from Jonathan, a small fiction:

HOUSE.
(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

The farmhouse, our ancestral home, was three hundred years old and held together only with tape, by eleven generations of quick fixes. This was the eerie and unlikely house where I was raised, and which later, at some unspecified time, I became. Our home was something we made up as we went along, using ruins and electrical tape. When it fell down, we propped it up: we improvised.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the wiring. The house was not suited to electricity. We ought to have kept, as our ancestors had, to lanterns, sparklers and djinn. As it was, the wiring was entirely jerry-rigged, stuffed here and there, running through walls, across rooms, and prone to improbable and calamitous connections.

If you unplugged the bedside lamp in the four-poster bedroom, the entire house went black. The washer, dryer, vacuum, blender and waffle pan could all be used at once, no problem. To use the toaster we had to turn off all the lights.First thing in the morning my mother in the kitchen would cry out, “Prepare to toast!” And my brothers and I would run through the house making sure everything was off before shouting, “Toast away!”

When I was young I didn’t understand why we did this. Or, rather, I understood differently. I had a very special third grade teacher* who taught the world’s religions, all at once, with mantras on the chalkboard and yarmulkes and an arrow on the ceiling to remind us which way was Mecca.I’d learned about the taboo or privileged status of pork, tobacco, orgone boxes, kopal and cows. I made no distinction between electricity and the holy spirit. I assumed our religion was one of toasting.

When my mother bought a new toaster, I cried sacrilege and insisted on keeping the ousted toaster in my bedroom, where I improvised a shrine with nag champa, baseball cards and a stolen yarmulke.

I was a lucky child: the range of acceptable behavior in my family was extraordinarily wide.

The world was reputed to be full of mystery, and no one minded if I bowed my head reverentially as we stood in the dark kitchen and watched the coils of the toaster begin to glow orange.



* Mr Griffith, I remember him fondly. He was a holy man--confused, but holy. If he ever became the prophet of a new religion--which I do not necessarily recommend--all his followers would wear maroon corduroys.