buildings.'
And let's see: I also note in my diary every day when the girls sing 'Sons of God' in morning chapel. I also entered in my diary the day that a journalist from some rock-music magazine tried to stop me for an on-the-spot 'interview' as I was about to take a seat in morning chapel. He was a wild, hairy young man in a purple caftan-oblivious to how the girls stared at him and seemingly held together by wires and cords that entangled him in his cumbersome recording equipment. There he was, uninvited-unannounced!-sticking a microphone in my face and asking me, as Hester the Molester's 'kissing cousin,' if I didn't agree that it all began to 'happen' for Hester after she met someone called 'Janet the Planet.'
'I beg your pardon!' I said. Around me, streams of girls were staring and giggling. The interviewer was interested in asking me about Hester's 'influences'; he was writing a piece about Hester's 'early years,' and he had some ideas about who had influenced her-he said he wanted to 'bounce' his ideas off me I said I didn't know who the fuck 'Janet the Planet' even was, but if he was interested in who had 'influenced' Hester, he should begin with Owen Meany, He didn't know the name, he asked me how to spell it. He was very puzzled, he thought he'd heard of everyone!
'And would this be someone who, was an influence in her early years?' he wanted to know. I assured him that Owen's influence on Hester could be counted among the earliest. And let's see: what else? There was Mrs. Meany's death, not long after Owen's; I made note of it. And there was that spring when I was in Gravesend for Grandmother's memorial service- it was at the old Congregational Church, Grandmother's lifelong church, and Pastor Merrill did not perform the service; whoever had replaced him at the Congregational Church was the officiant. There was still a lot of snow on the ground that spring-old, dead-gray snow-and I was opening another beer for Dan and myself in the kitchen at Front Street, when I happened to look out the kitchen window at the withered rose garden, and there was Mr. Meany! Grayer than the old snow, and following some melted and refrozen footprints in the crust,
he made his way slowly toward the house. I thought he was a kind of apparition. Speechless, I pointed at him, and Dan said: 'It's just poor old Mister Meany.'
The Meany Granite Company was dead and gone; the quarries had been unworked--and for sale-for years. Mr. Meany had a part-time job as a meter reader for the electric company. He appeared in the rose garden once a month, Dan said; the electric meter was on the rose-garden side of the house. I didn't want to speak with him; but I watched him through the window. I'd written him my condolences when I'd heard that Mrs. Meany had died-and how she'd died- but he'd never written back; I hadn't expected him to write back. Mrs. Meany had caught fire. She'd been sitting too close to the fireplace and a spark, an ember, had ignited the American flag, which-Mr. Meany told Dan-she was accustomed to wrapping around herself, like a shawl. Although her burns had not appeared to be that severe, she died in the hospital-of undisclosed complications. When I saw Mr. Meany reading the electric meter at Front Street, I realized that Owen's medal had not been consumed with the flag in the fire. Mr. Meany wore the medal-he always wore it, Dan said. The cloth that shielded the pin above the medal was much faded-red and white stripes on a chevron of blue-and the gold of the medal itself blazed less brightly than it had blazed that day when a beam of sunlight had been reflected by it in Kurd's Church; but the raised, unfurled wings of the American eagle were no less visible. Whenever I think of Owen Meany's medal for heroism, I'm reminded of Thomas Hardy's diary entry in -Owen showed it to me, that little bit about 'living in a world where nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.' I remember it whenever I think of Mr. Meany wearing Owen's medal while he reads the electric meters. Let's see: there's not much else-there's almost nothing to add. Only this: that it took years for me to face my memory of how Owen Meany died-and once I forced myself to remember the details, I could never forget how he died; I will never forget it. I am doomed to remember this. I had never been a major participant in Fourth of July celebrations in Gravesend; but the town was faithfully patriotic-it did not allow Independence Day to pass unnoticed. The parade was organized at the bandstand in the center of town, and marched nearly the whole length of Front Street, achieving peak band noise and the maximum number of barking dogs, and accompanying children on bicycles, at the midpoint of the march-^precisely at Front Street, where my grandmother was in the habit of viewing the hullabaloo from her front doorstep. Grandmother suffered ambivalent feelings every Fourth of July; she was patriotic enough to stand on her doorstep waving a small American flag-the flag itself was not any larger man the palm of her hand-but at the same time, she frowned upon all the ruckus; she frequently reprimanded the children who rode their bicycles across her lawn, and she shouted at the dogs to stop their fool barking. I often watched the parade pass by, too; but after my mother died, Owen Meany and I never followed the parade on our bicycles-for the final destination of the band and the marchers was the cemetery on Linden Street. From Front Street, we could hear the guns saluting the dead heroes; it was the habit in Gravesend to conclude a Memorial Day parade and a Veterans Day parade and an Independence Day parade with manly gunfire over the graves mat knew too much quiet all the other days of the year. It was no different on My , -except that Owen Meany was in Arizona, possibly watching or even participating in a parade at Fort Huachuca; I didn't know what Owen was doing. Dan Needham and I had enjoyed a late breakfast with my grandmother, and we'd all taken our coffee out on the front doorstep to wait for the parade; by the sound of it, coming nearer, it was passing the Main Academy Building-gathering force, bicyclists, and dogs. Dan and I sat on the stone doorstep, but my grandmother chose to stand; sitting on a doorstep would not have measured up to Harriet Wheelwright's high standards for women of her age and position. If I was thinking anything-if I was thinking at all-I was considering that my life had become a kind of doorstep-sitting, watching parades pass by. I was not working that summer; I would not be working that fall. With my Master's degree in hand, I had enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of
