O’Brien’s Literary Speculator Weblog

Story of My Life

Where might I start? At the beginning? No. That is always the same. Mother dies after horrible pregnancy during which all she had to eat was one clove of garlic and the flaking lead paint of our hovel’s walls. Because of a miracle, granted by a saint or demon, her diet only affected her body and not my brain, so that I am actually heavier at birth than she is, and it is she, not me, who is carried to Valhalla by eagles.

Should I start with how my father a boy from the country discovers a sword in his fathers barren and rocky potato field and within a month he has become the greatest swordsman of the city, which city is lost to time: Paris, Budapest or Edo? It turns out that he develped his technique by using a pitchfork to stun yellow jackets in flight, who he would later nurse until they were honeybees, beautiful, useful and not an annoyance. It is here that I became destined to love honey as I love life.

Should I go back further still? I could begin when my father decides to give up the ascetic life imposed on him by his father because of his hunchback, not my father’s back, which was straight as the flight of an arrow, but my grandfather’s. Dad leaves the  leaves the monastery, with only his single shirt, which hung to his mid-calf for modesty’s sake and sandwich made of a single clove of garlic and two thin slices of cardboard. He then walks back to the hovel of grandpa on the barren field and discovers the sword, but you already know that.

No. I will start where my story should start, when I am able to tell it all from my own personal memory. I was in the first grade in the orphanage school of St. Walpurgis. My studies that first year were confined to emptying bed pans, cleaning the stables, and cooking, in that order.

My stay at the orphanage was brief. It was discovered during the dysentery outbreak that I was a prodigy; able to sing, play the piano at concert level, and compose in both eastern and western traditions.

So I was whisked to the conservatory. I was sent straight to the music room where I toiled, if that can be said of one’s greatest passion, twenty-two, seven, using my two free hours to empty bed pans, clean the stables and cook, but not in that order.

My seven years in the conservatory were my most productive and exhausting. Predictably, my rival for artistic supremacy and a single miraculous clove of garlic turns out, after we battle each other on every conceivable level musical mastery, before falling deeply in love, to be my long lost twin sister. This discovery causes me to fall into a coma lasting exactly as long as if I had slept eight hours every night during those seven long and tortured years.

My sister contemplates our near brush with a really icky relationship. She enters the convent school of St. Walpurgis the younger, becoming the youngest abbess of that ancient institution after performing three bankable miracles, and being declared a saint pending her death. Although she dies at a very advanced age, her diary shows that she died a virgin and bitterly unhappy about that fact.

Completely confused by life, love, and the ability of essentially ignorant peasants to make subtle genetic determinations, and adequately care for me while in a coma that lasted for over two years, I decide upon regaining consciousness to take a position in the horse guard.

After spending several years in the horse guard fighting indigenous people for the right to take their stuff, I realize the valuelessness of all my actions to this point in my life and forsake it all, becoming a Jain holy-man, wandering naked living off the charity of those whom I pass, not daring to ask for but accepting the small balls of spinach wrapped in thin leaves. Not knowing that the thin leaves are actually just to keep the spinach off your fingers I eat them and am immediately I am inspired to create spanikopita.

I set up a small bakery, after clothing myself to avoid any unfortunate accidents, and within two years, I am supplying spanikopita to all of Asia Minor and being a person who has always liked colorful names came up with Baklava and then invented a sweet treat, using only the honey from reformed yellow jackets, that could use such a name.

As fate, or was it a lesser goddess, would have it, war broke out and it seems that both sides in this bloody conflict felt if they controlled my bakery victory would be theirs. So I found myself, with nothing but a clove of garlic in my pocket and my father’s sword standing before a mob of the worst kind of rabble, an army made up of only deserters, conscripts and disaffected intelligencia. They were for the most part armed with black market Kalashnikovs and Sten guns, but as in the traditional Mexican standoff, no one was willing to make the first move, until a young officer pushed his way to the front and instantly recognized me for one of his siblings, it turned out we had actually been triplets.

I, sensing the senselessness of a seemingly pointless war, divided my bakery and distribution rights among the factions. As a reward for restoring peace with dignity and without many people having to become pieces of persons and to die horrible and describable, but really gross deaths, was appointed ambassador to the United States on behalf of the country of my birth.

Moments after my arrival and installation in my country’s magnificent Park Avenue Embassy civil war erupted again, and the country was completely destroyed rendering my residence in the United States illegal. INS agents by the boatload, which such boat sailed up the East River, disembarked, and descended on the Embassy and the first one through the door immediately recognized me as the last of the missing quadruplets of which he was the youngest. He having been born in Brooklyn recognized that I too was a citizen of the United States and calling off the INS agents embraced me.

I immediately went back to work by declaring a homestead in this newly acquired piece of foreign property and immediately applied for sovereign nation status under the first nations act. Both of my petitions were promptly granted and the first nation to recognize us was the Vatican which immediately offered to send a delegation to Christianize us, which we graciously declined, promptly becoming a parhia state, and the subject of an upcoming Dan Brown novel.

And this is how I come to be before you this day.

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