The Adventures of Sky King

My late father-in-law had a really neat trick. In a restaurant, most often in rural Wyoming, he’d look up at the ceiling until other diners noticed him and would look up at the ceiling themselves to see what he was seeing, which was nothing at all other than the ceiling.

I long for those days of innocence, pre-social media, when you could lie and be believed, having to remember your lie and who you told it to so that the lie matched up with the person you lied to. Lying required much more work then, real diligence, not only seizing the opportunity but paying attention to the words that came out of your mouth, memorizing them so that they were in sync with the false reality you hoped to convey. Lying was fun then, exhilarating, your father could have, as mine did, a ranch in Arizona and a small airplane just like Sky King on TV, as long as you stuck to your fiction no matter what.

Now that my hair is as white as Robert Frost’s, I can stop in the woods on a snowy evening and re-collect my childish lies, which have turned powdery with age, and scatter their ashes for future liars to find. My hope is that this gesture will help put them on the straight and narrow, so that they become reformed truth-tellers and run for President of the United States or write a best-selling memoir or accomplish some other remarkable feat.

Someday in the not-too-distant future I’ll write here about my relationship with Vladimir Nabokov and my time at Cornell University when I was enrolled in his seminar, An Overview of Russian Literature…

My appearance in an episode of ‘The Sopranos’ didn’t make the cut, but it was fun to hang out on the set and mingle with the cast, all great guys and gals.