“I wish you’d do some of your ‘stunts’ for Father,” Lois suggested.
“All right. If you want stunts, here is my best one.” This was written briskly, upside down and backward from my position. “Dad, this is the way I wrote the letter to you and the girls. Here’s another, with my love and greeting. I said I’d do this with trimmings. This is the beginning.”
We gave him fresh paper, and he wrote rapidly, in winding circles, starting at the edge of the table and finishing at the center: “Now I’ll do it this way, all around the family circle. All of you in, and I am not left out.” Diagonally across the whole in bold script, “Frederick.”
In moving the paper again, it was torn a little. Mr. Gaylord made some suggestion as to the way it should be handled, and Lois humorously complained that he was “always interfering with other people’s purposes.” Beginning at the upper right-hand corner of the table, Frederick wrote along the edges, and then in circles toward the center, as indicated in the diagram:
“Don’t you mind, Dad. Let them laugh. You and I will be laughing at them presently, from all four points of the compass.” Again his name was signed diagonally across the whole.
“I always did like circuses, and I can be a four-ringed one now, all by myself, if I have a sympathetic audience,” was his next achievement, done once more in circles from edges to center, but this time his name was signed in the center, in small script, surrounded by a flourish.
When again a clear surface offered, he drew a large circle around the edge of the table—the symbolism of which, curiously, occurred to none of us until the next day—and then ran to the center, to circle toward the edge: “All of us together again, and all being happy in the consciousness that this is real and eternal union, and that from now on we are going to keep our family circle intact.”
Some one suggested that unquestionably he was keeping his promise to “do it with trimmings,” and in an intricate pattern, impossible to describe clearly, he replied: “Sure! I’m doing all the trimmings I can think of, and after a minute or two I’ll think of more.”
By this time the astonishment and curiosity aroused by these performances had perceptibly lowered the emotional pressure, and the interview again proceeded more normally.