Story by Gary Anderson –
This is a mystery story, and like every well-crafted mystery story, it follows a carefully laid-out trail of clues and then features an unexpected plot twist at the end. It began several years ago, with a trip my brother Jim and I planned back to our childhood home in eastern Iowa. For years, I’d been haunted by a childhood memory, and I was determined to put it to rest, once and for all.
The frightening memory involved being on my tricycle, peddling around a strange town. I had ridden my trike too far from home and I was lost. Not knowing what to do, I peddled on, growing more scared by the moment, until I ran into something that held a terrifying grip on me ever since.
I came upon the huge statue of an eagle, perched with its talons gripping a giant globe of the world. It frightened me so badly that my memory of the incident always ended at that moment. I don’t remember how I got back home or anything else about it. I couldn’t even remember what town the incident had happened in.
When I asked my mom about it, she was shocked. She said I couldn’t have been more than a year and a half old when we lived in the town I had described. She thought it improbable that I could remember something that early in my life, but my description convinced her it was real. The problem really was that she had no recollection of either the incident or the eagle I had described. Even so, it was a promising start. The incident had actually happened, and now I knew where!
Jim and I set out to solve the mystery. We knew no one in that town, but I was counting on the timelessness of small towns to help us gather clues. I hoped that the huge eagle would still be there, waiting with its terrible claws, waiting for me somewhere. Perhaps it was a statue in a park, I didn’t know. I only hoped that I’d be able to walk up to and touch it—and finally let that frightening memory go.
When we arrived in the small town where I’d lived only briefly as toddler, Jim and I drove slowly up and down the main streets, but nothing looked familiar. It looked no different from hundreds of small Iowa towns, slightly tired and rundown, with a layer of dust, like the dust of my memory, covering everything in the oppressive summer heat.
But we were on a mission, so Jim slowly guided the car as I stared out the passenger window for clues. Suddenly, I shouted, “Stop the car!”
Jim whipped the rented car to the curb and I jumped out. I was standing in front of a paint dealership, laughing heartily, when Jim joined me on the sidewalk and asked, “Well, did you find it?”
“I did!” I said happily. “Look, it’s my eagle!” I pointed at the statue of a bird sitting on a globe, just like in my dream, with paint running out from beneath its claws like blood from a fresh kill.
A sign at the base of the statue read: “We cover the world.”
The statue, from the top of the eagle’s haughty head to the base, stood four feet tall, at the most.
I laughed again. “And this is the eagle that’s been haunting me for thirty years!”
We didn’t even bother to go inside the store. We just stood on the sidewalk, looking down at the pitifully small statue and laughing. There was no reason to try to explain what was going on. It would have taken too long and wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone but me. The mystery had been solved, and that was all that mattered.
But there was something more even important that happened to me that day. I realized that there are many moments in our lives that seem larger than they actually were when we think back on them. They are events that have somehow taken on epic proportions in our memory, even though they bear no resemblance to what actually took place.
Yet those events haunt us—sometimes for decades, as that eagle did in my case—and they will continue to haunt us, as long as we let them remain large. It’s only when we screw up our courage, take the risk, and revisit the scene of the event that we can face our eagles—and see them as only four feet tall, that we can finally come to peace with them.
Freelance writer and editor Gary Anderson has published four books of Iowa humor and inspiration. He also owns www.abciowa.com and a publishing company, Paradise Creek Books.
