Crop Dusting by Circus Cannon

“Let me understand. Your parents required you to pay them to raise you?”

There were several of us sitting around a table talking, and the night was far along. In fact, if it has been too much further along it would already have been the next day’s night.

The man speaking had brought his point forward as if just now realizing that there had been a fundamental misunderstanding in the air.

“Why, yes, I was led to believe that it was common practice. You don’t mean to tell me that your parents raised you for free?” He thought for a moment. “You of all people.”

“Yes, I don’t believe the subject of money ever once came up between us. As far as I could tell it was an entirely voluntary enterprise. Let me, in turn, understand your point further. You say you had to pay them to raise you; at which age did you start making payroll?”

“A fair question if there ever was one, my friend. Of course a man’s memory goes back only so far, but I imagine…” – and here he looked off into the middle distance like someone making calculations in his head – “I would imagine that I had just turned three. Yes! Yes, it comes back to me now! I had just turned three. The Terrible Twos were over and my parents wanted to bring the contract back to the negotiating table now that they saw what they were getting into.”

“I see,” said a third man. “Now was this an hourly wage, or a fixed salary?” he asked, honing in on the financial side of the situation. “And did you pay overtime or was it one of these situations where you avoided overtime by elevating them into the managerial class? If so, that’s a bit underhanded if you ask me.”

“No, I wouldn’t do that. These were my parents, for goodness sake. I wasn’t going to try to gouge them.”

A fourth man had been listening in to these weighty manners. “You know it seems to me that your story holds up in the usual way your stories hold up, which is to say not at all, except in the matter of where exactly a three year old gets the money to pay a salary to his parents. Did you, and I’m just speculating here, spitballing, throwing some notions on the wall to see which one sticks, remindful to myself that there are no bad answers, did you get an allowance and then turn it back over to them?”

The first man whistled softly and shook his head in whimsical wonder. “An allowance? An allowance? Wait, I don’t want to do your query a disservice. Let me first understand what you mean by this word ‘allowance.’”

“Why, it is a sum, usually paltry as accounted for in the real world but meaningful to a small child, handed over on a regular basis, usually weekly, in exchange for performing small chores around the house. In this way, you see, the parents inculcate in the child the principles of responsibility, the value of labor, and the satisfaction of honest pay for an honest day’s work. I am told that these are invaluable lessons.”

The first man replied. “And you say that you yourself participated in this allowance scheme, and yet some, perhaps most, well, all would say that by all the evidence there is quite a bit of blue sky between you and an honest day’s work. In fact to measure this gap, you would have to bring in concepts such as the distance to the sun, the speed of light, the ultimate question of whether light is a wave or a particle, and, some would say, the Pythagorean Theorem. It makes a person wonder if this allowance racket is all that it is cracked up to be.”

“I am sorry that you feel that way, but then you have always been jealous of my abilities and the position I have attained in life. Let us put that to one side and answer this other fellow’s question. Where exactly did you come up with the money to pay your parents to raise you?”

“Why from my job, of course,” the first fellow said with honest amazement. “Forgive me if there is some small delay in my responses. I am still trying to digest the fact that by all appearances I am the only one around the table who had an honest job as a three-year old. What were the rest of you waiting for? For that matter, what did you do with your time? It seems like this would have been a breeding ground for indolence and small-time criminality. Well, and just look how you each turned out, which goes to show.”

“You attained this money from your job, you say. What exactly was this job? I can see a child that age picking up sticks in the neighbor’s backyard, or at the extremes of speculation walking a puppy or a kitty cat. Is it these kind of activities that you speak of?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. How could I pay my staff and keep them from moving on to another operation? I could never make payroll bringing in revenues that paltry.”

“And so…what was it?” asked another fellow, who hadn’t yet spoken. “We would all like to know the particulars of your employment at the age of three.”

The first man chose his words carefully, like a man taking into account the intellectual shortfalls of the companions that he is thrown in with. “Why, why, I was in the crop dusting game.”

“The crop dusting game,” said one of the men, flatly, but I have lost track of which one it was now. My notes are blurred from an unfortunate beverage spill that happened at about that time. “The crop dusting game,” he repeated. “You intend to tell us that you flew a plane over cropland and emitted clouds of insecticides and for all I know fertilizer upon those same crops? Is that what you’re saying, hmm?”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, I didn’t have my pilot’s license at the age of three. My goodness, if that is the kind of thing that you would believe then I have to say you would believe anything.” He smiled softly to himself and shook his head at the thought of it. “I didn’t have a pilot’s license until well into fifth grade, that is the fact of the matter.”

“The fact of the matter,” said of those fellows. “Let me just let that phrase roll around gently in my head for a moment here so that I can savor it. ‘The fact of the matter.’” He gave it a full minute and then with a wave of his hand moved the conversation forward again.

“No, of course I didn’t fly a plane,” the first man said, resuming. “You forget, my friends, in the heat of discussion, the main advantage that any three-year old brings to a commercial enterprise.”

“And that would be…?”

“His size, my friends, his size! There are many and many a profession where a diminutive stature brings a distinct competitive edge in today’s cutthroat would of capitalism run amok.”

“Why, what in the world does such a compact individual bring to the business of an airplane spaying chemicals over a field from a great height?”

“Ah, and there you fall into a fundamental error.” He gave some time over to the moment, knowing that he was keeping them in suspense. “Who said anything about an airplane?” He sat back satisfied.

“Why, what in the world else did you expect us to think when you said you were in the crop-dusting business? It is, you might say, an airplane-centric business.”

“Well, it is,” the first man said as if ever amazed at the smallness of the minds around him, “if you lack imagination. Consider, my friends, where we would be now if Galileo, or Copernicus, or Newton or any of the scientific or historical greats had likewise lacked imagination in the manner I see in those around me. But if – if, I say – you possess that most important gift of being able to see things that no one has seen before and to conjecture a new way of doing things, it turns out you don’t need an airplane at all to scatter chemicals upon the fields below from a great height.”

“Well, out with it, how did you get up high enough?”

“You are missing the obvious! As Sherlock Holmes was wont to say, all you have to do is discard the impossible and what remains is the answer. Can’t you see how your mental blindness is holding you back? In short, I climbed through the sky scattering chemicals upon the fields far below in the only way possible: I was shot out of a cannon!”

He sat back after revealing this fact, as though expecting the other members sitting around the table to slap their heads in humorous exasperation at missing the obvious. Instead they gave something of the impression of a group of people, strictly in an impromptu or improvised manner, intent on stringing this first fellow up.

“Out of a cannon! This is the most ridiculous thing you have told us yet. That is an impossibility.”

“Yes, it would be challenging for a full-grown man. But you recall my innate advantages, chiefly my size. I handily fit into the barrel of the cannon – not a military cannon, mind you, that would be ridiculous, but only a run of the mill circus cannon – and clutching my bag of fertilizer and pesticides I would be blown into the sky.” He took on that distracted look again as seemingly he considered the finances of the manner. “Of course we were able to underbid a lot of the other circus cannon crop-dusting outfits because due to my stature we required so much less gunpowder to loft me into the sky.”

“Well now, tell me, exactly how did you survive your fall back to earth?”

“Oh, that was no problem. The clouds broke my descent and the wind currents more or less wafted me down the last hundred yards or so. We do get a lot of wind here on The Plains, you know. I don’t believe even you would contest that simple fact. Or would you? Have you gone so far around the bend in your bitterness and jealousy towards me?”

This description of a simple commercial operation seemed to test the limits of what the rest of the men around the table were willing to accept as fact, or even willing to see cast into the English language and spoken, but the first fellow stuck to his account, bringing up a point that was hard to refute, mainly, how otherwise, except being shot out of a cannon to dust the crops of the regional farmland, could he ever have acquired the funds necessary to pay his parents for raising him?

And so they talked on far into the night and the lies fell like a light rain, a kind of benediction.