) Eckert, who is a native of Edmonton, Canada living in Korea. As an English professor most of his writing is academic, including articles on medieval romance, Chaucer, and (post)modern literature, with a recently published book, Middle English Romances in Translation (Sidestone), and Writing Academic Papers in English: For Korean Writers. He is an alumnus of Memorial University in Newfoundland and University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he studied Chaucer alongside creative writing students such as Alissa Nutting (Tampa) and Juan Martinez (Best Worst American).

Book preview

Learning

to Crawl

––––––––

Ken Eckert

Copyright © 2020 Kenneth Eckert

All rights reserved.

Moldy Rutabaga Books

http://keneckert.com/mrbooks

Print: ISBN-13: 978-1-7750234-4-9

E-Book: ISBN-13: 978-1-7750234-5-6

Contents

1 Opa’s Lesson Plan

2 Jane

3 Bright-he

4 Learning to Crawl

5 Selling the Bard

6 Screwtape Visits the Dorm

7 When There’s No Wheel

8 Lady Albright’s Purloined Toaster

9 Leveling

10  Bitter Sugar

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

––––––––

Thanks to all who have read and given encouragement and edits. All characters in this book are fictional. None are meant to represent friends, family, or myself.

Selling the Bard was originally published in Havik 40 (2019). Screwtape Visits the Dorm was originally published in Soliloquies Anthology 24:1 (2019).

Dates are given for original composition, although revisions were done 2019-20.

Cover art is via pxfuel.com. All graphics in this book are public domain (CC0 1.0 Creative Commons).

1   Opa’s Lesson Plan

Eric leaned over his desk and moved a few papers aside with his pencil, restlessly tapping the pencil up and down between the lacquered wood grain and a paper corner, giving that characteristic rattling sound of distant thunder. It was four o’clock, and the classroom had emptied out. It had been a bright day through the shutters, and so Eric had not turned on the lights. It was now getting dim on these cool late winter days; someone coming into the room would likely find it dark enough to warrant switching on the lights, but Eric’s eyes had adjusted. Yet he had noticed the lengthening shadows and knew that he really should walk across the room and turn the lights on.

To keep himself busy, he returned to grading his small stack of essays. They were largely uninspiring, and often brazenly an echo of what he had discussed in the class, almost to the point of resembling a tape recording on paper. There were, of course, exceptions: Dylan’s unusually large vocabulary in his writing, and the logical argument that Susan had used which surprised Eric and almost gave him a tinge of inadequacy, as though a school supervisor dressed as a sixteen year-old girl was hiding in his classroom.

It was Eric’s first year. The first two months had gone quickly, with some tension and uneasiness, but the school had begun to feel like home. As Eric thought over the day, he played back not the students’ answers, but the loose patter which had filled their mouths between class changes. The new video game. The movie they had seen, and the words they used in its description. The new album which was so cool.

Eric saw himself walking up and down that same type of hardwood floor and depositing his books on the desk, and, being a boy and expected to do so, feigning dislike of school with a good-natured growl. The girls had seemed so adult, so knowing; the boys knew all the answers, and when something happened in the school it had the importance of the universe. The entire world seemed to be happening consequent to their actions.

And now Eric’s friends had their own lives far away from the school. Many were married. Some were in other places. A few were dead. People were doing their own activities and building their own worlds. Not only was there no longer one world, but the world of Eric’s seemed less important.

Wolfman Jack? Eric had asked the girl jokingly, but privately in shock.

How can you not know who Wolfman Jack was?

A movie star?

The girl did not know. But how could she not know? As Eric mulled it over as the students wrote a project, yes, it came to her, of course she would not know. She had been born after the man had ceased to be part of that mysterious pop culture that people just know about. But they don’t know.

Green Day? Noise, pure noise. Pulp Fiction? Violence.

"Don’t people listen to good music anymore? Nobody listens to Led Zeppelin? Nobody has seen Star Wars?" Eric asked, again facetiously, but with growing inner embarrassment. They did know Star Wars, and knew what Led Zeppelin was. But they knew the latter via parents or elder siblings, not with the residue of personal knowledge and the sense of ownership that Eric’s peers would have; did you know that Stairway to Heaven was written in a Scottish castle? Did you know the famous story about Bonham? The music of our lives. All gone.

One of the girls smiled affectionately to him and called him Opa. At one time, Eric would have known what to do about a girl who smiled at him. And she was a pretty girl.

But that was just it. She wasn’t a woman. She was a girl. Eric thought this over. Of course, he shouldn’t feel attracted to the girl; she was a student. Yet his friends would certainly whistle at a girl this age. But this one was different. How? In what concrete way?

Wolfman Jack. Eric smiled. So young, so disconnected to the knowledge that comes from living, that cannot be learned in schools. The smile that adults used to give him when they talked about what they did when they heard Kennedy was shot. But that smile, did it indicate that Eric was disconnected?

My God, Eric thought. I’m no longer cool. I’m establishment. And then, Eric thought of how dated the very words were. Did the kids still say ‘cool’? Yes, they did.

Eric looked at his pencil. A mechanical pencil, smooth and plastic, without flaw. At one time, the pencil would have been orange-red and flecked with scratches and bits of missing paint. The page would have been covered with doodles.

Eric thought for a moment and then began doodling on the page corner of the attendance sheet. The eyes first, and then the large black disks that made ears. Snoopy. He still made it quite well, he thought.

And, upon reflection, he was still a teacher. But perhaps he could be a boy once in a while as well. He spoke as though it was a profound discovery, out loud, knowing that no one would hear him: I don’t like Green Day; but I can draw Snoopy whenever I want to. There are some perks to being an adult.

It was kind of a silly thing to say audibly, Eric thought as he returned to his last few papers. But still he felt better, and left the lights off just because he felt like it.

January 1996.

2   Jane

I’m comfortable here. The room is well-lit and filled with plants, and I think that most of them are real and not those replicated-type plants that have the same texture but don’t react to a breeze the same way. They don’t live. There is something, I suppose, to the fragility and vulnerability of plants that makes them more precious to us; yet they can endure against the worst of conditions and treatment. I’ve never been the gardening type like your grandmother—I must confess that hobby bored me!—but small details like this do stand out to me.

There are Venetian blinds and marble tiles on the floor, and some virtual paintings on the wall of faraway vistas and those soft pastels that seem intended to soothe the eye here. I enjoy the ceiling fan. It makes me think I’m in some European villa. All we need are the busts of Caesar to complete it. All we need are the old-fashioned type of nurse. The nurses try to make us feel at home in their short skirts, but they may as well have worn white as they used to. It’s not like they’re fooling us, or need to.

But I suppose I should try to be more charitable, for people really have tried to make these nursing homes less institutional and more like a home, as impossible as that sounds. How could anyone know or be able to match the atoms and the soul within them that make up one’s home, the way the walls lay and the paint sits, the way floorboards creak when you walk on them, the way furniture adheres to the floor as though it has earned the right to sit at ease after years of you guys jumping on them and playing, and your grandmother and I watching television or playing cards or just sitting up late at night talking and laughing about nothing.

So what I am trying to say, in my roundabout way that you are so used to, is that I am comfortable here, and that’s still something to cherish at the end of one’s days. Don’t be so damn serious! You’re looking at me as though I am being sentenced to death. Think of it rather as a transition, a transfer—a promotion. There is a saying, more than a century before you ran around the grass fields in the sprinkler when you were little, which goes, I was not afraid to be born. So why should I be afraid of dying? You’re upset that my life’s journey is near its end, and I can feel my bones and my lungs telling me that the force within me is ready to move on to new digs. But my life has been rich, and I have seen a lot and done lots of things, and so I do not begrudge its ending.

I know that you are not all religious, and I will avoid acrimony on this fine day by not further discussing the matter, but some of you have asked about a part of my life which I was always hesitant to discuss before. I feel that this would be a good time for this story to be finally told, for there is no longer any danger of anything coming of it and it would be a good object lesson for those of you unsure of the way your lives, and I mean all of them collectively, really work. Old people think all of their boring stories about when they were young are important. In this one case I think it really is.

It is a strange narrative, but sometimes truth is evident from this strangeness, as though it were too fabulous to be an invention. You have been patient with me as my memory has begun to fail me and as I’ve started to muddle things, but this one part of my life is important and I have not let it slip away. Some people ask whether it is better to have the body or the mind go first. I don’t know; they seem to be going in tandem in my case.

As you, Dean, Cathy, and Robert are or were, I was for quite a long time a college student in the late twentieth. In my third year I was taking a biology course, much against my will, although of course it really wasn’t that bad and my mock indignation over some of the demands of the course gave me something to complain about over lunch, as a good university student should. The incident I am going to relate began one day when I was alone in the laboratory working on an assignment which was, as usual, late. Don’t look so intent, Brett. You look as though I am going to relate a story of some chainsaw massacre or something. It is really not so macabre as this. You may even find it humorous in a way, once I convince you that it’s actually true.

Hello.

Hello. I looked up from my work on my microscope to see a young girl about my age. She was pretty, and blonde without that sort of stringy dampness or discoloration that ‘dirty blondes’ often have. She surprised me, and there was a beat for a moment while neither of us spoke.

She asked gingerly, Are you Richard?

Yes. At the time she seemed rather familiar to me, as though it were someone I had gone to high school with who had changed her hairstyle or something and was not instantly recognizable. It had happened before.

Another pause.

I’m Jane.

Yes. I said this to mean, i.e., translation, through body language: So? She looked as though I should jump up and embrace a long-lost relative or something. What was she expecting out of this?

How are you doing?, she offered.

Fine, I replied. She continued to look at me with some embarrassment and expectation. Had she hit my car? Did she run over my cat?

Do I know you from somewhere?

Yes, you do, she answered.

Well—

I don’t know exactly how to explain this.

I was beginning to become a little exasperated with her, as I didn’t have a great deal of work to do, but not so little as to spend all evening wringing answers out of a stranger.

Okay. Try me!

I’m your cousin.

At this there was somewhat of a relieved tension, as I had to laugh. You’re my cousin! Are you sure you have the right person?

Yes, you are Richard Davis. I am Jane Davis.

My cousin? Well, how did this happen, then? Has one of my uncles divorced and remarried in the last two weeks and brought you into the family?

I have to admit that I should not have taken such a sarcastic tone, but I hoped at the same time that there was an edge of playful silliness to it. You remember that I said she was attractive. It’s not that I was attempting to date her, as I was going out with a young blonde named Tina at the time and other women were the furthest thing from my mind, or at least pretty far. You know how young men are—they have to flirt anyway with a pretty girl whether they are interested or not. And this was when I made the connection—she had some intangible physical resemblance, which was why she had seemed vaguely familiar to me.

Eh, it’s kind of a long story. I promise you that I am your cousin. Look, if you want me to leave I will. But I value knowing my relatives and I hoped you would at least hear me out!

And now I felt a little guilty from the tone of her voice. What if she was actually right? I did not see how it could be, but I was willing to indulge her. And she did have attractive eyes which wore down my resistance somewhat.

She asked, Would you like to go for coffee and doughnuts?

This was, of course, a weakness of mine, as Hal, a friend at the time, and I would often go out for coffee to these brightly-lit coffee shops to hit on the serving-girls or just argue until two in the morning about free will or politics or computers or these things that university students always did and always will pass the time doing. There is a sort of self-importance to us types, you know—we were above the concerns of the common classes such as cars and sports. At any rate, I accepted. The lab work was not that important, and it was getting late. And so we went together in my car, which was a Ford Escort—something like the airport shuttles you would know, but more squarish and one you drive yourself—to the coffee shop.

We talked for a while, until I had to settle this matter once and for all and find out how we were linked by blood. Nowadays this sort of family link isn’t as important as it was then, but it was more of a part of what a person’s identity was then, at least in our family. And I have to admit to a sort of guilty motivation in this, for it would have been nice if she had not been related and this was an elaborate pick-up ruse of hers, for you know how men dream about aggressive women like this. I was not thinking about Tina. But she seemed to destroy this thought by reeling off my relatives’ names: Daniel, Jack, Marion—even Jonathan. These people aren’t around anymore of course, except for Jack, but the point is that she was unnervingly correct on every one.

So whose uncle or aunt of mine is your parent? Or—I suppose it was silly of me not to think of this at first—Sorry!—that you’re a second or third cousin. I don’t know all of them and haven’t met them all. So you easily could be a cousin. Which one, then?

Alright, I’ll level. My dad is your Uncle Jeremy’s brother.

Uncle Jeremy has no brothers, only sisters.

Her face began to turn red as the warning bells were going off in my head. But she continued, in hurried speech.

Um, yes he did. But he died young.

And again the serpent in my tongue rose again: If he died young, he must’ve been pretty popular with the women to have knocked one up to have kids before he died!

And at this her face turned even more red, so much that she could only look at me like a wounded animal and say nothing. I had cornered her in her lie. But I had become angry by her dishonesty and this made me especially blunt to the point of vulgarity. You must remember that I am telling this from over sixty years distance, and I was a different person then than now.

Second cousin? she asked with a pleading smile.

Look, if you are trying to be my friend or more than that or whatever, you aren’t going to do it by lying to me! If you just want to talk to me, then introduce yourself as Jane Whoever, Total Stranger, Esquire. Don’t give me some crazy story about being some long-lost cousin who was abandoned on the rocks near some cave. Otherwise you make me think you’re trying to convert me, or sell me Amway or something!

She continued to say nothing and to look ahead at me in stunned silence.

I continued. I’m sorry I yelled at you. But you haven’t been very honest. Maybe I should just go.

No, please don’t, she yelped, It’s important.

What is? What’s important?

That I talk to you. I don’t know how long I will be here.

Then talk to me. But no more of the relative business.

But I am a relative of yours!, she pleaded.

"How?" I growled.

I’m your daughter!

What!

You’re my dad.

There was another beat. Then, again, as a release of tension I laughed. It was so obviously an ice breaker of sorts, to tell me something so ridiculous knowing that I would take it so. And so I warmly laughed, until I noticed that she was not laughing. In fact, she looked annoyed.

It was silly of me to come. I feel like a fool. There is no way I am going to convince you of this, dad.

Come on, what is this really about? Is this some college joke of someone’s? Let’s level, now, come on—how could you be my daughter? I’m twenty-one years old.

Dad, do you believe in God?

Yes. What does that have to do with it?

Don’t you think that at times He might do something miraculous for someone’s benefit—to hammer home a point?

Alright, He might. But I’m not Moses. So my future daughter is a philosopher! So what is your question leading to? And now I was enjoying myself, for I was beginning to see that she was not serious but it was a harmless sort of joke. So why not play along?

That’s what has happened. Today at noon, for me, was about thirty years from now. I was visited by an angel who asked me to come to help you. I know you and know that you would not turn me away if you believed it to be for real. And I’m telling you that it is for real.

And with what are you going to help me? My lab assignment? Am I about to invent some serum that will change the world or make everyone’s hair grow back? Do I make transparent aluminum?

Don’t be silly. I’m being serious.

And so am I. So how are you going to help me? Are you going to sing the Barney the purple dinosaur song as I work to inspire me?

Will you please be serious? This is not a joke!

Well, then, answer me. I’d be edified.

I don’t know how I’m going to help you. I just have to, that’s all.

Well, it has been a while since I’ve had any.

Don’t be vulgar. I’m your daughter.

Would you care for a little incest to make life interesting?

Stop it!

She looked genuinely exasperated. And now I was enjoying being in control for a while, outdoing her strange joke. But yet I still felt guilty, for these last remarks made her face go whiter and whiter, and I was not so dense as to not know when a girl is on the verge of tears. I had perhaps gone too far.

Just stop it.

Alright, I’m stopping. But it would be nice if you would level with me.

I am leveling with you. I am your daughter. If I wasn’t, how would I have known who your relatives are: Uncle Jack, Aunt Marion...

I had not thought of that in the last few minutes. This was becoming a stranger and stranger evening.

I don’t know. How did you find that out?

I’ve known them all my life. They babysat me when you and Mom went away.

Tina?

Yes, she answered, with a slight hiccup in her voice.

Ah. So I do marry Tina. And do I become a rock star or a CEO?

You become what you become. I was told not to say anything about that.

That’s convenient for you.

But I know about the motorcycle you had for one week when you were a kid. And the kite collection. And your first car, that you restored for a month and then crashed. And the bald spot you already have tucked away there, and the scar on your arm from baseball. And your obsession with ‘50s music! You know, dad, not so many people listen to rockabilly or whatever in the middle of the twenty-first century. About as many listen to Gilbert and Sullivan.

And then my face began to turn white. How did you know that? I don’t even tell Tina about some of these things.

Well, you must eventually. I know about them. I even brought some pictures. And at these she reached in her small leather-ish purse and produced a small square box which resembled the portable compact disc players of the time, except it was slightly larger and had an oddly styled texture to it. Of course you know, it was just a phone, but I had never seen one like that then. She then pressed a few buttons and on the screen, clear if not slightly faded, was a picture of me as a boy. And another of me riding a bicycle. And another of my parents. And one of Tina. And then one of me in a graduation robe, receiving a scroll from my professor. This one scared me. It was too well done to have been created on a computer. Back then it was not so easy to create this sort of thing.

I sat back, flabbergasted, and looked around the coffee shop to see that I was still awake and that the others were not in on some elaborate scheme on me. But the rest of the place was continuing as it had before, oblivious to us in the corner, pouring their cream and sugars, reading their newspapers, complaining about the government, talking about the Leafs game. I was not in a movie or in a dream. And my eyes slowly shifted back to Jane. I was feeling very uncomfortable.

That’s a neat toy. What else do you have in your purse?

Would you like to see U2’s next album? And she produced what looked like a compact disc but was smaller. There it was, an image of the band members. I enjoy that sort of old folk’s music, she grinned.

Look, this is impossible!

But it’s not. Do you want to see another album? Here it is. I know that you wrote poetry from time to time, and it found its way into songs when you fooled around with your musical friends in college. You recorded an album. Look at the lyric sheet you made for it. You really put a lot of time into this thing!

And I glanced over the lyric sheet and began to feel a mix of panic and embarrassment, for one of the songs was