WHO WILL YOU BE IN THE ASYLUM? [W, 7-30-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Pretending of An Old Man—WHO WILL YOU BE IN THE ASYLUM? [W, 7-30-25]

 

English poet John Clare spent the last 23 years of his life in an insane asylum, a second stint since he had earlier escaped from another asylum. During those final asylum years, he thought he was Lord Byron or Robert Burns, and, according to Garrison Keillor’s “Writers’ Almanack,” did some of his best work.

Well, yes, if I could think I’m Lord Byron or Robert Burns, or even Garrison Keillor, I could probably write better, too. I don’t think I’d do well in an asylum, though, or even Minneapolis.

If you were committed to an asylum, who would you want as your asylum doppelganger? Apparently, you can do such much better work if you’re someone else.

When I was young, I did some pretending that I was someone else, especially when heaving basketballs at the netless, tilting, rusty iron hoop on the side of the barn. It never occurred to me that it was at least a bit unusual for a Southern Indiana white boy in the 1940-50s to pretend he was Meadowlark Lemon.

I pretended that I was Gil Hodges when I played baseball with Uncle Johnny in our orchard field. That made more sense. Gil and I both played first base, and he lived only a dozen miles from me before he went to play in Brooklyn.

And we were both polite young men. His real name was Hodge, but the secretary in the Dodgers’ office mistakenly added an “s” to his name on his first contract, and he didn’t want to embarrass her by pointing out the mistake. It was more polite to go by a different name the rest of his life.

I wonder if she ever knew about that? And, if so, did she then pretend to be some other secretary?

When I was in high school, I decided I to pretend I was someone who was interesting. I became Johney. The different spelling was so no one would think that I was my father or uncle or cousin or nephew, all of them John or Johnny.

I was really pretending to be Johnny Dark, a comic book action hero. It didn’t work. My friends kept me calling me John. As one said, “You’re too square to be a Johnny.” So much for my life of pretending.

If you want to be taken seriously as a pretender, to be The Great Pretender, you have to be persistent. [1] Like Bob...

When we lived in Mason City, IA, our daughter and her family had a neighbor, Bob, who claimed he was retired as “The # 2 man in the FBI.” He smoked a bent-stem pipe to prove it, as he leaned over his wire fence to tell anyone who passed by about his “real” identity.

It was a total fabrication. He had been a minor functionary for a railroad. But he told that to so many people that the FBI folks came around and told him to stop pretending. He did not, and in his obit, he was identified as the # 2 man in the FBI. That’s great pretending.

Well, back to the earlier question: If you were committed to an asylum—or even to your back yard, as Bob was--who would you want as your asylum doppelganger?

I think I can still hit a hook shot. They’ll probably let me have a nerf ball and a trash can at Peaceful Acres. I think I’ll still be Meadowlark Lemon.

John Robert McFarland

1] A great song, written by Buck Ram, and recorded by The Platters in 1959.]