David Kirby

            I See England
  Teddy Roosevelt had a pit-bull named Pete who bit a Navy department clerk and tore off the pants of the French ambassador.         The New York Times, August 3, 2023

Kid I went to preschool with wouldn’t brush his teeth,
so his parents made a game of it by calling his toothbrush
his “meenter-mineter,” a word he’d come up with himself
when he was four. “Time to play with your meenter-mineter!”
they’d say. “Buzz, buzz!” Problem is he didn’t find out
that a toothbrush was a “toothbrush” until he was ten and went
to sleepaway camp the first time. A heads-up would have been nice.
Kid I knew in high school—another kid—was rummaging
in his dad’s closet one morning and found a .22 pump
just as the housekeeper walked by with a load of laundry,
so holding what he thought was an unloaded gun at hip level,
he said, “Say your prayers, Felicia!” and squeezed the trigger.
The bullet went through an open window, but Felicia fell
to the floor in a dead faint, and when his little brother ran in
to find out what the fuss was and took one look at Felicia,
he ran back out and called the police to say, “Come quick,
my brother shot our housekeeper!” who at that moment
was actually coming around, so the boys gave her twenty bucks
not to tell and grabbed rakes and ran out and busied themselves
with imaginary yard work until the patrol car pulled up
 and two cops jumped out holding their service weapons.
What, what? went the boys. What rifle, what housekeeper,
she’s fine, go inside, see for yourself. You’d think
my preschool buddy would have learned to brush his teeth
on his own. What were his parents thinking? One trip
to the dentist to have a cavity filled and they wouldn’t
have called him Meenter-Minter Boy at Camp Happy Valley
for the next six weeks. Shit’s going to happen whether
you want it to or not. Take the time this comedian
was doing a set at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf,
only it was at five p.m., which is not good, and in the atrium,
which is worse, and even worse than that, some poor guy
in a wheelchair had decided to kill himself the day before
by rolling off the wharf and into the harbor, and as the comic
is telling the six people in his audience about the two cannibals
who are eating a clown, divers are locating the dead guy
and his wheelchair and hooking them to a crane
and pulling them from the water and letting them drip
for a half hour or so as they figure out what to do next, and now
the only person in that atrium with his back to this grisly scene
is saying to his audience, “This skeleton walks into a bar. . . .”
I tell young people not to overthink it. Just do what you want,
young people. We get along fine with the French these days.
Red wine, brie, the Eiffel Tower, Albert Camus: what’s not to like?
You don’t have to do what your parents tell you to do.
You could be a miserable engineer but a happy florist.
Wouldn’t you rather be a happy florist? If I’d been Pete,
I too would have torn off the pants of the French ambassador,
it sounds like a fun pitbull activity.

David Kirby teaches at Florida State University, where he is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English. His latest books are a poetry collection, Help Me, Information, and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. Kirby is also the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” He is currently on the editorial board of Alice James Books.