A costume was commissioned. The millipede would be incredibly long. Most of it would be dragging along the ground. The segmented body suit in greenish velour and black velveteen piping had oversized antennae, bugged-out eyes, and a butterfly's coiled proboscis. The multiple pairs of legs, only two pairs of which would be operable, were connected together in order for all of them to simultaneously move, marionette fashion, as the operator walked along.
My mother volunteered my father to be the bug. I teased her when I called home about the symbolism of the committee's mascot being a verminous scavenger.
"They're herbivorous," she replied.
"But hard to make cuddly, I bet," I said.
And what about having my father, her husband, appear for a year as this creepy crawly thing.
"No one will know," she said.
I had recently moved south, below the bug line as we like to say, the climatic zone where the winter wasn't cold enough to kill off insects. Infesting our new house, we discovered moving in, was a hatch of millions of millipedes or what we found out were millipedes once the county extension agent duly identified them. I have grown somewhat familiar to the flying roaches and the grasshoppers as large as small cats.
"You'd be surprised," my mother said, "about how cuddly your father is, millipede or not."
"You might have at least called him Milton or Mick the Millipede."
My father was good-natured about it all, suited up and crossed genders. My mother sent pictures of Millie in the parades, at the ribbon cuttings, in front of the huge numbers counting down on the official digital clock. I received a video of the ceremony in the park, the burial of the time capsule. I saw my father as the giant creature wave his many hands at the camera, inch his way through the festive crowd with the gold-plated shovel. He looked like a bad special effect, a monster from a Japanese Godzilla film, his dragging tail cutting a swath of destruction through a twig and tissue paper city.
By the time I actually saw him in costume in person on New Year's Eve, my father's tail had worn dramatically thin from the continuous friction of his various civic duties. They had taken to wrapping the nether region up over one shoulder of the upright upper half. The result was a commingling of legs or, now more accurately, arms that seemed to emanate from the lime body at every angle. That night the committee had sponsored a carnival for children at the Fine Arts Center to help them stay awake for the fireworks at midnight. The building was lousy with screaming kids doing spin art, singing karaoke, and having their faces painted. My father, as Millie, moved through the crowds. The children were strangely calmed by the hulking figure, magnetically drawn to hold one of its many hands as it slithered along. It led a little parade over to the park, the children still attached. Millie seemed to undulate through the ground-hugging fogs the fountains produced, lugging its cargo of limpid limpets. It stopped and turned dramatically to face the sound of the first exploding bombs going off above the city.
We Didn't Speak of Reddy Kilowatt
My grandfather worked as a meter reader for the municipal electric utility, City Light and Power, until it was sold to the regional for-profit company, Indiana and Michigan, or I&M, in a deal he regarded as shady.
I&M had always had a presence in Fort Wayne. That company owned the electric interurbans that ran all over Indiana early in the century. I&M maintained the high-tension transmission lines that brought much of the electricity into the city to be sold by City Light. There was a billboard near I&M's building, shielding the lot where it kept the hulks of transformers, gen erators, and cable spools. The billboard was by the corner of Spy Run and State, and my grandfather had to read its meter. The sign, of course, was lit all the time, and sometimes parts of it moved. The billboard, advertising the advantages of electric power, utilized a character named Reddy Kilowatt-a stick figure made up of a skeleton of lightning with a light bulb head and a light bulb nose and socket outlets for ears.
My grandfather despised Reddy Kilowatt, and we weren't to speak of him. Not that we would have even noticed its existence without the focus of my grandfather's rage. Reddy Kilowatt would have been just another cartoon on the landscape of cartoons I wandered through as a child. Still, we knew the days Grandfather read the meter on the sign. He would come home restless and unsettled, drink an extra Pepsi on the back porch to facilitate his belching.
After City Light was bought out and he retired, my grandfather took elaborate routes through the city to avoid passing the sign. This was a difficult thing to do since State was the main east-to-west thoroughfare on the north side of town. There were times that passing the sign was unavoidable and the traffic light at the corner of Spy Run and State always stopped you. Grandfather seethed in the car as Reddy Kilowatt, his crimped kinetic arm waving back and forth, loomed before him.
Stopped at the same light on our journey across town to visit my grandparents, my family contemplated Reddy Kilowatt, who might then be wearing earmuffs for winter or sunglasses during the summer, promoting electric heat or air conditioning. My mother always mentioned, her father not being present to hear, how Daddy was looking more and more like that Reddy Kilowatt-the wiry frame, the round mostly bald head with the tiny white shock of hair at his crown. "Don't tell him I said so, please!" she said as the light changed.
Hoosier Defines Itself
My uncle went to graduate school at Tennessee to study health. He got a government grant to run a study in the hope of demonstrating the validity of his thesis: To know the deleterious effects of obesity would aid in weight reduction. He had two groups of dieters. The control group simply followed the menus and exercise suggestions provided by a national weight reduction company. The subjects in the experiment also had to follow the diet and in addition complete a rigorous course detailing graphically and statistically the dangers of fat. To his surprise, my uncle proved that while the control group modestly lost pounds, the educated group effortlessly gained a ton. Traumatized by the detailed information they were receiving, they nervously ate in order not to think about what was happening to their bodies as they ate.
While in Knoxville, my uncle sent me a poster I hung on the wall of my bedroom. The drawing depicted a team portrait of the mascots of the Southeastern Conference, their eponymous heads bobbing above the various team football uniforms. There were two Bulldogs, a Hog, and several military combatantsMississippi's Rebel, Vanderbilt's Commodore, and Tennessee's own Volunteer. Alabama's Tide was, strangely, an Elephant that would make no sense until, years later, I moved to Tuscaloosa and learned it derived from the historical confluence of a Rose Bowl game and a local luggage company. Right after my uncle's gift, my father gave me the complementary poster representing the Big Ten, and I taped it next to the first one. I liked to think of the two portraits as my uncle's two groups of dieters.
The head of the Hoosier was rendered as that of a bumpkin, the dictionary definition after all, the same definition that Dan Quayle once on the floor of the United States Senate argued to legally change. The Hoosier on the poster showed up as a yokel, a rural rube with a fraying straw hat atop his rusty head of hair. He had vacant blue eyes and freckles, big lips and buckteeth that gnawed on a bent straw of a wheat stalk or weed stem. This Hoosier, even wearing a big-shouldered football uniform, not the requisite blue denim bib overalls, didn't look very competitive surrounded by the vicious menagerie of Wildcat, Badger, and Wolverine.
There is a whole class of mascots that suffer in this modern era of corporate corporeal identity. Look at the Buckeye looking like an eyeball with eyes. Adjectives get attached. Hurryin' was wed to Hoosier. Or weapons are issued, a pitchfork, say, that arms the Hoosier as an animated American Gothic. For a while there, the Indiana mascot metamorphed into a bison. I believe it derived from the state's seal, in which a pioneer with an axe fells a tree while the silhouette of a bison lights out for the territories. In the end Hoosier is just what it is. It is the word itself, its own mascot. One year, perhaps the same year native son Quayle rose in the Senate, the state tried to change the motto on the license tags from Hoosier State to Heritage State and was met with near insurrection. No one really knows what a Hoosier is, but not knowing, as my uncle proved, has its own logic. A Hoosier is a Hoosier is a Hoosier.