The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze by William Saroyan Read Free Book Online

conversations. I say to him, “Ah, you melancholy Armenian, you; how marvelous your life has been!” And he replies gently, “Be humble, my son. Seek God.”
    My father was a writer, too. He was an unpublished writer. I have, all his great manuscripts, his great poems and stories, written in our native language, which I cannot read. Two or three times each year I bring out all my father’s papers and stare forhours at his contribution to the literature of the world. Like myself, I am pleased to say, he was desperately poor; poverty trailed him like a hound, as the expression is. Most of his poems and stories were written on wrapping paper which he folded into small books. Only his journal is in English (which he spoke and wrote perfectly), and it is full of lamentations. In New York, according to this journal, my father had only two moods:
sad
and
very sad
. About thirty years ago he was alone in that city, and he was trying to earn enough money to pay for the passage of his wife and three children to the new world. He was a janitor. Why should I withhold this fact? There is nothing shameful about a great man’s being a janitor in America. In the old country he was a man of honor, a professor, and he was called Agha, which means approximately lord. Unfortunately, he was also a revolutionist, as all good Armenians are. He wanted the handful of people of his race to be free. He wanted them to enjoy liberty, and so he was placed in jail every now and then. Finally, it got so bad that if he did not leave the old country, he would kill and be killed. He knew English, he had read Shakespeare and Swift in English, and so he came to this country. And they made a janitor of him. After a number of years of hard work his family joined him in New York. In California, according to my father’s journal, matters for a while were slightly better for him; he mentioned sunshine and magnificent bunches of grapes. So he tried farming. At first he worked for other farmers, then he made a down payment on a small farm of hisown. But he was a rotten farmer. He was a man of books, a professor; he loved good clothes. He loved leisure and comfort, and like myself he hated machinery.
    My father’s vineyard was about eleven miles east of the nearest town, and all the farmers near by were in the habit of going to town once or twice a week on bicycles, which were the vogue at that time and a trifle faster than a horse and buggy. One hot afternoon in August a tall individual in very fine clothes was seen moving forward in long leisurely strides over a hot and dusty country road. It was my father. My people told me this story about the man, so that I might understand what a fool he was and not be like him. Someone saw my father. It was a neighbor farmer who was returning from the city on a bicycle. This man was amazed.
    “Agha,” he said, “where are you going?”
    “To town,” my father said.
    “But, Agha,” said the farmer, “you cannot do this thing. It is eleven miles to town and you look . . . People will laugh at you in such clothes.”
    “Let them laugh,” my father said. “These are my clothes. They fit me.”
    “Yes, yes, of course they fit you,” said the farmer, “but such clothes do not seem right out here, in this dust and heat. Everyone wears overalls out here, Agha.”
    “Nonsense,” said my father. He went on walking.
    The farmer followed my father, whom he now regarded as insane.
    “At least, at least,” he said, “if you insist on wearingthose clothes, at least you will not humiliate yourself by
walking
to town. You will at least accept the use of my bicycle.”
    This farmer was a close friend of my father’s family, and he had great respect for my father. He meant well, but my father was dumbfounded. He stared at the man with horror and disgust.
    “What?” he shouted. “You ask me to mount one of those crazy contraptions? You ask me to tangle myself in that ungodly piece of junk?” (The Armenian equivalent