By Carl Heintze
In the little town where I grew up, we had what I guess you'd call a village idiot.
His name was Harry; he was of indeterminate age, harmless, nondescript. He used to stand on First Street, one of the main streets of town, wearing shabby, wrinkled clothes and talking to himself as his hands wandered over his coat without touching it.
He and his sister, who was the town librarian and worked nearby, lived in an old house a couple of blocks away, also unkempt, but what I guess today we'd call picturesque.
It also was a time when picturesqueness was possible. The town was filled with old and odd Victorian wooden houses, most of them painted white, all of them large, many three stories high.
Most people didn't pay Harry much attention. They felt sorry for him and, of course, for his sister, who took care of him, but they accepted him for what he was, somewhat as San Francisco, in the last century, put up, humored and finally celebrated "Emperor Norton," a middle-aged man who wore a gold-trimmed uniform with badges and who was as batty as a bedbug.
Harry clearly also was deranged, but it wasn't a kind of abnormality beyond acceptance. In those days, there was room for a difference of Harry's kind. We in the town put up with him, even if we didn't understand him.
No one knew why he was the way he was or how he got that way or why his sister never married, but instead took care of him until he died. It just was a part of living in that town.
It was a time of tolerance. Or maybe that's just nostalgia.
Anyway, I was thinking of Harry the other day and wondering what would have happened to him in the 1990s. The town where he lived is no longer small. Indeed, there are not many true small towns left in California and certainly not many that would tolerate a village idiot.
Today Harry probably would be lumped among the homeless who stake out corners or bridges or places beside the railroad tracks in which to exist. Or perhaps he would have been hauled off to a facility for examination by a psychiatrist and then dumped into a board-and-care home after medication. Harry might even have improved on something like, say, Prozac or some other mood-altering drug that would have smoothed off his rough edges.
He might, but I like to think not. I like to think Harry and all village idiots are a part of a past from which we might learn something: tolerance.
Somehow making him normal and like everyone else seems false and out of character. It's like creating the "Brave New World" of Aldous Huxley's novel where everyone is churned out by artificial insemination into models like cars, tolerant of one another because they are all the same. Harry, I like to think, was different just because he was different. He would always have been different, but he also always would have been acceptable.
Today, we don't seem to have any room for village idiots, for those slightly out of step with the world. Today, parents might think of him as a potential child molester, although there's certainly no proof he ever exposed himself, tried to assault anyone or, in fact, had any interest in sex at all.
Others might view him as a potential menace simply because he was different and out of the mainstream.
Like the hitching rails made of steel and cemented into curbs--something that also existed in that town at the time, even though horses and buggies were gone--oddballs are people we no longer want around. We aren't doing well with tolerance for the unusual.
Perhaps it is because today we have to be tolerant to so many, whereas in Harry's day it was to so few. The town in which Harry lived had few immigrants, fewer still who were as different just because they weren't usual.
What's more, everyone was farther apart, if I can put it that way. There was more room between people, less traffic, more open space in which to wander. People didn't jet off to Hawaii, New Zealand or London; they just stayed home and dealt with their families and with one another.
There was a jail, and not a very good one at that, but it handled few prisoners except occasional drunks. Parking meters were yet to come; not many people locked their doors in the daytime and no one locked his car every time he walked out of it.
Of course, most everyone in town knew everyone else, knew what they were capable of and what they wouldn't do, why they were the way they were. Everyone saw Harry every day in his familiar place on the main street, talking to himself and not making much sense.
Somehow, instead of being frightening, his presence was reassuring. It seemed to say that every village ought to have its idiot, just to prove that the rest of its inhabitants were sane and on the right track.
Today, it seems to me, almost no one is sure we're on the right track, but it seems equally certain that no one is sure what the right track is. Thus, we tend to distrust anyone who is different, simply because they are. They're not us and we're not quite sure what we are, either.
Maybe to others we look like Harry. Now there's an alarming thought.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.
OUR TOWN
Bob Aldrich is recovering from eye surgery. His 'Our Town' column will return soon.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, June 12, 1996.
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