Author: Henry O. Arnold

The piñata and the unicorn have something in common for our family. It is an unusual union. Back in the day, I took a swing or two at a piñata, most likely after a couple of beers and the encouragement of the crowd; certainly with no malice to destroy a papier-mâché object or with a craving to have the candied guts shower over my head. It has been a long time since that incident. But this year, I did attend a birthday where a mob was gathered around a piñata and each participant got to take their club-wielding turn at the creature with its belly full of treats. In June, Kay and I went to Scotland for a couple of weeks. Before our departure, a grand daughter requested we bring her back a unicorn, her current stuffed-animal obsession. I was not aware that Scotland’s national animal was the unicorn. Images of it abound in the country. The unicorn is to Scotland what the bald eagle is to America. And while both creatures have achieved notable status in each nation, we know which one is real. That does not however, take away from the power each one represents. When Kay and I toured Stirling Castle, tapestries of “The Hunt of the Unicorn” were on prominent display. These works of art portray an odd co-mingling of pagan and Christian mythologies. The unicorn has a long history in Scotland dating as far back as William I in the 12th century who used the image in his coat of arms, and King James III who stamped a depiction onto gold coins. While representations fashioned in stain glass, on banners and flags, painted onto coffee mugs and sewn into bath towels were available at every gift shop and street vendor, we purchased a stuffed version of the horned animal in a thrift store of all places, complete with a rainbow-colored mane and tail. It had been “gently” loved. The grand daughter was thrilled, and it has taken its place in the menagerie of creatures, foreign and domestic, wild and fabled, that fill her crowded bed. How that kid sleeps with all those animals is a mystery. Perhaps it is the nesting effect. Like the unicorn, the piñata also has a multi-cultural history. The Chinese lay claim to the origin to a centuries-old whacking of the image of a cow filled with different types of seeds at the beginning of every New Year hoping for a favorable climate for their agriculture. Then the Aztecs say they invented the practice to honor the birthday of a god with a multi-syllabic name who needed appeasement—perhaps for every battered piñata there was one less human sacrifice. Once the Spanish monks moved into the Mesoamerica neighborhood, they immediately saw the opportunity to co-opt the ritual and created their own version of the tradition in the 14th century calling it “The Dance of the Piñata.” A seven-point piñata represented the seven deadly sins. The piñata itself represented evil, and the treats…

Find some discarded body parts; grab a tool box: hack-hack, saw-saw, cut-cut, stitch-stitch, read up on your ancient alchemy (copies at every local library, I’m sure), add a jolt of electrical energy, a splash of elixir, and voila, you have a creature. The creator might call it his “baby.” Some might call it an oddity. Others might call it an aberration. And still others (the less imaginative among us), a monster. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley called it “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus.” We all know what happened to poor Prometheus who thought he could steal fire from the gods and get away with it. Ah, the unintended consequences of hubris. One evening in 1816, a group of romantic bohemians were living in Geneva, and in an attempt to ward off boredom, Lord Byron blurted out “We will each write a ghost story.” Everyone thought it a grand idea, but none of these romantics could focus their creative and poetic natures into writing a good yarn; except for Ms. Shelley. Bryon lay down the gauntlet, and Mary Shelley picked it up. Eighteen months after Bryon’s challenge, Mary Shelley published “Frankenstein.” She was pregnant when she started writing “Frankenstein,” and pregnant again when she finished. Here was a beautiful confluence of “pregnant” creativity. After two centuries of this story existing in the public consciousness, we often confuse the moniker Frankenstein. It has become the interchangeable designation between that of the creator and that of the creature. It is a frequent misconception when a story has morphed into a mythology, and the two main characters have merged into a duality of a common title and identity. But there are stark differences between the Doctor and the Creature…I hesitate to refer to Dr. Frankenstein’s creation as a monster. The literary critic, Harold Bloom, has pointed out a significant difference in an essay he wrote on Shelley’s story, “Frankenstein’s tragedy stems not from his Promethean excess but from his own moral error, his failure to love; he abhorred his creature, became terrified, and fled his responsibilities.” It is a tragedy when we fail to love, and perhaps the “failure to love” is what creates monsters of us all. We are all “fearfully and wonderfully made,” as the psalmist wrote, but it is the responsible and volitional acts of genuine love that makes us human and not just stitched together parts of anatomy. In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Shelley’s novel, Studio Tenn has commissioned a new stage adaptation of “Frankenstein” by A.S. Peterson for its first play of the 2018/2019 season. The playwright has done a brilliant job of presenting Ms. Shelley’s multiple conflicts and tensions between the human desire to create and the results of one’s creation. What an individual might create with the noblest of intentions, and perhaps for the good of all mankind, may in the end, turn out to have monstrous qualities or actually become a monster. Just think of Einstein and Oppenheimer contemplating the incomprehensible power of atomic energy…

My lovely wife Kay has never met a stretch of highway that intimidated her. Regardless of which side of the public thoroughfare a country has chosen to dictate its traffic flow, she has never been concerned with the directional markings painted on the road. Staying inside designated lanes is not a priority: “Too confining,” she argues. This must be her creative nature and outside-of-the-box thinking. Yes, there is a beautiful little rebel inside the heart of my bride. Past Highways of Death include, but are not limited to, the length and breadth of the Amalfi coast. To clarify, the measurement of breadth in the case of this twenty-five mile stretch of coastline in southern Italy barely accommodates two vehicles as the scrapes and dents and broken side-mirrors attested on many of the cars we passed during our excursion in 2012. With the mountains on one side and a three-hundred foot drop into the Mediterranean on the other, the highway is unforgiving, and better to have a dent or two in the side of your vehicle than the alternative. The way many of the drivers use this stretch of highway, the guard railings to prevent a vehicle from plunging into the sea is more for show than for safety. Oh yeah, and then there are the horses; dodging pack horses is an added test to a driver’s skill set. Then there was the time two years ago in Lyon, France when Kay went the wrong direction on a one-way city street and we faced an approaching street car. She took the only move she had, pulling onto the sidewalk. After the street car passed, she got back on the road and immediately turned our car in the right direction. One must look at the positive, Kay would say: there were no parked cars along the street preventing her from using the sidewalk at that strategic point when she needed to avoid the head-to-head, and “no pedestrians were injured in the making of this move.” She ignored the shocked and terrified faces of said pedestrians or their curses as she righted the car and drove away. It is a wondrous thing to be cursed in a foreign language. Or the time we were driving through the French Alps to Chamonix when construction work on the main road forced us to take a deviation (French for detour). She was a reckoning force cruising the mountain-pass roads like the latent Indy driver she was, is, and evermore shall be; straightening out the switchbacks and hairpins like an expert, braking into and accelerating out of the curves like a pro. Mind you, this was a secondary road with few guard rails, so one faulty move and we would have sailed into the wild blue yonder. When we travel internationally our roles are well-defined: I the pathfinder and Kay the pilot. This recent trip to Scotland, I grudgingly agreed to a Global Positioning System in our rental car. The GPS is an affront to my keen…

The first time I questioned my sense of belonging came a few seconds before a near-death experience; nothing like your own personal NDE to make you sit up and take stock of your life, the world, and the universe at large. At the age of twelve I got my first job as a paperboy. For the next four years, morning and afternoon, I peddled just over seven miles through the neighborhoods near where I lived slinging The Tennessean and The Banner into the driveways of my subscribers. The tubular newspapers secured with a thick rubber band were stuffed into a large metal basket mounted on the front of my bicycle and two saddlebag-type baskets attached over the rear wheel. The paperboy motto was similar to the unofficial creed the U.S. Postal Service adopted from Herodotus’ description of the faithful couriers in ancient Persia of the 6th century: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” A subscriber expected to receive his daily paper as much as he expected his daily mail. I was depended upon, and the responsibility made me feel like a man of the world. Six days a week I could handle the deliveries on my bicycle, but the size of the Sunday paper was monstrous—half news, half advertisements—and the subscribers for the Sunday paper nearly doubled as well. This required parental assistance. So I struck a bargain with my dad: he would drive me on my Sunday morning route, and then we would head to church and I would help him fold and distribute the “Order of Worship” programs in the hymnal racks on the backs of the pews. It was a mutual benefit, but with one glaring difference. I would often complain about having to keep my end, while Dad never complained. It was one of many disparities in our personalities. Dad was given a paltry budget from the church to pay for the hundreds of programs used each Sunday, enough to purchase the paper to make the copies. He was meticulous in choosing the front cover: scenes of nature, paintings of Old Masters, sculpture, stained glass, of sacred spaces and illustrated scriptures; all images designed to frame the hearts and minds of the congregant for worship. The measly amount devoted to such innovative extravagance did not pay for the actual printing costs. After typing the original mock-up of the program, Dad would head down to the basement, pour in the chemicals for printing, and then hand-crank each copy on the mimeograph machine. I can still hear the rhythmic ka-chunk, ka-chunk, sound rising beneath the floorboards from the circular motion of the handle. One revolution spat out one program. Sometimes Mom would work the machine while Dad folded the programs, and on occasion, I was commandeered to do the cranking. The printing chemicals caused my eyes to water and gave me headaches. The fumes probably killed a few million brain cells each time I worked…

It is a wondrous thing what self-discoveries are made within the human heart when a layer of innocence is lost. A dramatic experience may destroy a belief system but make way for new wisdom. From 1959-1961 we lived in Bloomington, Indiana while Dad was completing his doctoral course work in choral music at Indiana University. Until that year, I had been in a private school environment (K-third grade), and was suddenly thrust into the culturally broader world of public education and living in diverse, multi-dwelling housing complexes instead of a single family home. In an earlier post, I have written a different story of that time entitled “Blood Brothers.” It chronicles my friendship with Raymond, one of three best friends I had during that two-year period, and a lesson in courage my blood brother taught me. The other two boys were Eran from Israel and George from Sweden. We were a crew. Our fathers were all doctoral candidates at Indiana University in various fields of study. We lived in University housing, though Eran and George lived in the newer, more spacious family apartments while we lived in the cramped, renovated army barracks. We attended Fairview Elementary public school together.   What I may have lacked in residential amenities enjoyed by my friends, I made up for by having easy access to a recreational area like no other. Less than one hundred yards from our barrack apartment building was a railroad track that cut through a hill leaving jagged, thirty-foot cliffs on either side then went under a bridge at the highest point of the terrain. Eran and George happily abandoned the man-made, state-of-the-art play sets built for their apartment complexes for the more life and limb threats of cliffs and woods and trains. There was nothing cooler in the world than to be playing on the tracks, hear the whistle of a train, and see the Cyclops-beam of the headlight making its circular pattern in the snout of the engine as it headed toward us. The yards were not far away, so a train was either slowing down coming into the yard or building speed as it departed. Either way, you had a minute or two to get off the track and scale the jagged cliff sides to a safe perch. We three would scream at the top of our lungs as the trains rumbled by and would toss Osage oranges at the cars, pumping our arms in the air with delight as the pulpy, inedible fruit exploded against the steel walls and rooftops. What a playground. And yes, this was back-in-the-day before the trend of "parenting" had taken over our modern culture. Outsiders that we were, it did not take long for the three of us to make enemies with some of our older schoolmates at Fairview Elementary. One Saturday, a gang of four or five boys from a neighborhood near our school rode their bikes into the section of University housing where I lived. My mother was hanging…

I had my share of scraps growing up; landed a few punches; took several more. I’ve always heard that it was a rite of passage for young boys to fight. If so, I performed that rite many times in the days of my youth. And not to besmirch the ladies, my two young daughters enjoyed “rough fighting” with their old man when I was still able to get down on the living room floor and be their wrestling opponent. Funny thing was I always lost these battles. In my defense, it was two against one, and the girls were brutal. There are heroic scraps and then there are inglorious ones. The scraps I got into as a kid were more of the inglorious kind. It is possible to learn more about the darker shades of one’s character from an inglorious scrap than from a heroic one. For a short time in high school I played basketball. Well, let me qualify that statement. I spent more time keeping the bench warm than heating up the court with my nimble basketball skills. The coach put me into a game when we were either twenty points ahead or twenty points behind with a couple of minutes left to play on the clock. Either way, there was little damage I could do on the court if given this brief moment of glory, but when offered the chance, I took my two minutes of fame and worked up a good sweat. I was aggressive on the court. I went after the ball. If I got an opportunity to take a shot, you know I took it. I did not mind fouling my opponent either, letting him know that as long as I was guarding him the game was not over until the final buzzer. So now to my inglorious scrap during one of my rare appearances on the basketball court. We were playing an arch-rival, and during my two minutes of court time, elbows were thrown as the players went for the ball at each rebound. I’m no angel. My elbows connected with an opponent's ribs on occasion. But on one particular rebound when I leapt off the floor to catch the ball and gripped it with both hands as it bounced off the backboard, the two opponents on either side of me began to throw as many blows against my defenseless body in an attempt to steal the ball before our feet returned to the hardwood floor; all for the sake of winning the game, of course. No whistle was blown. It was flagrant fouling, but the referees must have been ready to get home and wanted to be done with this game. When my feet hit the ground I spun around and looked squarely into my opponent’s face, the worst offender of "thrown" elbows; it was two against one, remember. “You want the ball so bad, you can have it,” I said just before I threw the ball right into his face. (For the…

I love it when I have the opportunity to do a play because I get to go around using my Outside Voice without fear of Kay's disapproval or a similar negative reaction from a host of others who might consider my volume level an infringement on their personal auditory space. During those weeks of rehearsals and performances I go about the house or tramp over the back field, my mind and body absorbed in my character, my voice modulating in tone and quality, as I search out just the right physical and vocal nuances that will lend truth to the moral fiber of my creation. Kay can only scowl at me when I’m “getting into character” and not scold. Early into our marriage whenever Kay and I were having a disagreement she would stick her fingers into her ears and tell me to stop shouting. “That’s not shouting, my dear. That’s projecting. I make my living projecting.” Yes, her eyes rolled in exasperation then and still do today whenever I use that excuse for my increased volume. On more than one occasion my Outside Voice has usurped my Inside Voice at improper times and gotten me into trouble. A notable moment took place in a church setting years ago when our girls were old enough to be sitting with us in the pew and still young enough to be indifferent to the service…much like their father. In the middle of the sermon when the preacher made an inane theological point that God’s love was contingent on us performing good works; the preacher’s line went something like, “Jesus is well and good, but you have to earn yourself a place in the kingdom,” I took immediate umbrage. I looked over at our little darlings seated between Kay and me, happily playing Tic-Tac-Toe on the church bulletin, and said, “Girls, what he just said is a lie.” In my defense I did use my “stage whisper” voice. However, their heads shot up, the Tic-Tac-Toe halted in mid-contest, and they looked at me as if I had said something blasphemous. And so did the other congregants in a three-pew, 360 degree radius from where I sat. My stage whisper was the epicenter of a contrary theological viewpoint pulsating out in waves in every direction of the compass. Kay, while sinking into her pew, looked at me with a shocked expression that quickly turned into one of death, the “As soon as I get you home, you’re dead,” look. We all survived my poorly timed comment, and we never darkened that church door again.   William Jennings Bryan, famous politician and orator of the early 20th century, had an Outside Voice. I am fortunate to be playing the character based on Bryan in the play “Inherit the Wind” produced by Nashville Repertory Theatre in March/April, 2018. (For more information visit Nashville Repertory Theatre website) The play centers around the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 challenging the legality of teaching the theory of evolution in the…

Most of us remember how old we were when we learned to ride a bicycle. My folks did not have the disposable income to purchase training wheels or helmets, so my first efforts to ride produced several injuries; nothing too serious, just the kind whose healing agent was an application of dirt. My “training wheels” was a patient father offering instruction and encouragement as he ran beside me eventually releasing his hold on the seat to allow free flight. Once I gained the dexterity of balance and motion, I felt a freedom and joy that was indiscernible. Mark Twain got it right, “Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.” I had a few crashes on my bicycle where a treatment of rubbing dirt on the wound was insufficient; one as a kid and one as an adult. This first story returns to the time when I was a paperboy delivering the morning and evening papers in the Green Hills area of Nashville “back in the day” when it was a nondescript neighborhood with a fire station, a movie theatre, shopping centers, a couple of grocery stores, random gas stations and pubs, and a high school with a lot of open space in between. But progress abhors a vacuum and now all the open space has vanished. Riding a bicycle with a front basket full of newspapers was certainly a challenge, but I was strong and agile and learned quickly how to maneuver around the traffic and the occasional dog that gave chase. I was always able to dodge the traffic and outrun the dog except for one incident. There was this German Shepherd on Oriole Place that considered me an invader into his realm. At first, he displayed no sinister behavior, lulling me into complacency. One day while riding down Oriole Place he trotted toward me with a casual gait. I thought, ‘Ah yes, Rin Tin Tin approaches for a friendly pat on the head.’ When I slowed down he lunged and clamped his mouth onto my right foot. I yanked it out of his fangs, and he yelped as if he might have snagged a tooth on my shoelace. For several days I escaped his attacks by outrunning him or swatting his head with a rolled newspaper. The assaults were never from the same vantage point, and the ride down the street was like entering a combat zone. When I complained to the owner, he asked with an indignant cock of his head, “What have you done to aggravate him?” Rin Tin Tin had a dark side his owner chose to ignore. I took matters into my own hands and stopped by a hardware store near where we lived. After looking at the selection of knives, I asked the clerk to open the glass case so I could test the feel of a good knife. Terror would begat terror. “Doing some whittling?” the store clerk asked, a bespectacled, white-haired man with a pink face and…

When my doctor of thirty years retired (how dare he), I recently was breaking-in a new doctor and suffering through the process of filling out multiple forms as if I were applying for some high-powered job. I was asked by a perky med-tech if I had ever smoked. The tech could have read my written answer on page three of the six-page form, but no, a verbal response was required. “How long did you smoke, and when did you quit?” was the question. “Started in earnest in 1967 and quit in earnest in 1974.” Then I sighed and lamented, “But there isn’t a day since that I don’t crave a smoke.” “Oh, when I quit it was the easiest thing,” said the tech. “And I have never had a craving.” The tech must have never inhaled or ever heard Mark Twain’s quote, “Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.” My first encounter with cigarettes was at the tender age of nine. My best friend at the time was the same age. His mother was a single mom and a smoker. The sordid events surrounding her single mom status was more of a theological sticky wicket in our religious circle than the fact that she smoked, but my folks were more open-minded on such matters, so whenever I was invited to go home after church with my friend and spend the afternoon between morning and evening services—the bookends of our every Sunday—I was given permission. During church one morning, my friend and I, along with a few other contemporaries, sat together in a separate pew away from the adults but still within the clear view of the parents were it necessary for any of them to use the clearing-of-the-throat reprimand at the first sign of squirming during the tedium of the service. Before I got my first job as a paperboy and could tithe from my own income, I was always given a quarter each Sunday to drop in the collection plate. On this Sunday it had been prearranged that I was going home with my friend. So when the ushers started coming down the aisles with the collection plates, my friend whispered into my ear, "Keep your quarter. We’ll buy cigarettes with it later." Funny how sin and temptation always starts in the church pew. How was I going to pull this one off? Like God, my mother was always watching. But I suddenly had an idea that was sure to fool heaven and earth. I secured the quarter between two fingers, cupping my hand to conceal the twenty-five cent piece, and when the plate came down our pew, I waved my hand over it as if dropping my offering into the plate before passing it down the row. Mother smiled, and I tucked my quarter inside my sweaty palm until she looked away and I could slip it into my pocket. With such slight-of-hand skills I could…

If you have lived on the planet for any length of time and were born in a country that recognizes the Christmas season and its official delegate Santa Claus, you have had at least one traumatic experience around the holiday season that possibly scarred you for life. Of course, the revelation that the man in the red suit with sleigh and reindeer and a big sack of toys is one big hoax is traumatic enough. The curse of the Age of Enlightenment, I suppose. (Anyone reading this who might still be a believer STOP READING NOW!) Once we move beyond our childlike faith and into our adult play-along-for-the-sake-of-the-kids pact with the entire adult population in the western hemisphere, we become vulnerable to those very personal traumatic moments that transcend the unbearable discovery that Santa’s sleigh is pulled by a fleet of Mercedes Benz instead of Rudolf and his pals. Oh the horror. The horror. I first began to lose my faith when I started paying attention to the song “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” I was able to understand that I had an inherent conflict with the lyric, “He’s making a list/checking it twice/gonna find out/whose naughty or nice.” With my proclivity for getting into trouble as a kid there was no way that I could trick an all-knowing/all-seeing Santa—maybe once, but certainly not twice—yet every Christmas morning there were presents under the tree with my name on it from the man himself. Was he that easily fooled? This began my intellectual slippery-slope, and when I began to calculate the world population with the number of houses, hamlets, and huts, Santa had to visit in a twenty-four period…well, you do the math. The only people in my life at that time with any authority to explain such matters were my parents, and when I began to question “the faith” as it were, they pulled me aside and 'fessed up. But they welcomed me into the myth-making business by insisting that I must not tell my younger siblings. That might have been my first step into adulthood. Once I became a jaded teenager I by-passed the Santa in the department store. While my brothers and sister took their turns on Santa’s lap making their requests known, I walked up and down the aisles stocked with irresistible items and made my own list that I submitted to the indisputable givers of Christmas gifts…the parents and the grandparents. That year I had my eye on a clock radio. I had a wind-up alarm clock used to rouse me out of bed in the pre-dawn hour so I could deliver newspapers on my paper route before school. But this relatively new combination of music and time in one device was revolutionary to me. A clock radio was pricey, and my parents reminded me that they “Weren’t made of money.” If this gift was to be acquired then economic forces would need to be marshaled: parents and both sets of grandparents would have to…