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medium of the television talk show, in which I proved to have a certain aptitude—provocative yet genial, relaxed yet not at the sacrifice of accuracy or intellectual passion—has given me a celebrity which I welcomed at first but which has become, as far as my actual work goes, a burden upon both my time and imagination.
    They had put my name and the simultaneously empty and pregnant word “Celebrity” on a paper banner on the side of the limousine. I was to ride with the local Congressman, who was running for reelection and who said he had been one of my supervisors at the old Hayesville playground. I didn’t remember him, but, then, as a child I had rarely looked up at those adults whose gargoylish heads loomed at the level ofthe sun and the moon. Even then my focus had been on the transpersonal, my gaze stubbornly fixed on the pavement, the pebbles, the grass, the dirt. The dirt at the playground had been a pale ochre, beaten by innumerable pairs of energetic sneakers to the fineness of milled flour and given therefore to rising up in little eye-stinging clouds at the merest stir of breeze. The same breeze would bring out from under the open-sided shelter of the pavilion the lonely, banana-ish smell of the shellac we used to solidify the tablemats and little striped bowls we “crafted” of multicolored gimp, and the desolate sound, the hesitant clickclack, of checkers being played. I had spent summer after summer there, never believing there would be a last summer. Obscene incredible things were written and drawn on the back of the equipment shed, and I never believed that such things—such blooms of hidden flesh, such violent conjunctions—would become on the larger playground of life not only credible but commonplace.
    Besides the Congressman and myself, there were to be fourteen marching bands, thirty-seven fire engines, three probate judges, a Hollywood stunt man whose father used to peddle pretzels door to door, Miss Junior Pennsylvania, Mr. Gay Pennsylvania, and a flatbed truck of supposed Delaware Indians—real survivors, those. But when, before the parade mustered, I made anthropological inquiries of them, they turned out to be all brothers and uncles in the fuel-oil business, operating out of Chester County.
    On the mustering-field—the parking lot of the newly enlarged regional high school—the personality I had created for use in the world outside Hayesville began to disintegrate. With downcast head I sensed from all sides a certain irradiation, as if the television sets out of which I had so urbanely expressed myself had reversed their currents and now were burning my reality away. In the tangle of assembled marching units and minor dignitaries I became obsessed with avoiding contact, and slithered back and forth in my inappropriate seersucker suit like a pariah or like a gossip reporter from some universally loathed but, because this is America, tolerated journal. The lead car of the parade, I observed, contained the burgess—an irrepressible bully, my contemporary, once nicknamed, because of his multiple warrior wounds, Scabs, and still, after forty years, called that. Also in this car rode the four borough aldermen, all wearing uniformly black suits as if to emphasize their remarkably distributed disparity in size, like a set of toys. The smallest was a virtual dwarf, a tailor called Runt Miller, and the tallest Gus Horst, asix-foot-eight-inch giant famous, in my high-school years, not only for his basketball prowess but for his skill at the discus, which flew from his long hairless arm as from a sling. The limousine behind theirs was to hold four beribboned veterans, one each from the two world wars and the two Asian involvements. Then some fire engines festooned with tricolor bunting, and a marching band led by stocky-legged young twirlers in white plastic boots and silver sequinned miniskirts, and the truckload of Indians, some more fire engines, and a limousine holding a probate judge, and