see the Prince. Shoe polish!
We hadn’t polished a shoe for at least two years. But we shined ’em up for the Prince. The English were hilarious about the visit.
Or, as they put it in their bulletins, The Visit. Polished shoes. Best clothes. He came to inspect a farm, the school, the Relief operation. He was here for two hours, which was considered a great honor. Most places he only stayed half an hour.
I must say that before he came I was not all that overawed.
This is America, after all. We don’t have a king. But I was totally won over by what happened at the school. We had all been out to watch the royal plane arrive, of course. The most beautiful white airplane. To see that huge Airbus and the royal entourage, you would not have known that there had ever been a war. Here is the world turned on its ear, and the royals are going on just as always, like saying it’s all going to be all right. Civilization isn’t over.
The Visit was a totally self-contained production. First a band came marching down the stairs. Then they rolled out their own red carpet. Then a bunch of officers came along and saluted while some lords and generals came down. Then came the High Commissioner of the North American Relief. He had flown in from Toronto. He was dressed in a blue uniform, and did he ever look imposing! Then the Prince. He was in white. In my imagination I had visualized him as a very big man. But he was normal size. He moved quickly. They played “God Save the King.” We sang “America the Beautiful.” Then “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Then he met the local Relief officials. Martha was very poised, but she was shaking like a leaf.
We teachers and the kids rushed back to the school. We had been selected for inspection, I think, mainly because we’re so close to the airport. I thought it would be a very formal thing. But he spent half an hour sitting on a chair in the auditorium, asking questions. What is the most important thing you are learning here? Tell me about the curriculum. Is it useful? Is it interesting?
He asked how well heated the school was. He asked after the health of the children. He went to the infirmary and read the records and inspected the medicine chest. He issued a Royal Warrant for tablet ampicillin, and we have never been without it since.
After he left, an equerry arrived with two suitcases of books.
They were a gift from the Prince. He asked that we read one poem each day from
Of course, I know there are people who resent the British, but without them I think the United States would really have had a very hard time. When it came time for them to repay their debt for our help and support through two world wars, they didn’t hesitate.
I will never forget that.
Charles Kohl, Student
I go to the Baldwin New School. My birthday is June eighth. I’m eleven. I like my school. There is always plenty of everything. We have all the sports stuff we want. I could have ten lockers if I wanted. We all stay just in the South Building. The senior high is on the top floor, we’re on the second floor, and the elementary school is downstairs.
I go to school in the winter. From April to October, me and my family work to tear down houses on our land so we can increase acreage. We have some apple trees, and we grow corn and green beans and stuff. When we lived in New Jersey we had so many scrubdowns I got allergic to the soap Mom used to make. Mom and Dad tried to move to New Mexico, but this guy from the Relief said we were crazy, it was very bad there, because there was a revolution.
When I got TB, they gave me pills at the hospital. There are kids, like in Texas or somewhere like that, who probably die if they get sick. We pray in school that God will keep us.
Dad was a stockbroker before the war. He will not talk about those times, except he says he worked in an office. Dad is strong. I used to think it was stock-breaking, like breaking horses, but Mom says it was a numbers job.
The United States is my favorite country. Of course, I love the King because of all the good things the Crown has done for us.
When Prince Andrew came here, I saw him. England must be a great place, and my ambition is to go there. My dad says they still use his stock skills there, so he might be transferred to London someday. He put our names on the list. If we go before I am fourteen, I could get to be a British subject and have my own computer. They also have frozen food there. I would like to be a pilot. But the United States is the greatest country in the world, Dad says, although that is not right, Miss Carver says. She says we had a hard time but we will get back. One time there were aircraft carriers as big as our school.
We have big plants here. There are problems with furnaces and controls and fuel and all kinds of stuff, so they can hardly go, although I saw smoke last week coming out of the Bethlehem Number One.
Dad says life is to work from six to six, eat from six to seven, read from seven to nine, and sleep the rest of the time. Mom has NSD, but she thinks she will be better. I think when she puts mineral oil on her tummy it is better. Miss Carver says I should love her and pray for her.
Our school computers are tied into the international information network. I am working on a program to defeat the holds so we can find out more about the world. Miss Carver says okay, but store my programs on disks, not in the internal memory, and officially she doesn’t know what I am doing. When a hold is imposed, it is always preceded by a synalog coding. It looks like it is coming in from the master program, but actually the master is just instructing your computer not to access the information. So I am revising our data-capture program to also capture the synalogs in the dump. That way I can find out their command sequences and probably get to where our program will automatically issue defeats anytime it sees a synalog being imposed.
Miss Carver wants to find out a lot of things she says are behind the holds. Miss Carver is from New York and she wants to know why people still can’t go back. Also, she wants to know about Russia and China.
There is this guy in our high school named Buddy Toro who tries to scuzz me half the time when I am on the computer. He will chat into my work and scoop whatever I am doing. Then he’ll alter my programs and superimpose something so my stuff comes out weird, like I’m supposed to have a geomorphic drawing but the earth looks like a pear and I get a C. He only goes after me. Our dads have trouble together. They are both on the Baldwin Council, and they are on opposite sides. The Relief wants the city to keep food allocation, but Dad thinks it should go back to the state government, which we do not at the moment have. We have to get a new one, Dad says.
I have a girlfriend. She is Stacy Boyce and I like her because not only can she play rugby football, she is really neat. We are writing a saga together on our class computers. Fifth grade has a new Phillips that is really fast. It accesses ten kilobytes in the time it takes our Epson to do one. If they wanted to, they could pull up a thousand pages all at once and do instant correlations. Anyway, she is Morgan Le Fay in this saga and I am King Arthur, and we love each other even though we are brother and sister. Last night in the saga I kissed her, and she comes back, “save.” That was so beautiful.
I gave her hard copy this morning, and she turned all red and said she would keep it forever. Her dad and mine were brokers together when, as my mom says, America was still young.
But we are young now, Stacy and me.
A Wanderer
East of Pittsburgh there are mountains, then there are farms, then there are fields full of wild growth, and a tumbledown look to the towns. Not many people are aboard the
