To read Fool’s Odyssey from the beginning, click here.

Chapter Seven: Good Friday (Continued)

Previously: Back home in L.A., The Fool resumed his aimless search.

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I was just driving around, not really going anywhere,

when I saw this grammar school down the hill.

It was a little country-type school right there

at the foot of the Sierra Madres.

It had the foothills for a backyard,

and then just went right on up into the mountains

without a fence or anything,

except for the little dead-end road I was on.

I could see behind the building

through the scrub oak and the scrawny adolescent fir trees.

All the kids were gathered around, and someone was talking.

Like I said, I felt like a kid myself that day,

so I had to find out what they were doing.

I got out of my car and climbed down through the bushes

to a spot on the hillside where I could see and hear.

There was a young teacher with red hair and brown glasses

and a blue dress and an Easter corsage

that she’d probably got from the Principal.

She was telling the kids about the Easter Bunny,

how he’d come and hid all these gifts in the bushes

and in the woods around the school.

She was wonderful (it must have been her first year).

She kept going on about

“the Easter Bunny this and the Easter Bunny that,”

never letting on with so much as a grin

that she and the custodian and the school Principal

had probably been out there at 6:30 that morning

hiding all those goodies.

But the kids were fooled.

All they could think of was finding those gifts–

delightful, silly, foolish children.

And then I began to think about me

and all of the time I’d spent running around

looking for gifts.

Yet I was never satisfied.

Why?

I could easily have spent the rest of my life

just opening all the surprises the world was so full of:

Extravagant sunsets and generous wind,

and gullible animals who somehow were willing to be your friend,

and wonderful hands full of fingers that moved

just when you thought they ought to,

and blood and muscles,

and skin that would heal itself and make some more of itself

when you hurt yourself,

and steam engines,

and vocal cords,

and oil paint,

and movies

and—

why were we never satisfied with so many gifts,

for God’s sake?

To read Fool’s Odyssey 26 click here.