THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, April 22, 1996 TAG: 9604220123
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
The sight of a tent, a teepee, in the window of a Lillian Vernon discount outlet on Wards Corner caught my eye and lured me inside.
Several months ago, a grandchild, now 6, had told his seven cousins he had seen an Indian in a teepee in the wilderness of our back yard.
When exploration failed to turn up the Indian or teepee, an aunt, bending down, asked him where he thought the Indian had gone.
He looked her in the eye.
``Probably he went out West,'' he said. Well done! I thought, at least one of eight has a bit of me in him.
So, seeing in the store window the teepee's eight poles bunched atop its widespread siding, the stout canvas just about the off-white you see in Frederick Remington's paintings of the plains, I bought the teepee, last of the lot.
Next morning, the child's father came over early and raised the teepee out back under the giant, three-spired deodar cedar tree, tallest for miles around. Its trunk is huge.
Two large offshoots are thicker than the trunks of any other nearby tree. It rears upward, a great three-masted schooner or Jack's beanstalk, depending on your view.
Upon arriving at the house, children, without saying hello, rush to the back yard to climb the always evergreen deodar tree, festooned with a rigging of vines thick as a man's wrists on which sailors or Tarzans and Janes, again depending on your view, can swing or slide to earth.
Now it shaded a white teepee.
``Don't any of you brothers tell your wives about the tent,'' I said.
``If the mothers find out, overwhelming love will compel them to heighten anticipation by hinting something exciting is out back.
``Hustle the children into the house until they all arrive, then loose them at once to find the teepee on their own, without warning.
``How the teepee got there must be a mystery. Let it subside in their minds until, years later, one asks another, `Do you have any recollection, a long time ago, of seeing a teepee, or even an Indian, under the deodar tree?' ''
The children, arriving, became involved in caroms until, the game waning, someone said, ``Let's climb the tree!'' They were gone as a swoop of swallows.
If the mothers knew, and they must have, they had kept the secret. I slid open the big glass door to peer into the impenetrable green wall of brush and trees out back.
Amid an outburst, going on and on, the only words to be discerned, over and over, were shouts of ``See!. . . See!. . . See!''
A father, joining them, found his 7-year-old staring at the white tent under the dark-green tree.
``Awesome!'' the boy said.
Much later, in the house, an aunt asked the 6-year-old if he wished to put the tent in his own yard.
``No,'' he said, ``the Indian might come back.'' by CNB