Does Berkeley exist, 3 of 8

           Thurber’s World

 

          I was visiting Marion Zimmer Bradley’s house. After trucing a few rounds of dilemma chess with the fantasy writer’s son, I stepped out to their back yard for a stroll and a breath of fresh air.

          It was twilight; the zenith had darkened to deep blue, the horizon all the way around glowed orange and red; the “girdle of Venus”. A crescent moon shone, and a few stars, and the planet Venus too.

          I stopped, amazed; for there in front of me stood a goat. An Angora goat, waist-tall, with silky white hair… and a single horn.

He was Lancelot, a successful animal-husbandry experiment by Morning Glory and Otter G’Zell. At the goat’s birth, they had surgically fused Lancelot’s two hornbuds together; the fused hornbud grew into an imposing monohorn.

          Lancelot was a unicorn. That surgically-modified Angora goat looked like he had stepped out of a medieval tapestry. Morning Glory and Otter G’Zell claimed that such surgery was possible in medieval Europe; so maybe unicorns were real enough.

          Just then, in the evening twilight, with Moon and Venus overhead, that unicorn looked more than real; for Lancelot was eating Marion Zimmer Bradley’s rosebushes. One of James Thurber’s stories was about a unicorn eating the rosebushes in a backyard garden. In that surreal moment, I learned that a visit to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s place can send you into a Thurber story.

          I also learned, by observation, that unicorn droppings are about one centimeter long and about half a centimeter wide.