I Am Boots

I’ve been reading fairy tales of late. I’ve always liked them, and recently I’ve been picking up public-domain stuff that I can get for free on my Kindle. The origins of Mickey Mouse are protected by our greasily amended copyright rules, but not Bluebeard.

One  delightful English collection was put together around a hundred years ago, with some rewriting for kids, by Joseph Jacobs. I like this man. Great humor and charming asides. The giants in his collection are mostly Welsh and want to eat Englishmen (considering what the English themselves eat, I’d expect rather unpleasant aftertastes).

The  collection that most affected me brings together Norse tales, fore-ballooned by a 70-page introduction which, as near as I could make out from skimming, shows that the tale tellers had turned the gods of Valhalla into giants who wanted to eat Christians – can’t blame them. This bunch resonated, personally.

It’s not that different, in many ways, from Grimm’s. Anyone who was whelped on Grimm’s will recognize the ubiquitous three brothers, who grow even more prominent in the Norse collection.

Generalized plot: The father or king (someone in big, deep authority) sets a seemingly impossible task, such as rescuing a maiden imprisoned in the farthest room of an impregnable castle. The two elder brothers – over-confident, thoughtless or dumb as a rock – blunder out in rollicking stupidity to do the deed and get killed/captured/lost, or just poop out and commiserate at the local pub.

After these misadventures, the youngest son – the wastrel, the ne’er-do-well, the idjit, the classic fool who, in the Norse versions, languishes by the fireplace sticking his feet in the ashes to keep warm; he doesn’t wear socks, which might catch fire – declares offhandedly that he will do likewise, in the face of general derision: “What the fuck, Sven, you’re a diddly ass”; “Well, my feet aren’t smoldering, you try it.”

He succeeds, in part through a fool’s fearlessness, in larger part through doing the foolishly unexpected, in largest part because he just doesn’t give a royal fucking goddam how things are supposed to be done or what will happen to him next. Today, he’d be a an enlightened venture capitalist or Jeff Bezos making the ever-gullible believe nonsense about drones.

In these translations from the Norse (I don’t read Norse – What, you read Norse? Well, good for you), the son’s name is almost invariably given as Boots.

I finished the collection and had an epiphany:

I am Boots.

I’m the youngest of three sons by some 13 years. While my elder brothers earned their bread through honest toil and amassed enough to meet old age with relative equanimity, I’ve blundered my way without a goal, with no clear idea of how one is supposed to exist in the world, without so much ignoring the rules as not allowing them register.

Now, dribbling into old age with my wife (who’s embarrassingly like me), I have accumulated less extended sustenance than a single 85-year-old is supposed to subsist on until the Maker calls (“Hello, Erstvald, you’ve come to me with a nice pile of loot – fork, it over”).

And I just don’t care.

The fairytale parallel is limited, of course. I have not gained half the known world – the standard Norse payment for offing a giant or rescuing a the kingdom from dissolution – or been offered any award beyond a handshake (“Nice job, that, rescuing  a kingdom from dissolution, keep it up”). More earthily, my brothers were never over-confident or thoughtless. Rod, my eldest, was a better and more clear-sighted person than I will ever be.

This should really be a paean to my brothers, who saved my butt more times that I will ever know, who showered me with kindness, who protected me throughout all the years of my supposed growth, despite my unwillingness to forge myself into a responsible human being.

If they had a fault, it was in protecting me too well. As I squelched through life, “no direction home,” working part time or less, bumping from one odd job to another, they never said a condemning word.

That’s my foolish, youngest-son luck – to be saved from foolishness by my foolishness.

I am Boots—and still bootless.

by Derek Davis