The Brilliantly Rainbowed Adventure

How do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?
- The Sound of Music

        I wanted to start this chapter off with a big bang, so I promptly recreated the primal void. Ha ha! Just kidding!
        Actually, I wanted to show off my broad-beamed experience, so I picked the above quote from "The Sound of Music" to sort of spice things up. Whenever I try to describe my pal Egghead, I have the same problem the Austrian nun did when she tried to describe Maria.
        Egghead is nigh unto impossible to define, and only a fool would try. Well, here I go!
        My brainy next-door neighbor in Gutchinville, my hometown, was also one of my best friends. His father was an eccentric inventor, and his mother was a rocket scientist. He was a real pal, but he wasn't Egghead.
        Egghead lived two blocks away in an old wooden house. His dad was a shade tree mechanic, and his mom waited tables down at the Clair de Loon Discount Cafe. They were poor, but they were rich.
        The name on Egghead's mailbox read "E. G. Jones III," which was unusual, to say the least. Old Mr. Jones had lived there before Egghead's parents moved in, and for some unknown reason they never took the name down.
        Their real name was Zenoborkawitz. Egghead's parents were Bilbo and Afid, and baby Egghead made three.
        They didn't get out much.
        Egghead and I grew up more together than apart. Later on, when he attended Oxford University on a Bowlder Fellowship, he used to write me all of the time. I wallpapered my outhouse with his correspondence, which you can still see at our Funtastic Fan-For-All Amusement Park in Gutchinville, Florida.
        On the day I met Egghead, I realized right away that he was an exceptional fellow. We were both five years old, and as the local preschool wrestling champ I felt bound and beholden to offer him the great honor of a get-acquainted bout. The rawbony bespectacled rascal struck a defiant prose.
        "Is this some kind of primitive peer-initiation process?" he asked, sliding his glasses up on his nose. They promptly slid back down again, yet somehow, with his carefully reasoned response, Egghead had taken all of the fun out of my challenge.
        "So's your old man!" I blurted cleverly.
        "I can show you how to wiggle your ears," said Egghead. From that moment on we were friends for life. Later on Egghead became famous, or infamous some would say, for his radically innovative concepts in the field of sub-nuclear physics. In fact, Oxford finally awarded him an honorary doctorate just last year.
        When Egghead dropped out of Oxford, I was there to meet him at the airport in Flupney. He appeared small and dejected as he strolled through the big doors that led from the embarkation area into the terminal. His big ears were sort of droopy, and his thin shoulders were hunched over like he was trying to get warm. With his thin brown hair slicked straight back; he sort of resembled a shivering little rodent that had just climbed out of a tub full of ice-cold water. I determined right away that I had to cheer him up.
        "Hey, Egghead!" I hollered like a big dumb moose. Heads turned in the general vicinity. Some of the more refined folks sneered as if they had stepped in a mud hole, while other, more good-natured souls chuckled heartily at the sight of our heartwarming enactment of the traditional Redneck reunion.
        Egghead, in touch as always with his cultural roots, literally turned red from the neck up when he saw me waving. This was a nice gesture. I hurried up to him and opened my big mouth.
        "Put her there," I said, sticking out my right hand. When he started to shake I shot the electricity to the little old joy buzzer that I had hidden in my palm. Egghead's eyes rolled up into the back of his head, and he jerked spasmodically across the floor.
        "Ubububububub," he said through clenched teeth.
        That Egghead always was a barrel of laughs! I cut the juice off, and he sank to one knee, putting his hand dazedly to his brow.
        "Here, let me help you up," I volunteered, offering my other hand to him. He reached for it with a sigh of relief, and it came off in his grip with a loud bang. "Ha Ha Ha!" I snortled, "I got you again." By now Egghead was shaking his head and laughing.
        "Hooter," he said, "to say that your are as dumb as a stick is to insult the stick." He stood up and we clasped hands, and then spontaneously embraced. There were tears in his eyes.
        To tell you the truth, I thought I'd hurt him.
        "Let's split the scene of this accident," I said. Of course, we did not literally split into two pieces at this point. I was just tromping out an attractive figure of speech.
        As we drove away from the airport in my old '66 four-door pickup, Egghead began to talk about Oxford. It had been too easy for him, but he was too polite to say so.
        "My experience was unusual, to say the least," he offered. "I was readily able to absorb the gist of what they offered… that is, the current body of work in the field of sub-nuclear physics." This was no brag on his part, just fact. He relaxed in the seat, leaning back dreamily as he talked. The summer heat had lulled us both into a careless state of sublime soporific supinity.
        "Most of the latest approaches involve conceptual models that I propounded to you while we were in grammar school." I well remembered his hair-brained ideas, which seemed as goofy as they were useless. "They were happy as long as I stayed on such familiar ground.
        "On their part, however," he extruded, "they were unable to grasp the basic tenets of non-sequential space-time inversions. As for the Eureka principle, they were unwilling to even consider it. My public demonstrations inferring the validation of these principles left them confounded but not convinced. I finally had to leave the university. I needed elbow room, Hooter," he said, pushing his glasses up on his nose and squinting in my general direction. Egghead was down in the dumps, but I was dead set on cheering him up.
        "Well, Egghead," I smurfed, "there are more important things than learning the technical specifications of the natural universe." He laughed, which cheered me up considerably.
        "Hooter," said Egghead, "that's one of your most interesting traits. Your mind operates unwittingly… in apparent accordance with the Eureka principle."
        "Well, don't tell anybody," I begged. By the way, that's how me and Egghead operate. I pretend that I'm dumb, and he pretends that I'm not. Suddenly, a coarse braying broke the silence.
        "Eureka? What's that?" hooted Frogstick, sitting up in the back seat, where he had been hidden.
        "Who reeks?" cried a familiar voice. At that moment a noxious cloud of pungent vapors assaulted our unsuspecting schnozzes. It was Stink, who had thrust his head into the cab through the sliding back window. Egghead was delighted at their sudden appearance.
        "You guys are too much," he said, shaking his head in disbelief.
        "My head is stuck!" squealed Stinker. We hastily rolled down our windows.
        "Shove his head out of the cab!" I hollered in panic.
        "You do it," Frogstick hollered back. "I left my gloves in my car!" Finally, after much travail, we managed to get Stink's head out of the cab. Soon the truck was aired out and we were drawing nigh to Gutchinville.
        "Where's Slug?" asked Egghead.
        "Oh, no!" cried Frogstick, "I left him in the terminal!" I spun the truck into a U-turn.
        "Where did you last see him?" asked Egghead. Frogstick's jaw dropped open.
        "Oh, no," he gasped, "he was asleep on the luggage conveyor." I hit the accelerator. Suddenly two voices hollered in unison.
        "Just kidding!" they cried. It was Frogstick and Slug.
        "He was under a blanket on the floorboard," hooted Frogstick. "We got you good!" Egghead looked around the inside of my old truck, marveling at our motley countenances.
        "Will you join our band again, Egghead?" I asked. "We missed you."
        "I give up," said Egghead, "you guys are just like fantastic fictional characters!"
        "Haw, haw, haw," I snorted, "what an imagination you have, Egghead!" He was obviously giddy from the trip.
        "Where do I sign up?" he asked.
        Well, that's how we got our pal Egghead back into the band. Two weeks later, we all went to see the Zeb Hendrix concert and our band got its first big break. The rest, as they say, is histrionics.
        So it was that in the fall of 2003, our pal Egghead was with us as we drove away from the Mulesboro Country Store, headed for the Nowhere County Wilderness Area. It was a beautiful day.
        The big blue sky was flecked with the distant forms of high-flying buzzards, strung out for miles behind our truck, intrigued and enamored with Stink's invisible scent trail. The air was clean and cool. Swarming clouds of tiny black martins rose and fell above the green horizon, pulsating and levitating like a single amoebic entity, while v-shaped formations of migrating ducks traversed the distant heights. Lulled to complacency by the surrounding beauty, we vibrated down the road in a serene state of enjoyment. Little did we suspect that incredibly exciting events lay ahead of us, just around the bend.