Let the following letter be addressed to the father of that
most distinguished personage who forms the subject matter of the selfsame letter.
Respected and most venerable sir,
Your child Thomas P. Clarkson, known hereafter as the Chosen
One, and known to you perhaps variously as Tommy, Tom, T. Clark, Thomas P., Tom
P., Tommy P., or Billy, forms, as indicated in the prefatory remark, the subject
matter of the letter whose head is this very sentence over which your venerable
and highly learned eyes presently pass, perhaps through the spectacles in which
the author of this letter last saw you, and has been sentenced to three days’
servitude at the local prison for being pronounced, after an incident of infamy
which will be brought up shortly in connection with this very servitude to which
the Chosen One has been sentenced, by the school psychiatrist, a man of
singular renown and skill, proficient in the art of abstracting from the
troubled and inchoate minds of delinquent youths the limpid essence of their
personalities, and who has three decades of experience and the most outstanding
honors to his name, mentally unsound to the point of being, in his pithy words,
written on the piece of paper that the author of this missive is using as a
reference at this very moment, side-by-side with this particular missive, in
his lucid, blue-inked cursive, “barking mad”, a charge which I am sure you
and your wife – (Do send the lady my regards) – are not only no doubt perfectly
familiar with, but so used to that bringing it up right now will perhaps not even
cause you to raise your venerable eyebrows by an eighth of an inch, or whatever
the necessary height be by which one’s eyebrows must be raised to register properly
the feeling of surprise or consternation, if you have not already been
arraigning him since the time of his birth with the same charge on the ground
that the Chosen One is wont to behave at home in the same unruly fashion as he
is wont to behave at school, which fashion is the reason why he has been sent
to the aforementioned prison, and which fashion is the reason for my writing
this letter to you on this otherwise perfectly fine Sunday morning that you and
your lovely wife and other children (if you have any) are doubtless spending in
the tranquility of the beautiful gardens of your manor (if you own one),
counting perhaps among the audience of your bubbling springtime rhapsodies
flowers such as lobelias, rhododendrons, honeysuckles, and chrysanthemums, to
name but a few specimens of that type of plant that has for so many centuries
enthralled the finer and more artistic senses of mankind, inspiring poetry,
paintings, and other works of art that have by now become so ubiquitous as to
pass our notice entirely when we come across them, and blend in perfectly with
their natural surroundings as if part of them, which as we know they are not
nor can ever be, for we are familiar with their sublunary – indeed artificial –
provenance, having seen others of their kind in the process of being created,
or having created them ourselves, in moments such as this, when authors of
letters such as the one that I am writing now, and over which your venerable
eyes are passing simultaneously, begin to realize that they have promised to
expand on matters to which they made allusions previously and under different
circumstances, and proceed to make note of the fact that the Chosen One, your son,
threw a piece of chalk at the Latin teacher during class, and refused to
apologize for it, earning himself, after being pronounced mentally unfit for
schooling in the company of other youths by the highly educated and honorable
school psychiatrist, the punishment I just delineated, in addition to being
expelled under my orders, as it was my duty to do, being a slave to procedure
and my own scruples, and desirous moreover, along with all the other members of the
school staff and no doubt a significant portion of the student body of which
the Chosen One has until recently been a part, of ridding our hallowed institution
of that pestilence.
Yours faithfully, and for so long as words are capable of
being written on paper,
Headmaster Samuel Shortletter
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