On and on until finally he said, “I wonder how many people heard him say he was worried about his dog? I wonder how long that old man lay there with that burdening worry before someone—and I’m proud to say it was my own son—heard him. Jesse, would you like to introduce Yellow? And I pray with all my heart that old man has some heavenly way of looking down right now.”
The cameras zoomed in on Yellow and me.
Yellow was dancing around while I held him, wagging his tail, then trying to jump up on his frail, old legs and lick my chin.
I said, “Well, Dad, he’s just had a big breakfast, and he’s ready for a run, and then a long nap.”
“Not up on our couch in the living room, I hope.” My father chuckled. “I sat down on that couch last night and there were some very suspicious yellow hairs on my dark suit when I got back up.” Ha ha, from the audience.
“He’s got his own bed now,” I said, and I don’t remember what else I managed to get out, but before I knew it the camera was back on my father and he was shouting: “Do all you can! To all you can! In all the ways you can! As often as you can! For as long as you can!”
And The Challenge Choir came in at the end, thundering out “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.”
Some ACE staff members helped me get Yellow back down the stairs and into the vestry before my old man started his sermon.
Seal was waiting for me. She threw her arms around me and said, “Oh, Jesse, that was just super! Aren’t you pleased?”
“I am now.”
We walked hand in hand down to my house with Yellow, people in their cars smiling and waving at us as we passed the lot.
At noon we sat together in the living room to watch the show.
Even if Yellow had wanted to, he couldn’t have gotten his old bones up on the couch. He flopped down on the rug with his head on his paws, while Seal and I sank into the couch cushions and stuck our feet up on the coffee table.
We watched through to the end, my father in top form, acting out The Oracle hunting down The Happiest Man.
As soon as he’d finished, the choir began, “Run, climb, reach for a star,” and the phone rang.
“That’s Dickie,” Seal said. “I’ll get it.”
“Dickie?” I said.
“Dickie Cloward,” she said, walking over to the telephone. “I told him to call me here.”
I got down on all fours and nuzzled Yellow while she talked to him. She was saying super this and super that, laughing a lot, telling him she’d designed a hat with an arrow going through it to wear to the Cheeks’ party. She was telling him to just wear horns, Taurus was the bull.
After she hung up, she came across and sat down on the floor with me.
“Dickie said to tell you he thought you were just super!”
I didn’t say anything. I was ducking Yellow, who was trying to lick my face.
“Dickie’s Taurus on the cusp of Gemini, so I said he should just rig up some horns on a cap, for Taurus the bull. It’d be super.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“He really did think you were super, Jesse. He likes you a lot.”
“Okay.”
“He said you were really super to Opal up at the Cheeks’.”
“You ought to find another adjective besides ‘super,’” I said.
She looked at me, surprised.
“What’s the matter with you, anyway?” she said.
The cost of televising It’s Up to You ate up ACE funds as fast as we could raise them. Donald and my father spent all their spare time dreaming up new gimmicks for fund raising, and Seal and I were working overtime to help get each new show off the ground.
That Sunday afternoon our project was The Good Turn Tree. There was an enormous pine tree beside The Summer House, and we were supposed to tie a ribbon to it for everyone who did a “good turn” by sending in money to keep us on the tube.
Donald had figured out that we’d been stressing family four weeks straight, and it was time to shift to country. He wanted a huge American flag suspended from the balcony beside the tree. On the tree, a white ribbon represented a ten dollar gift; a twenty-five dollar gift got a red ribbon; any gift over twenty-five dollars got a blue one.
The gifts were called Good Turns, and in exchange my father was launching a new campaign the next Sunday, with a “one good turn deserves another” theme, tied in to the idea that that was the American way.
Earlier that morning, I’d seen my father’s scratch pad on his desk, where he was working on the sermon.
If you have an impossible dream, do a good turn, and see what happens to that dream.
That’s the American way! We’re a country of buy one, get one free. We’re a country that knows impossible dreams come true, because when you give it, you get it!
“Give, and it shall be given unto you,” it is written in Luke.
I couldn’t resist penciling in “Thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money,” it is written in Acts.
Seal and I were starting the tree off with several hundred ribbons that were supposed to represent advance gifts from friends and neighbors. … It wasn’t a total lie. Seal’s family had made a $50 donation. Donald had tossed in $25. There were a few donations from the ACE staff, my mother, and our cook. The rest was bait.
(“Bait?” my mother
