Chapter 5: Etymology of Spirit

So. As I was saying, Dick named me Spirit. His parents thought it was a cute name. In some vague way, it perhaps even appealed to their rustic religiosity--an essentially pure strain of Dutch Calvinism. Dick was happy, perhaps even a bit proud, to let them think that way. The truth is, though, he purloined my name from the title of a song of a band that Dick's parents would have judged morally abhorrent and would have severely punished him for secretly listening to. I refer to the band Nirvana and the song "Smells like Teen Spirit." To parade the esoteric truth of my name even more, Dick would often call me Teeny. I guess between Spirit and Teeny Dick's parents thought he was covering both my personality and my appearance--for I was the runt of Bessie's otherwise all-girl litter.

The elder Scholtens would never have imagined Dick capable of such duplicity. They could hardly be blamed for this. In appearance Dick was a child of light. Summer bleached his hair platinum, while winter transmuted it to gold. Likewise with the seasons his wiry body oscillated between alabaster and bronze. More than this, he was polite, conscientious, and reasonably hard-working--both on the farm and at the Christian school he attended in Lethbridge. Perhaps the more he felt he had something to hide, the more he tried to merge with the image of moral purity he felt his parents projected onto him. He didn't entirely imagine this parental expectation. Despite the fact that it was the "90s," and that Dick was by no means the "first-born" (he was the second youngest), his parents really did expect him to take over the farm. Even when he was 16, his age the year that I was born, it went without saying in the family that if he did go away to college, it would be to study agricultural science, after which he would return and take over operations.

Maybe such an expectation seems crude or backwards. Probably in some sense it is. Dick himself would later rant about how his parents were stuck in the past. But that very notion presumes that "the times" move forward in a uniform way, that when things change in one place they automatically change everywhere. A dog's eye-view, however, does not show the present as one thing that people either accept or resist. It sees the present as a collision of all kinds of different times: a little piece of the Calvinist past existing alongside some as yet-unnamed and unrecognized future. Maybe beneath this chaos of time-fragments there is an underlying order. Nobody would argue with the possibility, because nobody would argue that things are precisely what they seem. And who knows? Maybe beneath the possible deeper order is an even deeper possible chaos and so on and so forth until the dizziness of the regress between chaos and order makes you puke.

On the other hand, if it's so obvious that nothing's ever what it seems, than why did almost everyone accept Dick's shining seeming for real? There was one who didn't: Anika. Ann. Annie. Ka. But then, as far as I'm concerned, it was her who split him in two in the first place.