Pipes & Illicit Chicken

[Hello Followers of the good doctor - David sent me this & it's a good story so I'm taking the liberty of posting it for him.  Enjoy!]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 3:16 PM, H. David Kirk <hdkirk@shaw.ca> wrote:

Hi Lisa, 
I finally got to send something to the St.Chris club secretary:Cheers, 57

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	ATT: David Cursons
Date:	Mon, 29 Aug 2011 14:31:46 -0700
From:	H. David Kirk <hdkirk@shaw.ca>
To:	club@oldscholars.info

To: David Cursons,

My stepdaughter, Lisa Tansey, has given me a copy of your email to her Oct 2, 2010 in which you said that you had a chat with Richard Palmer, who said that I had "a fund of stories of his time at St. Chris".
You may therefore be interested in the following. If you would like, I would be happy to send you more.

(for some reason some of this came out in red) 

With good wishes, sincerely, David

Frank Fitzpatrick was a fellow student who lived in Letchworth with his mother. One day he saw me sitting on a pile of boards at the edge of the school playing fields furtively smoking my pipe. I’m sure that Frank considered it to be a sign of my being already grown up, something to which he also aspired. Seeing him looking at me with awe, I sensed that he wished he could be in my shoes (with a pipe that is). So, on the next weekend trip by train to London to spend the weekend with Aunt Anna Peretz, I decided to spend most of my month’s pocket money on a pipe for Frank. Even today, I remember what it was, a Peterson – a famous make. This one, bent, and with a black mouthpiece fitting into the bowl, etched by a silver rim.  In miniature what Sherlock Holmes might have sported, or so I thought. I seem to remember seeing a black and white photograph of Mother, me, and Frank Fitzpatrick on the platform of Kings Cross Station in London. We were both furtively holding our new pipes in our trouser pockets, ready for the adventure of being nearly grown up.

One day in 1934 when I was sixteen a Jewish boy arrived from Holland with his mother. This was Herbert May, originally from Germany, whose mother having fled with him to Holland had now brought him to England to attend St Christopher. One Sunday Mrs Harris called me over from the dining table where we were having our broth and rusks and asked me to make him feel at home. Little did I know that this thirteen-year old was much more street-smart than I, and it became obvious that he knew his way around, by means barely legitimate. For example – meals at St Christopher’s were strictly vegetarian, mainly vegetables and salads and most of us who grew up in meat-eating families, in spite of plenty of cheese and butter, missed the chewable meat. At a Sunday supper, usually a rather bitter-tasting broth and what the school called rusks, which was either very stale bread or bread that had been baked in oven and was like zwieback, but not as sweet. The rusk was usually available late afternoon Sunday as a supper snack – not very appetizing and was looked down on by all the boarders at St Christopher’s.

When I discovered that Herbert missed getting meat at school meals I decided to take him for a picnic at which he and I could cook some chicken. Well, I went to butchers in Letchworth and bought a small whole chicken with which we would have a feast on an early Sunday morning while most of the St. Christopher kids were at church. I think we took our bikes and went down the hill to the village of Hitchin. I remember something about a hidden away grassy plot with bushes where I spotted a possible picnic spot that I hoped would be out of sight of potential travelers on the nearby road, or someone going to or from the church. Thinking we were pretty shielded from the possibility of being detected because of small fire and smoke, Herbert and I started to make a crude spit with two forked branches. Ordinarily, one would have first plucked and degutted the chicken, but in our haste to get it all done unnoticed, we put the whole chicken on the spit over the fire. Not surprisingly, we also cooked the total innards with all the waste and, as a result, there was a terrible stink so that passers by walking or cycling on a nearby path started to investigate the source. And that is how a group of hikers discovered Herbert and me hovering over our cooking adventure. Unfortunately I don’t remember anything of the encounter except that Herbert and I quite suddenly packed up everything, but left the uncooked chicken with its innards still intact for some roving fox, wolf, or farm dog to find.

Fran's Dog Stanley

Fran's Dog Stanley

Dedicated to all faithful dogs - alive or dead

Fran's apartment house looks down on a large cemetery.  It's now a park with graves still in it & people can walk past the graves.  When Fran takes him for a walk in the evening to pee, he always makes for the same grave.  Unhappily I can't think of a natural explanation for this behavior, so let's make up an esoteric one.  Here is my suggestion:
Fran's dog Stanley seems to have a mystical awareness of anyone  called Stanley in the human sphere.  So, when he is taken for his walk in the cemetery, and wants to pee, he seems to have an affinity with another Stanley in that grave.  So he chooses that gravestone to relieve himself.  Perhaps the person "Stanley" buried there - instead of being offended by being pissed on by Fran's dog Stanley, feels himself in a grave position of gratitude to have a living dog relieve himself on his gravestone.  Which is the only way a dog, who lifts his leg and his penis like a gun, can express that he feels honored. 
   And now, Fran and her Dad, walking Stanley home from the graveyard, perhaps imagine this dog having a mystical understanding of the departed, and their need to be connected with the world of the living through the urination of a living dog.