Read Online The Bog by Michael Talbot - Free Book Online

watching? Benny Hill .”
    She sighed. “I know, but every once in a while it’s not going to kill him.”
    “But it’s mindless.”
    “But every once in a while it’s good to be mindless, like when you’re exhausted, or battle-fatigued from having your entire world shifted beneath you. And sometimes just for the sheer joy of doing something mindless.”
    He grimaced.
    She looked at her husband imploringly. “Don’t you remember how it was being a kid?”
    This caused him to regard her sharply. Of course he remembered. He remembered his father ripping up his books if he caught him reading. He remembered drunken brawls, the perpetual mist of alcohol around his father’s face. That was why he was so driven in his own thirst for knowledge, why he was so demanding of his children, so critical of their friends. David’s father had been a factory worker and a horror. He had wanted David to grow up fulfilling only his strict mold of what it meant to be a man. In short, to learn to fistfight, to eschew books, to become a factory worker, and ultimately to end his life as he himself had, accomplishing nothing, learning nothing, and dying, a spent and broken man amidst an ocean of beer cans and empty Jack Daniel’s bottles.
    That was when Melanie put the final nail in her argument. “You don’t want to end up as demanding as your father was, only in the opposite direction, do you?”
    He looked at her solemnly. No, indeed, he did not want to end up like that. “Very well,” he conceded. “I guess it won’t hurt him to watch Benny Hill every once in a while.”
    He walked back into the living room. “Tuck, if you want to just watch television tonight, go ahead. You can read some more of the dolphin book tomorrow.”
    “Thanks, Dad,” Tuck chirped obliviously, his eyes remaining glued to the glowing tube.
    David spent the rest of the evening helping Melanie put the house into some semblance of order. When night finally came he found to his surprise that he was actually looking forward to the unconsciousness of sleep. Normally, he was so consumed in his studies, his own reading, and the constant racing of his thoughts, that he usually found it difficult to pull away from it all and go to bed. Tonight, however, he was quite looking forward to being lost in the arms of Morpheus.
    He went upstairs, but before going into his bedroom he paused to look in on the children one last time. He knocked on Katy’s door first.
    “Just a minute! Don’t come in!” she screamed immediately from beyond.
    David smiled. She had become so excruciatingly modest and vulnerable since she had entered adolescence. There was a time not too many years back when she would have paraded around in front of him with just a pair of shorts on, but suddenly she had become acutely self-conscious about even the most innocent of things. This afternoon, while they were unpacking the trailer, a pair of her simple cotton panties had fallen out of a box in front of him and he thought she was going to die of embarrassment. Nonetheless, he knew that he had to do everything in his power to refrain from showing his amusement at such incidents. He knew that it was all a part of growing up.
    “Ready yet?” he called.
    “Okay,” she returned.
    He opened the door. When he entered he found her sitting up in bed with her flannel nightie laced tightly around her neck and looking decidedly unhappy.
    “Katy, what is it?” he asked as he sat down on the bed beside her. He felt a sinking feeling, assuming that her disconsolation could only be due to their recent move. For several long moments she said nothing, and he gently took her hand. “Katy, won’t you tell me?”
    Finally, she looked at him, her eyes revealing that she was still struggling to find the words to express her misery, and then at last she spoke. “Oh, Dad, why did you have to name me Katharine?”
    This was not at all what he had been expecting, and he had to think about it for a moment.