'I see,' I said; but I didn't. I didn't realize the degree to which Owen Meany never got tired of talking about that. Toronto: July ,-it is a scorcher in town today. I was getting my hair cut in my usual place, near the corner of Bathurst and St. Clair, and the girl-barber (something I'll never get used to!) asked me the usual: 'How short?'
'As short as Oliver North's,' I said.
'Who?' she said. O Canada! But I'm sure there are young girls cutting hair in the United States who don't know who Colonel North is, either; and in a few years, almost no one will remember him. How many people remember Melvin Laird? How many people remember Gen. Creighton Abrams or Gen. William Westmoreland-not to mention, which one replaced the other? And who replaced Gen. Maxwell Taylor? Who replaced Gen. Curtis LeMay? And whom did Ellsworth Bunker replace? Remember that? Of course you don't! There was a terrible din of construction going on outside the barbershop at the corner of Bathurst and St. Clair, but I was sure that my girl-barber had heard me.
'Oliver North,' I repeated. 'Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, United States Marine Corps,' I said.
'I guess you want it really short,' she said.
'Yes, please,' I said; I've simply got to stop reading The New York Times] There's nothing in the news that's worth remembering. Why, then, do I have such a hard time forgetting it? No one had a memory like Owen Meany. By the end of the winter term of ', I'll bet he never once confused what he'd said to Dr. Dolder with what he'd said to the Rev. Lewis Merrill-but I'll bet they were confused! By the end of the winter term, I'll bet they thought that either he should have been thrown out of school or he should have been made the new headmaster. By the end of every winter term at Gravesend Academy, the New Hampshire weather had driven everyone half crazy. Who doesn't get tired of getting up in the dark? And in Owen's case, he had to get up earlier than most; because of his
scholarship job, as a faculty waiter, he had to arrive in the dining-hall kitchen at least one hour before breakfast-on those mornings he waited on tables. The waiters had to set the tables-and eat their own breakfasts, in the kitchen-before the other students and the faculty arrived; then they had to clear the tables between the official end of breakfast and the beginning of morning meeting-as the new headmaster had so successfully called what used to be our morning chapel. That Saturday morning in February, the tomato-red pickup was dead and he'd had to jump-start the Meany Granite Company trailer-truck and get it rolling down Maiden Hill before it would start-it was so cold. He did not like to have dining-hall duty, as it was called, on the weekend; and there was the added problem of him being a day boy and having to drive himself that extra distance to school. I guess he was cross when he got there; and there was another car parked in the circular driveway by the Main Academy Building, where he always parked. The trailer-truck was so big that the presence of only one other car in the circular driveway would force him to park the truck out on Front Street-and in the winter months, there was a ban regarding parking on Front Street, a snow-removal restriction that the town imposed, and Owen was hopping mad about that, too. The car that kept Owen from parking his truck in the circular driveway adjacent to the Main Academy Building was Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen Beetle. In keeping with the lovable and exasperating tidiness of his countrymen, Dr. Dolder was exact and predictable about his little VW. His bachelor apartment was in Quincy Hall-a dormitory on the far side of the Gravesend campus; it seemed to be ' 'the far side'' from everywhere, but it was as far from the Main Academy Building as you could get and still be on the Gravesend campus. Dr. Dolder parked his VW by the Main Academy Building only when he'd been drinking. He was a frequent dinner guest of Randy and Sam White's; he parked by the Main Academy Building when he ate with the Whites-and when he drank too much, he left his car there and walked home. The campus was not so large that he couldn't (or shouldn't) have walked both ways-to dinner and back-but Dr. Dolder was one of those Europeans who had fallen in love with a most American peculiarity: how Americans will walk nowhere if they can drive there. In Zurich, I'm sure, Dr. Dolder walked everywhere; but he drove his little VW across the Gravesend campus, as if he were touring the New England states. Whenever Dr. Bolder's VW was parked in the circular driveway by the Main Academy Building, everyone knew that the doctor was simply exercising his especially Swiss prudence; he was not a drunk, and the few small roads he might have traveled on to drive himself from dinner at the Whites' to Quincy Hall would not have given him much opportunity to maim many of the sober and innocent residents of Gravesend. There's a good chance he would never have encountered anyone; but Dr. Dolder loved his Beetle, and he was a cautious man. Once-in the fresh snow upon his Volkswagen's windshield-a first-year German student had written with his ringer: Herr Doktor Dolder hat zu viel betrunken! I could usually tell-when I saw Owen, either at breakfast or at morning meeting-if Dr. Dolder had had too much to drink the night before; if it was winter, and if Owen was surly-looking, I knew he'd faced an early-morning parking problem. I knew when the pickup had failed to start-and there was no room for him to park the trailer-truck-just by looking at him.
'What's up?' I would ask him.
'THAT TIGHT-ASS TIPSY SWISS DINK!'' Owen Meany would say.
'I see,' I would say. And this particular February morning, I can imagine how the Swiss psychiatrist's Beetle would have affected him. I guess Owen must have been sitting in the frigid cab of the truck-you could drive that big hauler for an hour before you'd even notice that the heater was on-and I'll bet he was smoking, and probably talking to himself, too, when he looked into the path of his headlights and saw about three quarters of the basketball team walking his way. In the cold air, their breathing must have made him think that they were smoking, too-although he knew all of them, and knew they didn't smoke; he entertained them at least two or three times a week by his devotion to practicing the shot. He told me later
