I Should Have Known

         I should have seen it coming.

         When little Johnny was a boy, he used to hold matches to ants to watch them scatter. He’d regularly play dress up, which I thought was normal, but his obsession with clowns. Well. That just bordered on being creepy.

         “Pogo? Really? Pogo?”, that was all I could think as he screamed the name, parading around the living room in his clown outfit. It got even creepier when he did the ant-n-match thing while dressed as a clown. Very creepy. But I figured that his preoccupation with dismembering insects was a budding interest in entomology. Maybe the clown thing would develop into an acting career? Heck, worst comes to worst, maybe he’ll host a children’s television show.

         We tried to give him an archetypical American name. Like “Jesse James” or “Daniel Boone”, but we settled on “John Wayne”. We had hoped it would make him rough, tough, and athletic. It had the reverse effect, I guess. The other kids teased him for being named after a cowboy but I still never understood why he wanted to call himself “Pogo”.

         I had always thought that the worst thing about dismembered insects was washing them off the porch with the hose every afternoon, and the worst about the clown thing was constantly running out of lipstick. I never once thought that I needed to take him to get a test, even when he refused to grow out of calling himself “Pogo”.

         It wasn’t until he got in trouble that I connected the dots. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, I guess.

         But on a positive note -- now that he’s been in prison,  I never run out of lipstick.

                                       ~ Mrs. Gacy