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Outfoxing the Enemy 1/22/2017 10:56:16 AM
As a boy, I read THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME by Richard Connell. This is a little thriller written in the 1920s. The villain is a big game hunter who has reached a point in his bloody career where he no longer finds regular animals satisfying prey. As a result, he has taken to hunting the most cunning animal he can find – Man. The hero of the story is the hunted. His job throughout the story is to outfox the villain.
I was thinking about Connell’s story this morning as I was putting together my boys’ school lunches. I was struggling with my own villain – Variety, and the evil forces behind it. In this scenario, I was the desperate hunter. How would I ever root out a matching lid for the plastic container I had chosen for Lee’s yogurt?
The yogurt had already been spooned into said container – a mound of acidophilus-laden pudding awaiting its containment like some nebulous wild beast crouched and ready to spring. Lee was standing by with his lunch box. The clock was ticking. The pressure was mounting. Good gosh! I hadn’t even had my coffee yet! But if we didn’t leave soon, my kids would suffer the indignity of being marked tardy, perhaps mocked by their peers, maybe even made to stand in the corner and wear one of those tall pointy hats – one with big red letters that read LATE. It was a true parental conundrum, a thriller of sorts. I needed to get a grip and summon my own heroism, or all would be lost.
“Focus,” I whispered to myself, and began sorting through the ten thousand plastic lids that had somehow infiltrated our life like alien invaders. “Don’t let them win.”
My mom used to throw Tupperware parties when I was a kid. That was where this problem all started. This was in the 1970s. She would invite her friends to our house where they would dip crackers into Velveeta cheese bubbling in little fondue pots hovering over flickering candles. The women would talk about macramé, listen to Dean Martin records, and drink Fresca from glasses their hostess had conscientiously pre-frosted in the icebox. At last, my mom would show the ladies the latest offerings from Tupperware. The selection was endearingly limited. Maybe a dozen containers in all, each with a matching lid. A modern miracle. The best thing for homemakers – literally – since sliced bread. But those first humble models were the seeds from which my future troubles would grow. They were the banal first pieces of the most – if not dangerous, at least frustrating – game.
When I was growing up, I imagined every story to be an actual experience had by the writer who wrote it. It made sense to me that Richard Connell had actually been hunted by another man. How else could he know so much about it? That was why I wanted to be a writer myself. Even though it was terrifying to think about, who wouldn’t want to be hunted? Who wouldn’t want that life-vivifying brush with mortality? But now I understand that Mr. Connell wrote his story from his imagination, possibly taking some tawdry part of his every day, changing it up a bit, and turning it into a thriller. He rolled out of bed, drank his coffee, and shaped a fantasy out of some other more banal aspect of his everyday life. Since he was writing in the 1920s, he didn’t even have the advantage of knowing the many hassles and hazards of Tupperware – that great challenge faced by dads in this muddled day and age.
It takes a lot of cunning to outfox the villain in a good story. And, admittedly, it sometimes takes a little help from a heroine. So in the end, when all seemed lost, I finally called on my daughter.
“Grace!” I whimpered. “Help!”
In all of two seconds she had surveyed the myriad plastic lids, selected the correct purple one, and snapped it into place over Lee’s yogurt.
The villain had been vanquished.
And we were out the door.
More Blogs by Brian Kindall • I Am Not Dead - Saturday, November 25, 2017 • The Angel - Thursday, March 2, 2017 • Outfoxing the Enemy - Sunday, January 22, 2017 • Boy Hunter - Monday, January 2, 2017
