But if I were to say to my mother that the word was getting in the way of her intent to have people remember my father, her response would have been, “But that’s what it is. My father would have hated that his prized collection was completely lost in the asinine avalanche started by the word penis.
“How would you like to go out with the guy who had a penis bone like that whale?” “Did you see the size of that bone? It’s from a whale’s penis.” Every child under the age of 15 who looked in the case walked away saying to his or her friends or mother or the nearby librarians, “That’s the penis bone of a whale.” I remember looking at it and thinking, “that’s from a walrus, not a whale.”Įveryone in town comes to the library. The placard in front of the oosik said, Fossilized Penis Bone of a Whale. One read Prehistoric Shark’s Tooth ( 10 million years old). There was a neatly typed placard in front of each item saying what it is. I am haunted with the thought of how lonely my father must have been to need to medicate himself with pot.īack at the library, the display case looked like a pirate’s chest filled with exotica. What wasn’t on that shelf was the stash of marijuana he kept hidden in the basement, thinking that my brothers and I didn’t know about it. I felt he was imagining the life that it once held: hippopotamus, whale, shark, or lion. Now and then he would stand by the shelves that held his memorabilia, pick up something, look at it and gaze off.
WHALE PENIS TV
So he embraced solitude and lived in the TV set, interspersed with fantasy novels and videos. I think at some point he must have realized that the doorway he thought my mother opened for him out of solitary confinement had closed. These were usually people who dressed well and had financial success. But those were things my mother reserved for herself, or for people she thought worthy of them.
WHALE PENIS FULL
Love and attention, the two things he didn’t receive from his family of origin, would have done it, would have allowed him to have full heart. He loved my mother and wanted her to rescue him. But I think he saw marriage as the doorway out of emotional solitary confinement. I don’t really blame him for this, thinking of the old saw about touching fire twice. One of those defenses was not fully participating in his own life. He was a smart man who had had the emotional crap beaten out of him so many times that he disconnected his feelings from his daily living and spent his time constructing defenses against the next beating. My father was dissatisfied with his station in life. But I always got the impression he was on his way out to somewhere far away. That picture brought back the fact that he was a strange set of contradictions, my father.
She placed everything in the case beautifully,with a terrific 5”x7” black and white picture of my father smoking a pipe and looking like quite the adventurer. This gave her access to the display cases in the main reading room and she signed up to put Dad’s sea-tossed treasures on display for the public. For years after he died, the collection sat on the shelves in my mother’s living room until the day she volunteered with the Friends of the Library. When he looked at them, you could see in his eyes that he felt the wind of the South Seas blowing through his hair. Oosik is the Inuit word for the penis bone that certain mammals have, though not humans or whales.ĭad arranged these things in an order he liked. He had prehistoric shark teeth, and walrus ivory, and most notable, a fossilized walrus oosik. From the sea, he had a sawfish bill with a scrimshaw sunset in beautiful pastel shades of purple and green. From the Dark Continent, he had a lion’s tooth amulet, a variety of ivory statuettes, and his prize, a hippopotamus tusk. My father collected all sorts of interesting natural objects from the sea and from Africa.
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