Read Online The Painted Ponies of Partequineus and The Summer of the Kittens by Peter H. Riddle - Free Book Online Page B

Nova Scotia, Canada,
    North America, Earth, the Universe
    Â 
    May 16 th
    Â 
    Hey, Diary!
    I’ve got lots to tell you. Something happened today that got me wondering about a lot of stuff.
    My mother thinks that most of the people in the world are good. At least that’s what she says, although the way she talks about some of the neighbours makes me wonder if she really believes it. Our minister says that good and evil exist side by side in the world, and that everybody gets to choose whether to be one or the other. And my Dad? Who knows what he thinks. He isn’t around much anymore.
    I’m not sure if Mom is right about most people either, ’cause there’s like about six or seven billion of us in the world, right? And I only know the ones who live on my street, and some of the people who work in the stores downtown, and the kids and teachers at school and our relatives, maybe forty or fifty people in all, so I don’t have much of a data base to work from. And Reverend Davis is a nice old man, but he’s so boring that I’ve given up listening to him. I only go to church because Mom says I have to, and two minutes after he stops preaching I can’t remember anything he said. His sermons never have anything to do with me.
    Dad won’t go to church, not even on Easter Sunday or at Christmas time. I guess he doesn’t believe in God.
    You know what I think about the good and evil thing? I think that most people aren’t either one or the other.  Not good, not bad. What they are is indifferent. They just don’t pay much attention to the consequences of the things they do, at least until they get caught doing something bad. Whatever they decide to do, no matter how it might affect other people, they just go ahead and do it. Like the three college students who drove down our road today when I was sitting in the tree in our front yard.  Jimmy was there too, but he wasn’t up in the tree, of course. We’d just come home from school, and we had to get dressed up for our class pictures today, and I hadn’t even changed my clothes yet.
    I sit up there a lot, in the big old elm that’s been there for maybe a couple hundred years. Dad hammered some boards into the trunk like a ladder so I could climb up. That was back when he still paid any attention to me. It’s really huge, and about four metres off the ground there’s this really thick branch, almost half as big as the trunk, that curves out before it goes up at a steep angle and makes a kind of seat like a horse’s saddle, and I like to sit up there and watch what’s happening. Except that nothing much ever does.
    Anyway, the university had its graduation ceremonies over the weekend. My Dad’s a professor. Every year he puts on his old black robe and that stupid square hat with the tassel and some sort of cape made of maroon velvet with a blue and white silk lining. He calls it a hood , only he doesn’t wear it on his head, so I don’t know why it’s called that. If he did put it over his head, maybe it would cover up that dumb-looking hat. Then they all line up in front of the gym, him and all the other professors and the students who are graduating, and when somebody tells them to, they all walk across Main Street and go up the road to University Hall. You ever see that movie, March of the Penguins ?
    So with graduation over (“It’s not graduation ,” Dad keeps telling me, “it’s Convocation! ”), a whole bunch of the students clear out of the dormitories and apartments and go wherever it is they go during the summer. But since I don’t live on a main road, they don’t often come by here on their way home.
    Only this time three of them did, in an old, beat-up car that was white with one faded red fender that must have been put on after some accident, and brown rust all around the wheels. There was a guy and two girls, and they had so many boxes