Read Old Bones: A Collection of Short Stories Page 16

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  A Child’s Tale of Learning

  A YOUNG BOY in Ridgewood discovered a question. It was awkward and new and he didn’t know what to do with it, so he gave it to his mother. She gently took it and with her son, looked at it in the yellow rays of the summer sunlight. Then she handed him an answer. It fit perfectly in his little hands and made him warm and happy. He found more questions in many sizes, all too many for him to carry at once, so he took what he could to his mother; she replaced each one with a perfect-fitting answer.

  At the elementary school, he found many more questions and, like at home, he carried what he could to his teachers. Some gave him answers that fit well in his hands, but other teachers gave him questions—BIG questions—in return for his questions. As he grew older, the questions his teachers gave him increased in size and quantity until eventually he became overly burdened and tired from receiving their questions in return for his.

  He took some of their questions home and his mother was able to give him well-fitting answers for them. But as their questions grew bigger, so did her answers until they became too big for his hands. On his way to school, he often dropped and broke the big answers and had nothing to give his teachers, except tiny answers that didn’t fit their big questions. They scolded him for mishandling his answers until he finally stopped giving them any answers at all. He even kept his questions to himself.

  His mother became concerned that he wasn’t bringing home any more questions, and at school his teachers were concerned because he had stopped giving them answers.

  “I don’t want to give you answers,” the boy said. “I want you to give them to me.”

  His teachers said he was being selfish. “Students must give proper answers in return of our questions, not vice versa.”

  “But you only want answers that fit right to your questions,” he said. “I can only give you answers that fit right in my hands. Anything more is too much to carry.”

  His teachers merely looked at each other in dismay and gave him more questions. Big questions. Heavy questions. They told him to look in libraries for answers; they said to search in universities, too. But the libraries were crowded and the universities too far away, so he lugged around their questions and tried to find answers elsewhere. However, everywhere he looked was void of the right-sized answers. Along the way, he dropped and broke them. Eventually, he gave his teachers his leftover answers, which they returned unaccepted. Too small, they said; try again.

  Eventually, his load of big questions became too heavy to carry, so he dragged them behind him until one day he strayed off course and ended up at a riverbank. He rested with his burden, sorted through the mess of jumbled questions, and found his own unanswered questions lying at the bottom.

  He felt that he had failed his teachers and mother, and even himself terribly. Convinced that he would never find the right answers to any of his questions, he pushed them into the river until he was free of every one. Suddenly and without warning, a spinning wind swept across the water, picked up his questions, and flew them into the sky straight toward the sun. Then a hundred answers fell upon him, all perfectly sized to fit in his hands. He sprang about, gathered them into his arms, felt their perfection, and gave thanks to the wind for its bounty. In reply, a voice spoke from the sun and told him to return every day and throw one question into the river. If so, he would be blessed with many answers from above.

  To this day, he has made good on that promise. And every day the river, wind, sky and sun blesses him a thousand times over with their answers.