ONCE UPON A UNICORN

A mythical battle among the library books

10: 05. Saturday morning. At the library with Emily. We sit across the table from a muscular man in a tight T-shirt. His need to show off his pecs is so obvious as to be embarrassing. I am embarrassed for this poor man! Probably didn’t receive enough attention as a kid. Absent father. Mother obsessed with her Chippendales’ calendars. On top of everything else, his hair is wet, allowing the entire world to know just how recently he was showering. In the nude. “Let’s change tables,” I whisper.

10: 12 a. m. I watch all the bowed heads, eyes gazing down at books. Eyes are usually aimed down at smartphones. I wonder what all this looking down is doing to the chemicals in our brains. I remember once reading about a pipe that connects the front of the brain to the back, and that the back is where we store short-term memories while the front is where we store long- term memories. So when you want to think upon the long- ago past, you unconsciously lean your head forward to get the brain juice flowing to the front and when you want to remember something recent, like where you parked your car, you look up, sliding the brain juice to the back.

What with the constant worrying over falling rocks and attacking birds, cavemen probably spent most of their time looking up. Not us, though. Does this mean we’re pouring too much long-term brain juice into our thoughts? And if so, is it making us more nostalgic?

10: 35 a. m. Emily is nostalgic for something that never was: unicorns. She finds a book about their history, checks it out of the library and we leave for the park.

10:55 a.m. On a bench, she flips through her book. “You know,” I say, “there were unicorns in the Garden of Eden.”

“And what happened to them?” Emily asks, indulging me.

“God had to kill them to punish man.” I explain how God commanded Adam and Eve to do the killing themselves. “They wandered the Earth, strangling unicorns as they wept.”

“How could someone kill a unicorn — even if God told you to?”

“In the beginning, it was rough, but they got used to it, even making small talk as they strangled.”

“That doesn’t seem very fair of God,” Emily says.

My Minnesotan wife thinks that my Hebrew Lord — a deity so unbelievably aggro he turned Lot’s wife to a pillar of salt for rotating her head, a Lord so smity he killed Cain’s entire lineage because the meat Cain prepared for him in a burnt offering was a little gamy — isn’t fair. While this middle western take-a- pennyleave-a- penny sense of fair play is one of the many reasons I love her, Emily just doesn’t get my people’s Lord at all. Fair!

“In the end, strangling unicorns actually brought Adam and Eve closer together and helped their marriage,” I say. “Don’t worry. God knows what He’s doing.”

And on a day as beautiful as this one, it would certainly seem as though he does.