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• Let It Loose, Let It All Come Down: A Very Sad Business All Around

I don't recall if the local giant ever actually claimed to have special powers. It did, however, seem to me that he conducted himself as if he had sprung from the pages of mythology.

What I'm trying to say, I guess, is that this didn't appear to be just another ordinary, run-of-the-mill giant. For one thing he was a good head taller than any giant I've ever seen, and he could balance small children on his nose and juggle dogs without seeming to cause the animals the slightest alarm or discomfort. The dogs actually appeared to enjoy being juggled, in fact. Some of them even slept while the giant was juggling them.

The giant didn't have much to say, but he was one of those giants whose actions spoke louder than his words. He had a real knack for catching people when they fell, as well as for locating lost objects. He was always returning things to their rightful owners, things that had been missing for great stretches of time --decades, in several notable instances.

Some folks were suspicious of this talent, and spread rumors that the giant had actually stolen the items in question, and was hoarding these things in his lair. To dispel such rumors the giant took out a full-page advertisement in the local newspaper, announcing an open house to which the entire community was invited to inspect his lair and sample his baked goods.

The giant, it turned out, was a damn fine baker, which honestly came as no surprise to his many local admirers. His generous selection of baked goods --many of them quite exotic-- put to shame the offerings of any of the small bakeries in town.

Needless to say, those who chose to take advantage of the giant's hospitality --and there was quite a turnout-- saw absolutely no evidence of lost or stolen items. And the very next morning the giant delivered a pristine 1969 Chevrolet Impala, a vehicle that had been missing for over a decade, to the home of its owner, a local school board member.

Any explanation of how or where the giant found these lost objects was never forthcoming. The man was, as I mentioned, notoriously tight-lipped, and most of us had learned to live with his amiable silence.

The giant also had a special rapport with birds; he could persuade them to perch on his head and eat grain from his scalp. On occasion, when he wished to entertain children, he could coax birds to pluck sunflower seeds from his nostrils.

There were some in the community who resented the fact that the giant contributed nothing to the local economy. I have no idea how he survived, but he didn't seem to have anything to do with money, and eventually there was a successful movement to drive the giant from his lair along a river outside of town to make way for new commercial development.

When the giant left his lair for the last time he did so peacefully, and comported himself with the quiet dignity many of us had come to expect from him. He left behind all of his possessions, with the exception of an opulent, handcrafted, and intricately detailed dollhouse that he carried away in his arms.

A large family of musically gifted grasshoppers inhabited this dollhouse. These grasshoppers, it was said, slept in tiny four-poster beds and filled their little mansion each night with the strains of beautiful music.

The giant finally established a new home for himself (and his family of grasshoppers) in a smaller neighboring community. A short time later we began to hear reports that he was healing people and performing miracles, and that, of course, was when the real trouble started for the poor fellow.

If you've done any reading at all --from the Bible to the Greeks right through to some of your classic fairy tales-- you'll know that life is generally hell on giants. And unfortunately our fellow didn't fare much better than most of his more celebrated predecessors.

It's a rather discouraging story, really, and I am frankly too tired at the moment to continue with it.

But what the hell, I’ll just cut to the chase: one snowy night just after Thanksgiving some years ago, the local giant was flushed from his burrow by a mob of drunken locals and stoned to death. He was interred along with his beloved dollhouse --the musical grasshoppers having been adopted by the daughter of a Lutheran minister-- in a plot next to the old courthouse dome at the county fairgrounds, and folks still come from all over the place to pay their respects. The county historical society has a pair of the giant's old handmade shoes on display, and they allow visitors to stand in them to have their pictures taken.