Troubadour


		TROUBADOUR: Union Station Peter was only four. But already he knew a lot, and had a mind of his own. Well, sort of. Fairly often his mind got to its limits and faded out. But he always got it back very soon, and was off in a new, exciting direction. Of course fairly frequent blackouts of sense did confuse and frighten him. He didn’t know this was normal, but in spite of not knowing he bounced back so well, and things were basically so good in his world, that he avoided paying much attention to this fear. He was on his way to his favorite place, the train station. Trains, forever now his best thing, gave him the happiest experience of his entire life, which was to lie in his mother’s lap for three whole days almost without interruption. Sometimes he looked up into her pretty smiling face warmly greeting him with love, basking in the powerful security of that care. And sometimes he just stared out the window at the blurry objects that raced by the train, and daydreamed about having the power to make this go on forever. When his mother had carried him off his beautiful train several days before, he had not noticed the station because he was so sleepy. So he was anxious now to see what it looked like for the first time. He just knew they were going on another long journey so he could do it all over again. Maybe they were even going to live on the train and travel all over the world. Of course his mother denied all of this, but he was sure she just wanted to surprise him. When he finally viewed the vast space of the train station fully awake in daylight, he was utterly amazed. It was so enormous he couldn’t even see the hazy top of it. Somehow the station had captured the sky and clouds! Trains, and the houses in which they lived really were the most magical things to be found! Though he normally had trouble waiting, he didn’t even mind when his mother said they had to wait awhile before anything good happened. He’d waited the four years of his life before his first ride, so he didn’t have any trouble waiting a few minutes for the second one. There was one problem though, which he tried mostly to ignore, but he couldn’t get entirely away from. Something about his mother was very different. She was acting in a way that he’d never seen before. She wasn’t angry, an experience with which he was very familiar, not because he was the least bit afraid of her anger, but because he could tease her out of any rage with a simple, “I love you” applied to her heart with his small hand placed right between her large beautiful breasts. She loved to be loved, and he knew how. It was the one way he was smarter than his older brother, who didn’t know how to love at all. A grownup Peter would have realized that his mother was afraid. Peter had never seen his mother really afraid of anything, or if he had he didn’t remember it. So he was confused, unsettled underneath his buoyant enthusiasm for life and this particular day. There was one thing he did know instinctively, which was to stay out of her way, not to demand anything. He sensed she couldn’t handle one more thing. She kept pacing back and forth between two pillars talking to herself under her breath, completely oblivious to anything else. Watching her, Peter began to feel strangely unfamiliar to himself. As usual his older brother Pendergast had wandered as far away as he could get from his mother and Peter, and what he regarded to be their stupid love affair with each other. Pendergast couldn’t love, but he had something that might be even more powerful. He could command. He was called “Pentup” by his friends because he was usually very cool-headed no matter what was happening. But then very occasionally he’d explode. Since he was the neighborhood leader that meant his anger defined the law, at least until he changed it. Nobody ever argued with Pendergast because it was pretty clear he was more independent of grownups than the other kids. So he was King. Naturally Peter admired him very much. The King was his brother. But the King was contemptuous of Peter and largely ignored him. Today Pendergast was searching for something to distract him from his mother and brother’s usual cavorting lovingly together, which he thought was about the dumbest thing anybody could do. He was denying that he felt anything when Peter usurped his mother; his solution was to throw mothering to the four winds. He didn’t need it anymore. WHAT READERS SAY... “In Troubadour, Don Fenn creates the first post-psychology myth of the heroic journey to wholeness. Traditional myths survive because they illustrate a basic psychic process that inspires each generation anew, like the heroic quests for the Golden Fleece, the Holy Grail, or Don Quixote. Such myths are, for the most part an unthinking acting-out of the quest for wholeness, usually with action and violence as a part of the search. Activity in the outside world structures most of the quest. But in Troubadour it is the psyche that guides and structures the heroic process, lighting the way to the highest potential of individual human experience. I’ve laughed in fits to the point where I nearly began to cry. I have been encouraged to thinking critically and profoundly about the structure of several emotions, and the great labor associated with them. I’ve felt saddened. In short, he’s written a novel that demonstrates the extent to which thought is fundamentally an emotional experience. Troubadour is the best stuff I’ve read in a very long time. It’s very powerful and in most places masterfully done. I will read it again five years from now and throughout my life.”—Christopher Steuart Britt Arrendondo PhD, Associate Professor of Literature, George Washington University copyright© 2007, 2008 Don Fenn. All rights reserved.