I am treading deeper and deeper into leaves and silence. As for me, I have come to think I am moving in an endless extension of that single Kansas autumn. He was trying, no doubt, his own keys to the past. It was, I think, the last time I saw Claude, though his professional papers came faithfully to me for many years. And as I stood after the lapse of years and looked at the faint impression of his paw, it struck me that every ruined civilization is, in a sense, the mark of men trying to be human, trying to transcend themselves.Īs we left, the leaves in the wood were red and coming down. He knew very well he was being mocked for not being human…Īnd the moral of all this is that Mickey tried hard to be a human being. If anyone mocked him at such a time by pretending to have paws and resting his chin on the table as Mickey had to do, Mickey would growl and lift his lip. If permitted, he would sit up to the table and put his paws together before his plate, like the rest of the children. Mickey, I know, wanted very much to be a genuine human being. The mark of Mickey’s paw is dearer to me than many more impressive monuments-perhaps because, in a sense, we both wanted to be something other than what we were. Here is his only legacy to the future-that dabbled paw mark whose secret is remembered briefly in the heart of an aging professor.
No one knows where Mickey the friendly lies no one knows how many times the dust that clothed that beautiful and loving spirit has moved with the thistledown across the yards where Mickey used to play.
Some time ago after the lapse of many decades, I stood and looked at the walk, now crumbling at the edges from the feet of many passers. Many years ago, when the first cement sidewalks were being laid in our neighborhood, we children took the paw of our dog Mickey and impressed it into a kind of immortality even as he modestly floundered and objected. It is there, down those streets past unlit houses that the child runs on alone. It is there that the arc lights lay their shadows. It is in the mind that the flight commences. Few men have such motivations in childhood, few are so constantly seeking for the loophole in the fern where the leaves swing shut behind them. And out of that intolerable sunlight your one purpose has been given-to escape. It is the games in which you were pummeled by other children’s big brothers, it is the sharp, demanding voices of adults who snatch your books. Noise is all the things you did not wish to do. Noise is the Outside-the bully in the next block by whose house you had to pass in order to go to school.
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