Year: 2005

You can’t just plop your heart on the table every day, prod it with a fork, and expect it to give up its secrets. It can’t be shoved or bullied, and has never stood for interrogations.

It speaks when it’s good and ready, and when it has something to say. There’s no small talk in it, and when it does finally speak –and it speaks less and less often– you can be certain it will tell you the truth, and that truth may either move or bruise you. It is also capable –and you fear this– of shattering you.

Your heart’s stock in trade has always been simple, declarative sentences, but it is also capable, from time to time, of really carrying on, of railing, of delivering the occasional surprising and stirring exhortation, harangue, or passionate monologue. It is not afraid of giving you a good dressing down whenever it feels like it’s required.

Whatever it says, though, it is always clear that the sentences have been a long time building, word by word, each word carefully mulled and weighed.

One night, you recall, after your heart had been for many days entirely silent, it spoke quietly from its purple velvet cushion next to the alarm clock on the bed stand. Your heart and the alarm clock have a touching and clearly affectionate relationship.

It was very late, after three a.m., and you had inserted ear plugs and the fan was blowing. You were reading a collection of E.B. White’s essays.

When your heart spoke it spasmed almost imperceptibly in place, and the lamplight that had settled on its moist, lacquered-looking surface trembled. You took out your ear plugs and asked it to repeat itself.

“I hope you realize,” it said in its odd and familiar baritone croak, “that I am capable of doing just as much damage at rest as in motion.”

“And are you now at rest or in motion?” you asked.

“What the fuck does it look like?” your heart said. “What the fuck does it feel like to you?”

I have no one to blame but myself, I know that. I clearly blew what might have been a career-making opportunity.

I’ve been trying all night to take the advice of my boss and look at this whole unfortunate situation as a ‘coachable moment,’ but it’s not easy, and, frankly, it really does make me question what the hell I’m doing with my life.

If nothing else, this whole sorry episode illustrates the importance of never putting off for tomorrow what you can do today, or whatever that old line of horse hooey is.

Here’s what happened, more or less as I can piece it together after the fact: I was hustling out of the house yesterday morning, and running late as usual, when I noticed upwards of several hundred giants gathering in the park across the street from my house. I don’t mean to imply in any way that these were mythical giants, but neither am I being hyperbolic; if my eyes were not mistaken these were all clearly giants as classified by medical science, if, in fact, medical science still even bothers with such classifications for people of uncommon height and proportion.

My elderly neighbor was sweeping her sidewalk as I made my way to the car, and I gestured at the commotion in the park and said, “Any idea what’s going on over there?”

“Looks like a giant convention,” she said, and shrugged. It was a sort of question, really, the way she phrased it; there was a definite suggestion of uncertainty, which was uncharacteristic of this particular woman. I had always found her to be one of these know-it-all speculator types who’d likely never uttered the phrase “I have no idea” in her entire life. In this particular instance, however, based on what I could see with my own eyes, her supposition didn’t seem to be entirely off base.

“The caloric requirements of men of that size are almost impossible to believe,” she said, and then went back to her sweeping.

Here’s where I made my big mistake. I got into my car and drove away from this spectacle that was developing directly across the street from my house. And even as I was driving downtown to work I was thinking about those last words of the old woman, and recalling that a personal experience from my childhood eerily corroborated exactly what she had said to me: My father, I remembered, had once taken me to a local grocery store to see a giant who was on some sort of promotional tour for a brand of bacon.

I could be mistaken; it might have been a breakfast cereal. At any rate, though, there was a giant in the grocery store, and he struck me as a rather socially awkward fellow. He just kind of lurked around behind a table, if I remember correctly, and had a woman who did all the work for him. The woman handed out photos of the giant, on the backs of which were printed a typical day’s menu for such a huge man. My father read this menu to me as we walked across the parking lot to his truck, his voice literally rising with incredulity as he recited the portions of each meal in the giant’s diet. The seemingly ridiculous quantities of food that this giant was alleged to consume each day struck me as questionable, I remember, primarily because the giant in question was such an unnervingly gaunt fellow.

All of these thoughts and memories were swirling around in my head as I drove to work. Once I arrived at the office, though, I went directly to my cubicle and busied myself with the mind-numbing nonsense that occupies such a huge part of my day and my life.

Sometime after lunch my editor stopped by my desk to chat, and I related to him what I had seen that morning, almost, I must admit, as if I were recounting a dream. My boss was understandably full of questions, questions I was in no position to answer. And I could not answer those questions for the very obvious reason that I am a complete failure as a journalist. At a moment when any normal human being –even a dim-witted child– would have been seized with the basic investigative curiosity of a journalist, I had climbed into my car and driven away from the scene.

To his credit, I’m sure, my editor would have none of my ignorance. If, in fact, there was some sort of congress of giants taking place in the city, I was told, it was imperative that we have a reporter on the scene. Pronto.

“We really need to hit the ground running on this thing,” my editor told me. “We must own the giant story. Get your keister back out there right this minute and get to the bottom of this business.”

I went back down the five flights of stairs, got back into my car, and retraced my journey of many hours earlier. By the time I pulled into my block some thirty minutes later I could see immediately that the park was completely empty of giants.

My neighbor was still out in her yard, now messing around with the flowers in her window planter, so I went over to see if she could shed any light on what had transpired earlier.

The woman stared at me like I was out of my mind, and I was seriously afraid for a moment that she was going to tell me that I had imagined the whole thing. Instead she said, “Even more came after you left. Buses full of them, and every one of those fellows was so tall they had to practically bend over when they stepped off the buses. I couldn’t tell you for certain what they were up to, but there seemed to be some deliberation for a bit; then there was some chanting and holding of hands, a softball game, and, finally, a song.”

I asked her if she had noticed any television cameras or newspaper reporters. She had not, she said, but then she wasn’t one for sticking her nose where it didn’t belong.

“It was just like I told you, though,” she said. “Several times during the morning huge caterer’s trucks pulled up over there at the park, and they were immediately swarmed by the giants. Such big people eat like you can’t believe. It smelled like they were eating barbecue ribs. I suppose you could go over there and see if they left behind any bones.”

You will surely understand why I am now, at 3:30 in the morning, still pacing my dark house and smoking and murmuring to myself, resisting the urge to sit down on the floor and punish myself with the most fearsome scriptural lamentations I can get my hands on.

The truth is a bright and terrible thing in the small hours, and I have no choice but to stare it down as best I can: I have utterly failed at my chosen profession. I could not –and I did not– own the giant story.