Story Invisible

My grandmother used to say, “Out of sight—out of mind.”

Growing up on a dairy farm, that really resonated with me. There were always more chores than willing workers and as the oldest of six kids I felt that I got more than fair my share of the nastiest jobs. It was my duty to myself to keep a low profile; to avoid mindless, boring menial tasks so that I had more time to do the important things—like reading books about Superman and The Flash, watching educational shows about exotic foreign places like Bourbon Street Beat and Hawaiian Eye, or learning the lessons of history from dramas like Maverick and Have Gun Will Travel. And besides, it was good for my younger brothers to learn a little responsibility; it was my duty as a big brother to get out of their way and let them grow.

Then one night on TV I saw a movie that changed my life —Claude Rains as the Invisible Man. How blind could I have been—being Out of Sight is just the passive act of not being seen, but Invisibility was a positive choice, an action, a self-imposed mission. And it answered that age old question, “If you could have any superpower what would it be?”

I shared this revelation with my friend Ray. His approval was immediate and he pointed out benefits I had not even considered, “You could go to Tommy’s store and take whatever you wanted—a whole box of York Mint Patties a bottle of Hire’s Root Beer and a stack of comics—and the best part you wouldn’t need to run out of the store—you could sit down right there and nobody would even notice.”

Ever the practical one I pointed out, “But if you sit down and are invisible someone will step on you.”

Never one to let mundane details stop him Ray said, “Ah, but you sit under the pinball machine—nobody steps on you there! Oh, and the girls locker room—you should definitely take a camera in there—a Polaroid, because they won’t develop pictures of naked people from regular film, I know, but I bet they keep copies for themselves.”

Previously I had made myself scarce by ducking around corners and slipping back to my bedroom when I wanted to avoid an onerous task. Now I took charge of my life. That small clearing in the middle of the corn field that for generations had been the farm dump provided a set of bed springs and an old canvas tarp that became my command post. For rainy days I dug out a burrow in the hay loft that could not be seen from more than ten feet away. An old deer stand in the woods became my crows' nest lookout. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that the work of avoiding work was probably harder than the chores themselves would have been.

On a visit home from college, long after dad had retired from farming, my brothers and I were trying to top one another on how crazy we used to be. I mentioned my invisibility phase to see what dad's take on it was. After a minute of thought he said, “You know you began disappearing long before that.” I expected him to go off on the tale of how at the age of two I escaped from the play enclosure he had built for us kids and wandered into the alfalfa dehydrator—a furnace that ate over a ton of wet grass a minute and turned it into dry powdered feed for the cows and how I was found staring down into the machine that wouldn’t even have burped if a two-year-old fell in and how Oscar Franklin snatched me from the maw of death.

But dad starts off, “I think you were three days old the first time you disappeared.” No, a totally different story… three days old?

I’m suddenly thinking of those times when I had hoped I was adopted, or left on the doorstep by passing gypsies, but now I am thinking “disappeared at three days old—maybe a tragic mix-up at the hospital? Maybe I am the long lost heir …” but no, dad assures me that I was not adopted or left by a passing stranger and there was not a mix-up at the hospital.

Dad goes on, “You were born 8 minutes after midnight on Monday June second. After the morning milking, I fed the cows, cleaned up, and around 9 drove over to Princeton Hospital and visited your mom. A nurse took me down to the hospital nursery and you were still sleeping even though it was after 10 AM by then. Nurse said I should give you a pass since it was your birthday. Driving home from Princeton I stopped at Shafer’s hardware store on Nassau St. and bought a pint of black paint and a quarter inch brush. After crossing route one I stopped beside the sign that said, “Welcome to Plainsboro population 648.” I painted a line through the number 648 and just below painted in the number 649.

“Two days later on Wednesday I was bringing your mom and you home and slowed down as I approached the sign. Hoped she would see it on her own without me pointing because calling attention to what I had done would have been like bragging. Unfortunately on Tuesday old Mr. Jacobson had died and some joker had crossed out your 649 and reinstated the number 648.

“So, John, that was the first time you disappeared and I should probably have taken it as a sign of things to come.”