Free Every Third Thought by John Barth

boys’ passion not only for reading (especially novels : no longer Tom Swift and Tarzan of the Apes after elementary school, but Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage , Jack London’s White Fang , even Dumas père ’s The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo ), but for writing made-up stuff: in Stratford Junior High, a satirical mock-Nazi underground “newspaper” called Der Berlin Times with crude cartoons of Hitler & Co., its handwritten single-sheet copies circulated among their classmates; in Avon County High, a pseudonymous gossip-and-humor column in the school’s biweekly AvCoHi Eagle called “The Osprey,” bylined PN (for Prosper/Newett, their joint “PNNAME”) and motto’d, “The Eagle soars; the Osprey pounces.”
    But that’s another story: the blooming springtime of their teens and twenties and the American Century’s ’40s and ’50s, following these Winter’s-end first stirrings of their nascent sap, so to speak.
    “Another nom de plume for the pair of you, maybe: Nascent Saps ?”
    Touché . And in the Here and Now, as the vernal equinox of 2008 approaches, Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin at least nominally transfer authority over their respective domains
to each’s hand-picked successor; Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama still go at it in the early Democratic presidential primaries; the dollar slides; crude oil tops $100 a barrel; the Iraq war, then in its fifth year, costs the U.S. some $21 billion per month; the Taliban regains strength in our stalemated Pakistan/ Afghanistan misadventure; severe late-winter storms strike California and the midwestern and northeastern states (but spare our mid-Atlantic Tidewaterland); and in early March a woman in Kansas is discovered not only to have been living secluded in her bathroom for two years, but to have remained seated so long on her toilet that the skin of her butt has grown literally attached to the seat, which must be removed before her discoverer/rescuers can transport her to hospital for its surgical detachment.
    Which reminds George Irving Newett, changes changed, of his hibernating Muse—who however now bestirs herself to prompt him (better never than late?) to close this section of this Whatever with a couple of Last Things from the “Winter” of his&Ned’s preadolescent boyhood....
    But she then on Second Thought remembers, or is by him reminded, that we did that already, just a few pages back....
    And so on Third Thought we say, “Literal and figurative First Winter, adieu ,” and bid the Reader (if he/she’s still out there) to follow Pete Seeger’s season-song’s advice:
    “Turn, turn, turn . . . ”

3
    spring
    Spring has sprung. The grass has riz. I wonder where the flowers is? 3
     
     
     
     
     
     
    T O HIS PAL George Newett, “Solstices are mine,” Ned Prosper declared one late-March morning back in their Stratford High days (he having been born on one, Q.E.D.). And by the same reasoning, “Equinoxes are yours.”
    Sixty years later, recollective G.I.N. assumes this declaration to have been made Nedward-style, his friend’s right fist clenched thumb-up for emphasis, and followed some while after by “On second thought [forefinger raised beside thumb and pointed Georgeward like a cocked pistol], I guess that gives me just the winter solstice and you the fall equinox, right? And so
on third thought [raising middle finger to make three, then closing thumb and fore to make the Up Yours gesture with middle solo], fuck all that. Last day of winter! First of spring! Time to lose our fucking cherries, man!”
    “The word that won the war,” British soldiers called that all-purpose Anglo-Saxon expletive, 4 so common in adult fiction and film dialogue nowadays as to raise scarcely an eyebrow 5 (G. writes these lines on Just Another Workday Morning in 2008), but still such a No-No back then as to make Stratford/Bridgetown teenage boys feel macho/horny just saying it aloud. Even a dozen years later, when