My Mostly Happy Life: Autobiography of a Climbing Tree

By Shelly Reuben

Chapter 6 – Ethan’s Best Friend

Now I have to tell you a story about a fictional bird named Pal and a mother and daughter who looked very much alike.

Both had bright red hair.

Both had freckles.

Both had big hazel eyes.

And both were very pretty.

The mother’s name was Pegeen Fitzgerald, and her ten-year-old daughter was named

Meg.

They used to sit on one of my lower branches and read aloud (they took turns) from Meg’s favorite book, Ethan’s Best Friend.

It was an old book, one that Meg’s mother had read during her own childhood. It was not very long, but it was jam-packed with illustrations and partially written in verse.

Since others, too, had loved that book, including Esther’s mother Donna, who was a successful sculptress, the last two-lines of the story were engraved on a brass plaque and embedded in a brick wall that surrounds the Children’s Garden in the Samuel Swerling Park. Sam had commissioned his daughter Donna to design and create the plaque herself.

I’ll tell you more about the Children’s Garden later.

The book’s main character was a twenty-one year-old poet named Ethan. Ethan’s purpose in life was to re-popularize the kind of rhyming poetry that was written by his English and American heroes, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edgar Alan Poe, and Rudyard Kipling.

He intended to accomplish this goal by writing the poems himself.

Ethan was a nice looking man. Not particularly handsome, because his mouth was a little too small, his teeth were a little too large, and his face was a little lopsided, but he was tall and well-made. He had light brown hair, compassionate brown eyes, and a sweetly romantic disposition. Ethan was the kind of a fellow who would walk across the street to give a donut to a vagrant; he always surrendered his seats to women on buses; and he held open doors for just about everybody, because it seemed to him to be the right thing to do.

His parents lived on a faraway farm halfway across the country, and they did not earn enough money to help pay his rent; but they did have a beloved cockatiel named Pal who had been in the family since before Ethan was born. So they gave Pal to Ethan to keep him company in the big city where he had moved to achieve his dreams.

Pal was a beautiful bird with a plump grey chest, white wings, an elegant long tail, and a bright yellow head, from which sprung a crown of grey feathers as graceful as a festive salute. His cheeks were emblazoned with vivid orange patches. These patches made him look like he was blushing from acute embarrassment and added a comical aspect to his otherwise forbidding beauty.

Ethan rented a small apartment on the sixth floor of a tired old tenement in the tired old neighborhood of an ever-changing city. He worked eight hours a day, five days a week in the stock room of an advertising agency, so that at night and on weekends, he could compose his verses. But every evening before he picked up his pen, he spent an hour playing with his pet cockatiel, Pal, and telling him what had happened during the day.

Ethan taught Pal new melodies (the cockatiel could whistle fifteen songs and sing the lyrics of five), and he confided his hopes about the poems that he wanted to write, and the life that he wanted to live.

In return, Pal would nestle up against Ethan’s fingers, dance on his shoulder, and sing while Ethan diced vegetables, grilled chicken (his mother had taught him to be a very good cook), and dined. When Ethan was busy writing, Pal would fly around the room, collect unasked for items – a penny, a paperclip, a packet of sugar – and lay them on Ethan’s desk as if offering bits and pieces of inspiration. Sometimes a poem about a penny or a paperclip or a packet of sugar would emerge.

Such were their lives together.

Until two things occurred.

The first was that Ethan fell in love, which meant that most of his conversations with Pal now concerned Nancy Sue, an illustrator with whom he worked at his advertising agency, and who also seemed to like him very much.

The second was that a magazine expressed interest in publishing and paying for a lighthearted poem he had written called “Ode to a Hiccup.” Nancy Sue thought it was funny, and when Ethan read it aloud to Pal, the cockatiel emitted a staccato whistle that sounded very much like a laugh.

Then, as so often happens in books about poets, everything went wrong.

Nancy Sue disappeared from the office, did not return Ethan’s telephone calls, and did not answer his letters.

That very same day, Ethan received a letter from his new editor stating that her magazine had been acquired by a major publishing conglomerate, and she was being fired. Therefore, her offer to publish “Ode to a Hiccup” had to be withdrawn.

Ethan was depressed.

Ethan was in despair.

If he had been a mere twenty-years-old, youth would have invigorated him to meet the challenge.

If he had been forty-years-old, maturity would have fortified him against disappointment.

But he was twenty-one years old.

His childhood’s body-armor of oblivion has disappeared, but wisdom and stamina had not yet kick in.

Ethan had started to write poetry when he was six-years-old. He’d begun to submit poems to magazines when he was eleven. Five of his poems had been printed in his grammar school newsletter, and during his high school years, four were printed in the local newspaper.

After that, nothing.

When Ethan once complained to an editor about the difficulty of getting published, she snapped back that he shouldn’t feel sorry for himself until he had received over one hundred rejections.

He had long since surpassed that benchmark.

He sat at his small desk in his small apartment, staring out his small window at the blank brick wall of the building across the alley.

For over half an hour, he did not move.

Pal was perched atop a Thesaurus on a bookshelf beside Ethan’s desk.