Sycamore and Flowers

2009-12-18T14:00:00.000-08:00

A crisp, bright day. Children play and mothers accompany the younger ones under bare oak limbs. Shadows everywhere. I look or imagine looking through their eyes or their children’s eyes toward the blunt metal surfaces of playground equipment. Above us a hawk’s white belly broadens, its wings wide, pale underneath. A few speckled red-brown feathers spot its breast: the same rust color darkens along the upper body as it turns, gliding in the warmer currents of air that make it buoyant without, it seems, any effort at all.

*

I try to look at me through the eyes of these mothers. I look back in time through my mother’s eyes to me as I was to her. I wander through her eyes and wonder what I am to her now and look again. The bright day warms. And children play tag and spin.

*

Sometimes there is something alien that drifts through the years. It is apprehended only by others and evades any personal effort to gain some glimpse of its form. I like to think I have changed and yet the part of me that does mutate is accompanied by something that will not. What “I” am hardly matters, though “it” does seem to possess a playfulness, a kind of charmed echo, of all the things forgotten and lost in the dimness of memory.

*

Another hawk joins the other. Both pale breasts and bottom wings spread nearby. I bring my son close: we look at the birds together as their arcs widen. Maybe they’re looking for lunch, I say. Yes, he says, maybe. What will they find, I say. A mouse maybe, says my son. A mouse indeed, I say. Aren’t you hungry? Shouldn’t we get lunch? Yes, he says, but not a mouse. No, I say, no mouse lunch for me.

*

Across the playground my other son calls for me to push him in a swing. A girl spins in a large yellow cup. The mothers are leaving for lunch, though some have gathered with their children to eat on a picnic table. A Christmas wreath and ribbon stand out on a distant building. A boy tells his mother he will not leave and she threatens him. My son rides higher in the swing and the branches of the oaks cast shady streaks that he breaks through.

2009-11-28T06:24:00.000-08:00

The Witch

She comes from the earth. In her hair grass and leaves have been tangled. Is it a blessing or nightmare? Her gown is white and silver. The moon glows bright and full. In its light we process through a thicket of black yew and birch and the birch bark catches the moonlight: it sparks.

I follow as she steps away. She slips between a copse of quince and willow. We have not spoken but she looks me through the blackened limbs, and onward.

If she speaks I will answer, but we move wordless on. Her face glows white under the moon and the branches spread thick before her.

Because she dies her body has been taken. I go with some men to find her. This takes a long time and one, a stranger, smiles knowingly. Touch her hand, he says, and the chill will sink to your core. Another in the moonlight turns, his coat patched and threadbare. The Witch has coiled up in your viscera, boy. She is a tired and cranky old man: just ignore her.

I wonder about these words, and how the dream translates them. The men are common woodsmen. They know all I know, but it’s easier for them: they are not possessed by her spell. One man acts as though he were put out; another whistles as he cuts new lumber; still another plays with a lasso woven of feathers and hair. Someone says—or perhaps I imagine it: Leave The Witch in the ground.

We arrive in a field, our breath slow in the chill, and dig. I see her pale hand and the veins of her wrist grow with the roots of the birch.

In four seasons’ time she has died and rebirthed. She compels devotion by charms: she leaves nothing untouched by her appetite. Once in a meadow we passed an evening. She spoke of the farthest reaches of space. The galaxy, she said, is shaped like a bowl with long, thorny vines. It twists along a horizon where darkness meets the light. Her secrets were powerful, sure. Do you see how your hand maps mine, she said. I spread my palm and she pressed it.

Once I paused with some men under ash. We leaned on branches prating about those many nights with The Witch. O how she charmed our bright feelings, tarring our hopes with black pitch.

Rowan, alder, willow, ash. White-thorn, oak, and holly. She was known as Gwydion, enchantress of an army.

Gétal! We stood in gooseberry and broom, bright moonlight on holly and heath. Gétal! An owl spread its wings in the coll; below it brooded The Witch. Gétal! She lit on it fast. Feathers and a sudden noise shook the dark; below her blood drops stained a fern. Gétal! She chewed the sinewy thing; gnawed its soot-colored bone to ash. Shadows increased with a fluttering movement. Gétal! A scuffle continued as branches and hair and the silver in her gown whirled in a frenzy of vines.

When the still husk of night returned I found her inertly strung. Her eyes were gouged, her neck scratched: she hung in scarecrow tatters. Somehow I took her off the tree. She’s not herself, I said.

As we went toward her grave I talked about this and that. I said what if this time I do not come for you. And she paused to think. “What if,” she wondered, and we walked. She said: “If you don’t come back for me I will lay in the earth. And that will be okay.”

I split the elder and in the fire it went. Some praise blackthorn, some white: the Ogham’s ancient course in leaves sometimes is hard to straighten. The men are gone, the woodland empty. A better world awaits my axe: away I swagger wanly—and tread my boots on the muck and mud that keeps The Witch.

2009-11-18T12:13:00.001-08:00

When I go to bed my mother leaves the door to my bedroom open. A hall light shines and the light comes into my room, over the smooth, orange wood of the door that faces the bed. To my right are windows with white curtains and red trim. My parents’ voices—perhaps the television—come to me muffled through the walls that separate us. Sometimes I go into see them, after bedtime, to complain that I cannot sleep. “Close your eyes,” my mother says. In my room I look at things and invent stories about people I would like to become. I close my eyes and follow threads of some narrative that interweave again and again.

Once I endured a period of what I considered to be nightmares. This was perhaps near the time in my life when I discovered the word “midnight,” a sublunary and mysterious word that gave me an impression of dark blue laced with black. When I would close my eyes in the darkness of bedtime I practiced elaborate narrative rituals designed to delay sleep and to keep far away whatever nightmares I certainly felt I would have.

A Sunday school teacher gently pointed out to me at this time that I possessed a certain power to confront the monsters and bad things that populated my dreams. She said to step right up to the things I feared in my dreams and to say that they had no power over me. She spoke, I could tell, in earnest, and I believed her.

In the spring a shrub of spirea would rustle next to my window as the wind blew gently at night and I lay trying to wind myself down for the inevitable coming of sleep. I listened to the wind scratch the window with the little branches and white flowers and finally drifted into my dreams. Perhaps my Sunday school teacher’s yoga had some power indeed, for I do not recall another episode of nightmares. Only, on occasion, did the contents of my dreams match the intensity of waking life. The dream world instead became a kind of resting place. Images came, whatever they were, and I was just another occupant of the dream until morning.

Only recently have I noticed again how the intensity of dream makes claims at times on other precious psychic resources. Remembering my Sunday school teacher’s words—or perhaps those words have been refreshed by a more recent magazine article—I have somehow begun to step out of my dreams into another place, as though the images arrive as a wedge between me and some other alien substance. It’s hard to describe. I observe the pace of the day and perform its quiet rituals: make the bed; play chess with my sons; sweep the floor. And yet it seems as though simultaneous to these dreams other stories are being formed beyond my conscious narratives. But when I dream it isn’t me but that boy—or perhaps all the people I have been and no longer can be—sharing still in the images we have gathered over to watch with great scrutiny. What do we tell each other I wonder? And how do we train ourselves to be still in the dark and observant, instead of fearful, of things that go “bump”?

These dreams have no portent: I don’t seek their omens or believe such things presage future events. Some other transport—some intimate communion—takes place. Even now the memory of myself in bed, the hall light flooding one side of my room, arrives in dreamlike waves that can only be partially grasped. And yet, those years of going to bed composed an eternity, too.

To walk around inside a dream is to discover ways of telling a story. It’s not your story, though it is, quite certainly, you who are called on as its witness.

There is a photograph of Carl Jung, taken by Aniela Jaffé during the final year of his life. In it he holds in his left hand a candle while behind him Lake Zürich disappears against the horizon. This great dreamer focuses his gaze upon the camera, and I have thought often of this—how he was so compelled by images. And here he is absorbed by his own imaginary, the picture contributing to the circulation of narrative about him. The candle motivates a story in miniature of a life nearing completion. The brevity of that spark shining into the camera lens freezes it. The lake absorbs this light, and the rush of things continues.

2009-11-10T20:22:00.000-08:00

The body hangs like a scarecrow on sticks, invisible axes supporting a thin figure in the sensorium of the world’s bountiful evidence: grey hairs on an arm; small brown spots that smudge the otherwise pleasant features by which, as a boy, I idly watched as mulberry leaves came undone, little yellow and brown, crisply curled forms, themselves changed, crinkling to particles in a blunt fist: I scried a future in the deposits of brittle fall stems--the smell of burning debris in the Yemeni capital, the pressure of bodies in transit on buses there, a frank burst of mucous over a man’s pants, the wet particles spraying my clothes. I possess a sense of witness for others whose lives somehow make palimpsests with my own. Dai, for instance, stopped in Aden many days, perhaps weeks, on his way toward India, and then over the Himalayas into China, flying gasoline to the army of Chiang Kai-shek. His words or what I remember him saying, accompany me toward a question: what looks through these eyes, dislodging memory, to shift outward over the surface of villages, distant from me now, a small moment of life retrieved by a photo, though even the memory resists my belief in it? Dai stands in pilot gear, strung over twin sticks that turn through little trails toward a future that will emerge, fragment, and scatter into the objects around him: the projective field into which the boy goes, observing that face, some short time later, looking back, closes, and the man in the photo vanishes into the earth: the trails are covered up like the memory of honeysuckle nectar in the alley after school is absorbed also into some alien substance claiming the child. Now in November, cool air shifts the impressions of how all around there are small objects that endure, remarkably little things—a Schrade pocket knife from the twenties by which I preserve a sense of duration: there, in the far corner of a closet, my father’s father’s Masonic insignia, the letter G centered between an open compass: God and Geometry; Goodness and Gawdawfulness; the Gliding spirit and Gelded soul; Gondwana and the Gape of Okeanos. Suddenly, now, my son interrupts with these words: “that’s no mystery”—HA! Of course it is and is not. A G—gee whiz—a G!

2009-11-03T10:18:00.000-08:00

Extracts

Near my birthday as a child time slowed its pace inexplicably. I once argued with my mother, insisting I was born November fourth—not the third. Despite her witness, I persisted in this odd misplacement. Often now, when people ask, I will claim The Day of the Dead as the date of my rightful birth (I forget if November one or two is correct). My mother, of course, was right about the third.

*

Once on my birthday Glynn Ramsey pushed me from behind. We were coming from the soccer field: a new western shirt tucked into Sears Toughskins; blue and white sneakers with laces carefully tied. The air that day had turned brisk: a bright blue sky ran against the horizon. A broken wall—grey bricks in brown grass—stood gapped and gateless across the street from the school. Recess bell. Grass stains on my knee.

*

One year Dai gave me a train set. My mother made a clay tunnel for the electric-powered engine and its cars to move through. I do not recall the cake that year, but in a picture I wear a red and white shirt. A blue engine turns into view as I manipulate the power source, speeding up or slowing down the train’s velocity. It is strange to see myself thus in an image that retains more of the boy than I recall. The body regulates memory to protect us. And yet I can’t help but fret over all that must be so lost.

*

In the early blue of a still-dark room I’d open my eyes. I could hear my mother and father in the kitchen and the burbling sounds of the heater coming on as I pushed back a sheet and blanket to burst into the morning cold. I ran in my pajamas to the kitchen, pleased and expectant. In those years my mother would hide certain gifts in the dark house. I would luxuriate in the movement toward them, first looking under sofas and chairs, then peering behind curtains or opening the doors to an ancient record player cabinet. Eventually I slid a hand behind an equally antique pie safe. Here I found it, wrapped in red and green, images of a small boy and his gifts illustrating joy on the paper. Inside: a grey and blue jersey with the number twelve. This is significant to me because it belonged to the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys—Roger Staubach. On the back my name had been pressed above the one and the two.

*

We gather over a chocolate cake decorated with a merry-go-round pressed into the frosting. Red, blue, green, and yellow pointy party hats paint the room with color. Eight candles light the table. As the song ends I make a wish: blow. The flames lean away as breath traces waves of chocolate. Later I lick plastic horses with cake stuck to their hooves.

*

My mother’s knees and a yellow dress. The same light—perhaps the first light and experience of weather I’ll ever recall—fades into the evening of the house. My parents make the number three with their fingers. I mimic their gestures with less success. Thumb holds back the little finger. Fire truck; cake; a little dog named Pepper. Mulberry branches are bare in the window. My brothers are born that November.

*

In the kitchen my relatives gather. My grandfather—Duskin, the Mason—and the woman I call Mammy sit with my family. The same mulberry branches have shed their leaves: another year.

*

Once my mother bought a cake with thick blue and white frosting. My grandparents came and in a picture I no longer possess, but remember only, Dai pushes a fire truck with me over gold-colored carpet. The details vanish with time, only certain textures remaining vivid: the creases in his dark slacks; the rough and uneven nature of the carpet, my cheek flat upon it watching the wheels roll; circular swirls of white in the ceiling; thin, see-through curtains behind a sofa. Somehow I noticed the day’s dim light and the brightness of candles; the camera’s extraordinary flash.

*

Mi poses with me beside a cake: white frosting and a strawberry center. I have a funny look, and show something between bemusement and impatience. I am looking toward the dinner table. The kitchen behind us once seemed so big. I went through its door many times; dreamed into the numerals on the clock. Look at the orange and white hat next to orange stripes in her dress: the red shirt and warm reds in the wooden cabinets. Her brooch is pinned elegantly at the dress’s collar. I could not know how young we were, or what that even meant. A single candle at the center of the cake—a flame to unify the progression of years. Time is gathered there to signify the event of an unwinding singularity. Perhaps I have blown it out: the birthday song has been sung. Or instead we pose, briefly, as my grandmother prepares the cake for this ritual of the flame and my breath given to it.

2009-10-25T22:19:00.000-07:00

He’ll shrieve my soul, he’ll wash away
The Albatross’s blood.

Baby albatross bellies are filled with plastic trash. Cameras document their distorted figures—making signatures of a moment in duress. Of course, by “moment” I mean the shared associations that compose environments in resistance to the projective power of analysis. How might we “process” such figurative associations of cheap industrial detritus bound within the organic tissue of expired creatures? They feed on bright doodads and shards, colorful pieces of discarded parts: clear syringe; worn balloon fragments; shampoo and detergent bottle tops; blue packing straw; medicine dropper; green, red, and yellow, translucent Bic lighters; aqua-colored Styrofoam pieces; buttons; a little bear; soda tops; engine oil container lids. A detached sacrum rises out of decayed feathers and the patterns of modernity accumulate in the rot on black pebbles, a thin albatross bill extending eyeless gaze toward the photographer’s foot. These entrails make weird auguries: the refuse of industrial and post-industrial forms spiral outward toward a still too-slow-to-learn wilderness of exposed beings; witness the accumulated residues of life-as-usual, unconscious, earnest in its need; examine the foreclosed judgments determined by arrangements of parti-colored fragments that choke the host. The optimistic urge to embrace modernity collapses in the far, unseen reaches of a world unused to such forward looking endeavors. The decayed feathers and rotted portions of flesh reveal nothing but a mortality belonging to us, too. Friends arrive. We drink wine. I wonder about us in a merriment that skims the surface of some deeper experience. Those faces in the scrapbooks of my family—what will they hope to find to redeem the albatross exhaustion? The moments when we learn that our habits produce suffering pass rapidly. And yet it’s like discovering nuclear bombs: the knowledge integrates into associations we make with the world. Our experience bloats with the random accumulations of particles we are fed. Icebergs melt; islands shrink; tsunamis suck bodies into the deep. We know this. And move on. And store the knowledge. And forget. And are reminded. And upon our deaths, when our torsos are exposed, the auguries of this knowledge present what we knew, and what the birds told us, on the pebbles, decaying with their firm particles next to the lumbar bones and skull fragments. No one in the 1930s would have considered this. Hopefulness made a strict ideology of discipline, attention, and mindless drive to move outward in a world where there was an out. What do the albatross think? Their ancient patterns continue without thought to the accumulating plastic in their bellies. In these photos there are maps of a future and a present. I hear Donny Green’s voice and his taunting about dick hair. I hear Dai’s worried voice as I view the pictures of bodies he made in India. I look and I watch with great wonder. We are so small next to things erupting around us. I stare into these dead things, and dream of the life still there.

*Thanks to S. B. for sending a link to these pictures by Chris Jordan.

2009-10-19T22:51:00.000-07:00

The years bear such force. At first time moves slowly. No escape is imagined from these circumstances. What was it that compelled me to leave? Even now as I look back into the images of people I knew but did not know as they knew themselves there is a sense of love—and great distance. The background in the photos reveals more to me than the sentiment of the recognized face. The clothing, the weight of jackets, and the precision of men’s ties indicate a knowledge of the shared lives that were so faithfully extended. East Texas. In its backwater rural distances dreams burst forth into the sky. Radio and airplanes. I fled Texas for an earlier dream of space so defined by the optimism of imagination. Adventure was not bound by urban centers, but by the airwaves on which the words of the world arrived. I see the women in their perfection, and smell their lotions and perfumes. Such reserved smiles reveal strong faces. How they must have struggled to condescend to their men’s desire to animate space. I look at East Texas now—the husk of a dream. The little towns like Tyler pimping a dead past in the red brick nostalgia of city centers. It’s as though the dreams were swallowed and crapped out on once holy land. The Caddo built their mounds and cities here. Buffalo and whitetail deer populated the plains and woods, the river bottoms rich with plenty. Lake Tawakoni, named for the people who lived there, arrives so clearly to me. Mid-1970s. Bait and tackle shops. The water’s expanse drifted for miles as my father powered the bass boat onto its grey surface. My brothers and I would sit on a pier with bamboo rods and fish for perch, mosquitoes nipping as my mother arranged the odd, cement-floor cabins. In my memory we are no longer ourselves, but figures of something other. As in the photos recently discovered of my family. The backgrounds consume the image. I have been running from something my whole life—from that damp, buggy landscape. And yet I cannot escape it—nor do I want to leave it. That optimism of my family runs weirdly with elongation, surfacing and dismantling the grim habits of space we are prepared to occupy. In a dream I see myself as a boy, wearing only shorts. I walk out with my father into Lake of the Pines. The sand oozes between my toes. I hold his hand. The water to my waist. We do not speak, as now, and yet the sense of movement with him into our separate experience remains strong. We step out hardly there but for the traces of our patterns in the oozy sand. The water splashes our knees. RVs are parked under pines where life makes curious patterns I no longer recognize in the shade. My mother fries bass, makes hushpuppies. Dai’s smile and confidence expand from shore, in his lawn chair. These patterns of experience so quickly become other in my dream—in the memory of my affection. The bolted picnic tables with Lays potato chips and jello salads await us. The immense power in these figures drifts into the present. Nothing here but the quiet of a sleeping house at some other moment in time far away from them. And yet the years hardly matter. There is no time. And none of us are here. And the figures of our lives are manifested with such power within limits that form and dissolve.

2009-10-11T08:46:00.000-07:00

A day in late fall. A family poses for the camera. Black field hands stand against a fence in the background. I have looked into this image for many years. Maternal ancestors. Strange faces precede those with whom I’m more intimate. The presentation of success arrives in a forthright manner: two chimneys bookend the house; horizontal lines on the skirts of the women echo the lateral movement of pattern on their blouses; the boys’ laced boots stand in stark contrast to the servants’ bare feet; the foreground spreads thin, worn by heavy daily traffic. The Hagans possess a sturdy candor, and lived by farming tomatoes. I know little else of these figures under the sycamores. A few names recede into memories of my childhood. Notice the cluster of features in their faces. The orientation to the camera suggests a need to reduce certain distances. The Civil War shapes the firm order of their dispositions to the spaces they occupy. They have not yet been lumped by World Wars and Depression as consumers. They associate not with ideas determined for them by managerial strategy. Dai concludes a portion of that narrative, flying over the Himalayas into a new prosperity. And yet he shares with these others a desire for closure in the gaps between self and the objects that make visible the meaningful paths of an environment. A patient faith in photographic narrative yields this fleeting document. A mere record of observed fact through a mechanism of modern leisure—the family portrait—makes stark testimony. The house, servants, children, clothes—all adhere within the unique prejudice of desire for what lies beyond them. They are unable to anticipate my gaze—some distant and obscure reader of once living faces and postures submissive to mundane elocutions of an extraordinary optimism. What would I say to them? What might they make of a legacy morphed by the very urges they share with future generations outrunning the mark by even greater self-exposures? The posture of the patriarch makes Dai and Wellborn’s radio tunings more poignant. It’s not possible for me to speak in intimacy of these figures. But my experience of the image invites me to linger with unresolved questions. Is it possible to finally dissolve distance? Not even the air or the sky proves sufficient. No bandwidth brings us within range of the most primal identifications. Familial properties disperse through the genome, and certain features resurface: a bright spark returns in green eyes; birdlike faces suggest raptor attention; a confidence and ease of form arrives with the presentation of bodies to others in the fall air. And even the sweetness of their forms baffles me. I want to withhold something important from them—perhaps from myself—as I dig farther away from appearances into claims of what I might be to ancestral eyes. I’m pursued by a question that won’t quite present itself as I linger here. My grandmother—Alma Hagan—will arrive to these people shortly after the photo was taken—1905. These lines of relation remain indifferent to personal bond: they indicate instead a preference for manners of expression. An inner cosmos and outer forms compete with imaginings of migrant observers. It is interesting how the sycamore trees are nearly bare, and how this tree with its peeling bark takes such an ordering role in the imaginary of my childhood.

2009-10-03T21:38:00.001-07:00

Once in a small tin box I found photos Dai had taken while stationed in India during World War Two. The years of his service occupied family lore, and even as a child I understood that he had flown planes from what is now Bangladesh over some of the highest mountains in the world to China. I knew he did not like the test, and that it was dangerous, but he carried cargo over the Himalayas throughout most of the war. More than 4,000 pilots, many smashing into darkness at extraordinary altitudes, were stationed there during the war. But what I recall that day—I must have been seven, perhaps eights—was the discovery of the textures of his experience. Even then I felt that the images I found meant more to me than to him. With a kind of embarrassment Dai observed how I was perhaps too young to be looking at such things. He explained how the funerary pyres occupied space on city blocks and that the flames in the photos were of the deceased. “They believed in reincarnation,” he said. “They burn their dead and their souls return in new bodies.” My eyes wandered through the images, in awe of something I still have not quite pinned down. Human frailty sounds so cliché, and yet here were bodies laid out on the side of streets for final rituals. I think of my own people—the brevity of our lives and the rituals of preservation and burial. A few generations exchange their values and prized possessions and yet, in an instant, centuries seem to pass. Who are those people on a street in Calcutta, their trial long absorbed into a vast anonymity? I didn’t care as a child who they were, actually. I found interesting what they were, however, and tried reading into the significance of their figurative placement for me in the tin box my grandfather had brought home from a world far away. Certain textures of experience seize the imagination. This must have been around the time Donny Green tested my stamina by announcing the apocalypse of nuclear war. I wonder if I had the capacity then to reflect on what it meant? Certainly, at some level, I understood how life had been seized in advance by regimes of power that included nothing of my experience. I wonder now what possessed my grandfather to take those images from the pitiful figures who gripped the asphalt and dust as the features of their loved ones disappeared from them forever. What were these instances to him and how did they organize meaning in his submission to a foreign culture—or to his own? The sudden and matter-of-fact manifestation of the dead body, perhaps, seized his attention as it claimed mine, years later. I gazed upon the corpse of the infant. Because I was at an impressionable age, and because also I am an impressionable person, Dai’s encounter, however mediated, fused in me with something I still can’t name. I see Donny Green under the mulberry trees in our yard. We ride our bikes through the shaded portion of the driveway. A summer day in the nineteen seventies. Locusts scream across the yard. Sycamore branches form a canopy. We race around. A sense of horror often accompanies moments of ease. Even now, motivated by these black and white pictures, I pursue some knowledge that refuses delivery. I don’t possess an easy sense of things. The edges creep in. A transaction takes place, in advance of our births. “I must go on” is not enough. Instead, I must go on at full speed—fearless in a certain naivety, a natural in the game of failed pursuits. I see the naked child in the doorway. He appears in shadows to be about my mother’s age. Perhaps Dai took this picture because of some homesick sense of relation between the child and his daughter who, far away, in Tyler, Texas, awaited his letters. I wonder about that young pilot still, and his movement from the fields into the air, across an ocean and into a war that compelled him by naïve relation. That organization of character in ratio to vast ideological drives haunts the familial lore—the old force of the bible and bumpkin pastures replaced with some new but equally forceful drive. I continued for many years to seek out that tin box. When I would visit I traced through the images to try and see myself through them, and imagine things about the world.

2009-09-26T22:46:00.000-07:00

Tonight I trace words, following little threads; my mind drifts into barely visible prints on the patterns of family history. It is not the truth supposedly latent in the tree driving me onward. All those branches with little leaves of generation. The names of those now decayed in Smith County soil come out of the past like talismanic figures, just as mysterious, sullen, even, in the sense of foreclosure that accompanies their memory to my presence. There is the long life figured in my clan’s most recent progenitor, John Henry Bonner, born 1842 in Missouri; he died 1930 in Tyler, Texas. Served five terms as mayor of Tyler. And the names after him arrive, burbling up out of the peace of nonexistence: Mattie Bonner, Charles Wellborn Boon, Wellborn Bonner Boon, Margaret C. Sledge. Harmolean Bonner, James John Covington. I recall as a boy meeting on several occasions Martha Covington, born 1901, and Bascom B. Watson (we called him B. B.). To my knowledge, he is the only man I have ever known to serve in the First World War. And his memories trailed back through the South to veterans of the Confederacy. I possess still a buckeye top, purple, that he gave me before he died in 1977. Martha was Wellborn and Luther’s cousin. Her family history reaches toward the ghosts of other eras, and perhaps this is why her handwriting leans strongly to the left. As she aged it became almost impossible to decipher. I remember learning of cardinals and chickadees, flycatchers and dicksissles, through the parchments she would send. I wrote her, perhaps for the last time, in California. It is terrible that we disappear from one another. Her writing slowly vanished from me. The shape of her letters was gripped with what looked like Parkinson’s, squiggly and yet violently wagering some sense onto the impossible shapes that reached out into the white space of her elegant stationary. “This is a notation concerning Martha Ellen Wade,” she wrote, “who was the wife of William Neval Bonner—Her father was Micajah Wade—Born February 8th, 1777 in N. Carolina. His mother’s maiden name was Sarah McCormick. She was the daughter of Dorcas and James McCormick. James McCormick was a soldier of the American Revolution and fought gallantly for the liberties of the Colonies throughout the seven years struggle. This is where the name Micajah came into the family.” The facts of names and dates, and the accidents of relation to events, wedge into historical record. In time objects accumulate and are oriented to certain names or moods. The first bursts of autumn bring residual feelings of harvest. I have no memory of the fields. My immediate family embraced machines and technology, abandoning the farm. I often reflect, however, on the lists of names that come into my possession. For instance, I have dreamed into the textual surface identifying those descendants of the first parents. The book of Genesis is where the records of birth and death begin in the Protestant line I happened upon by birth. The first ones are there by name alone. I often have imagined into spaces between the words of those great lists leading throughout the Old Testament to the birth of Christ. For hours as a child I would gaze on a small bible with pictures of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac. I do not know why that boy shares anything with me still. So much of the world seeks the failure of his vision and intimidates him into nonbeing. He is no more "me" than I am any of those others recorded by persistence in the family archives. It is only with great struggle that I come to see my image, or my name, among those others, not because I dread the company of the dead, but because I have not been often enough vigilant to what hovers just beyond reach of living habit.

2009-09-19T15:18:00.000-07:00

A ticket stub to a March 21, 1939, CBS Radio Theater presentation by Helen Menken survives in an album of family photographs. Luther and Wellborn had moved briefly to New York City to “study radio.” The lore of this sojourn to the big city resists biographic description, for where they studied is lost to immediate family recollection. Exactly what aspect of radio they pursued likewise slides into the ghostly residue of memory, though radio would eventually lead both men to unexpected careers. Somehow radio signals and vehicles of transport associate with the mature lives of these men, for ships, cars, planes, and, as I observe in an ancient photo now, motorcycles, all connect to their biography from an early interest in radio technology. Wellborn eventually settled near Washington, D. C., working for the department of the Navy to create missiles guided by radio waves that could deter Japanese Kamikaze pilots. An application to the United States Patent Office dated August 31, 1950, is assigned under Wellborn’s name. It describes an “invention” called an “angular accelerometer.” Several pages of description and illustrations relate the particulars of this device, with references in the literature of this technology going back to 1936. As an old man, not so long ago, he was interviewed on the History Channel, and you can see his angular features, aged as they are, strike the camera with matter-of-fact confidence. Photos of the young Luther, by contrast, are moody, brooding. They differ dramatically from the features of the man I knew growing up, an even and generous person devoted to the immediate artifacts of the world around him. If Wellborn looked to the invisible machinations of modern warfare, Luther turned to flight, sharing initiations into the knowledge of air. Back in Texas, a man gave flying lessons in a field and Luther became a pilot. But a deeper mystery of the urgency of flight compels my interest in this portion of a narrative that extends far beyond me and into a history of mutations and abandonments of rural life. I look at these figures—my grandfather in a field in overalls. Motorcyle parts lie about him and his hair falls forward to just above his eyes. I see the sandy loam below his feet and vertical posts that fence off a field that must have pressed against his imagination of escape. The contrast of that field of bluestem and switchgrass to the strident thrust of the arm of the Statue of Liberty into the Manhattan skyline obscures a long forgotten feeling in the American psyche. The air of the modern city could be breathed in quite differently than that of the rural South. Saved among these images of recollections is a picture of a woman making a purchase at an automat. Such urban novelty must have spoken concretely to Wellborn and Luther in a way lost to me in an age of manufactured convenience and presumptions of wellbeing. A popular image of Texas focuses on cowboys and cattle. But the men in my family pursued instead the mechanics of modernity. Somewhere between the images I have collected and my communion among the diverse possibilities projecting from them, I notice tremendous generational desire to be free of the grating monotony of the fields. Luther and Wellborn made themselves new—aviators and inventors. Their world possessed promise and enthusiasm. The positive force of the modern claimed their attention, and they acted on it. There is the Paramount Theater stub too along with the remains of my grandfather’s memorabilia. These are holy objects, fragments of spiritual identity in the dynamic drift of eternity. I remember, as an old man, his collection of jazz recordings, and the time we spent together listening to music. Among the genetic and familial legacies I share with him is foremost a sense of life made up of sound and levity. This of course contradicts the narrowing of light that prefigures a twilight darkness—a sense of inevitable gravitas that arrives at times to combat my inherited buoyancy.

2009-09-12T10:37:00.001-07:00

In 1932 my grandfather made his way from a small farm near Whitehouse, Texas, to Galveston, where he took a job as a radio operator on a Merchant Marine ship delivering cargo to Spain. He lied about his age, though perhaps it didn’t matter either. By the time he was fifteen he had taught himself to use ham radios and other equipment, and so he brought a useful skill to the Texas port city. I am unsure of any specific cause for this flight from East Texas to the coast, and then finally to Spain. He had been named Martin Luther, growing up in the home of a strict Baptist minister and farmer, Martin Luther, Sr. I know of a picture of his mother—Mary Elizabeth Bonner—from the turn of the last century. She wears what looks like a satin blouse and a dense skirt with many pleats. Her hair is bound up on her head and she peers sternly into the camera. She played violin and taught music lessons, and helped oversee plans for a new house after the previous one had been ruined by fire. I have heard it told that she contracted pneumonia while attending the construction of the new house in the cold of winter. I have heard other versions, too. A March 6, 1907, letter to the New York Times—“Would Shut Out Fresh Air: Draughts, Pneumonia, Death the Sequence in Thousands of Cases”—complains of “Fresh-Air Fiends,” “overfed male and female hogs, who with blood almost bursting through their skins demand ‘fresh air’ in order to keep from suffocating.” This cult of “fresh air,” some say, contributed to Mary Elizabeth’s untimely demise, for as she lay dying in the upstairs bedroom of the minister’s house, doctors had opened windows to let in the cold northern winds that gusted down from Canada. This was told frequently at dinner tables when I was a child. My understanding of the Sheppard’s way of life after her death is fuzzy. Luther, Jr., looked after a much younger brother, Wellborn, and together they disassembled engines and radios, working together in a small workshop some distance from the main house. Perhaps something about radio helped them process their new situation. Motherless, Luther and Wellborn, for comfort and meaning, discovered modernity, tuning in on a version formed by distant voices. The promise of a life far beyond rural East Texas must have been appealing. I am not sure what news they picked up on the radio from the shed by the tomato and squash patches under the stars at the end of a long workday. I imagine how the spark and crackle of the machinery worked in concord with the more ancient rhythms issued by cricket frogs and killdeer, the shrill utterance of woodland creek bottoms coming into their little lean-to of hopeful transcendence. Jazz, big bands, and news of the world—such sounds shifted through the air and entered the tubes and wires distributed over their workbench. Their father soon remarried and this, I recall, bothered Luther, who did not like the woman, Lollie Senter. I met her once as a child, and I remember being introduced to her, years after Luther, Sr., had passed, as “Miss” Lollie. Her living room smelled of mothballs while ancient furniture gripped my legs. Afternoon light streamed through lace curtains; doilies spread over small tables; a green rug covered wooden slats; through sheets of thin glass I saw the porch banister swell and extend beyond sight; a ceiling fan turned with moderate motion; the lower boughs of deciduous pine dipped into view in the yard where “Dai’s” El Camino shined brightly on the gravel drive. He sat in brown trousers and a polo shirt, speaking indifferently. It was my first experience of “the visit,” something one did to pay tribute to old folks. I now wonder about that tribute. He did not remain for long in Spain, and the details of labor aboard the ship are missing. He told me he was broke and alone in Europe. The point, though, was to see something.

2009-09-05T07:41:00.000-07:00

We tell stories to ourselves, often alone, suddenly dislocated from the habits of our own self preoccupations. (Or really, we are re-integrated into a body of feeling that we had never recognized, or, perhaps, only forgotten.) As a boy I turned the wheel of narrative through me, portraying the heroic deeds of medieval knights, or performing superhuman feats prefigured in the abundant strengths of Superman or Batman. I recall a double holster and pistols, dark blue denim, a colorful scarf that belonged to my grandmother, and cowboy boots. I would portray scenes from The Lone Ranger or navigate the western images of a John Wayne that so often lit up the nighttime on my father’s television. These dramas occupied me on the swing set in early spring, or as I rode a bicycle in circles on the driveway. I see a boy somewhere now in the far recesses of imagination as he cinches with a safety pin a red towel around his neck. He reaches forward with his arms to fly into the yard, or through a house among the now long forgotten items of a people he no longer knows. It used to be that our stories provided the tribal narratives—such yarns made sense of experience, or shaped the inchoate forms of our engagements with others, and with things. I recall those who knew how to tell a story, their voices rich with the textures of life more than with the exuberance of some tremendous episode. It takes little to narrate a tale in terms of the duration of event and experience. Instead, we are required to speak intimately to the other, though with a respect for distance, too. Stories are ours only insofar as our experiences generate passion in others. At least these are some things I have told myself from time to time, given, like that boy in scarf and holster, to narratives—ones I am not even sure how to possess: and yet, they take me. And so perhaps in my submission to the demands of the tale—of the vast dream that interferes with the linear grade of our progression—I arrive not entirely a whole person in any standard sense. Yet I cannot imagine it otherwise. Perhaps for these reasons I named, as a very young child, my grandfather, “Dai.”

2009-08-29T08:12:00.000-07:00

Certain moments lodge permanently into the waves of memory that persist throughout one’s life, while others dissolve, disperse, and, upon some alchemical spill, resolve in the present to haunt and provide tremors in the senses we come to trust. I can see the “old house” now, a forlorn chinaberry bare, save for a few dried and brittle clumps of yellow pods dangling from its branches. A north wind blows and exposed limestone glows on the surface. Down the stone path toward the ranch’s entrance I recall cattle and sheep, clumps of bluestem and prickly pear as further out the horizon blurred into the twilight. My father built a fire and we sat, eating hotdogs as the darkness spread. The new moon and the old moon moved beyond view as I stretched out my arms to the sky. Milky Way. I wandered through the vastness of Orion, listening to low voices coming through a transistor. But November’s chill drove us inside, and my father put oak logs into the wood stove and lit a match. Linoleum peeled away in the corners and a layer of grey dust settled over the floor. I liked the sulfuric scent of the match, and watched the blackened stick release its last trails of smoke. An ancient bureau’s drawers held pistols and ammunition, decades of oilcloths and tin cans of metal lubricants. Much of what I recall from this period of my life revolves around the deer lease in the country, and my father’s rituals of the hunt. Up by five each morning we’d bundle up in downy vests and flannel, take our guns and go out. I’d follow his steps over the rough limestone paths for miles until, veering off, we found ourselves in denser brush. Nestled deep in the scrub would be a deer blind built of oak limbs that had been shaped and entangled roughly. My father and I would sit in the cold and wait. As dawn approached the life of the countryside began to move. Purple finches fluttered while further out flycatchers dipped toward a distant horizon, a little stretch of it I’d glimpse through the branches of some great oak furzy with mistletoe and ball moss. Squirrels and other rodents made their way throughout the trees while on the ground were insects—dark beetles—close to my boots. My father might nudge me, and looking up, I’d see one, two, perhaps three white tail deer. On this occasion I recall a doe and a younger male. Their black noses sniffed the air cautiously. My father sat motionless and I could hear the breath move through my body as I tried to imitate his stiff repose. He lifted his rifle, sighted the deer, and looked through the scope upon their grey-brown bodies. As the morning moved in that dramatic stillness the sunlight spread through the branches. Slowly, they turned, wandered off, finally going beyond view as the last bough of oak or juniper settled over the space they had occupied only moments prior. I remember asking why he had not taken a deer. They weren’t bucks, nor were they big enough, he said, though I realize now he really only liked being alone in the country. The kill wasn’t his thing. And that was cool with me. So we walked. Spent the day shooting cans. Once a rattler confronted us: my father aimed. Was there an impact? The coiled form slid under the house. Cold, icy wind blew. At dusk we set out again. Certainly these moments inform so much of my body of feeling in ways I can hardly understand. One night, after hunting, and after driving into town for hamburgers, we came back quite late. We stumbled through the dark, taking a leak on white rocks. Inside we found our bunks and spread our sleeping bags. I remember that our heads faced an eastern wall. In that dark room my eyes closed and I began drifting away when my father’s voice broke the silence. I opened my eyes. A faint blue light appeared through the front windows. Slowly it brightened, growing in intensity, until the entire room was suffused in a bright blue. I could see my father bolt upright. I turned back to the windows. What is it, I asked. Don’t know, my father said, eyes wide on his gun. Suddenly the source of the light shifted at once to the north window, and the light remained from that position illuminating the room in a weird twilight of blue and yellow and traces of red. And then it left. I remember how this event for some time lodged into family lore. I could not stop talking about it. What had it been? A U. F. O.? I spoke of this for so long and so often that it is difficult now to imagine how eventually the memory of the lights began to fade, the details trailing off as those animated colors had so suddenly vanished. The lore of this episode has now been so dislodged that, only recently, it took some time to jog my father’s memory of that moment so long ago. I like to imagine it as some kind of visitation, though a visitation of what, I’m still not sure. Perhaps they were car lights, though doubtful for such a remote location. Is it possible that the visible presence of some alien and as yet unnamed aspect of ourselves roams the sky? It perhaps descends at vulnerable moments to awaken our curiosity. Beyond that the mystery of my experience continues to challenge the meaning of such observations. I’ve yet to encounter repeats of such celestial phenomena.

2009-08-22T07:59:00.000-07:00

Somewhere heading north from Central Texas—perhaps near Glen Rose—the news of Kool-Aid suicide in Jonestown enters the cab. Dusk. Cool dry air. Windows down, Dairy Queen recedes in the mirror behind us. My father drives, says something to my mother. I listen. November 18, 1978. We had been deep in the Texas Hill Country to hunt deer. I remember a brown down vest and a John Deere tractor cap I wore then. It was part of the ritual of my father’s life to go, each autumn, five hours south of Dallas to hunt on land owned by James and David Nefendorf. Their voices surprised me as a child with German accents that were difficult to follow. They had been born in Texas, but the German community of ranchers there retained the language of an extended family reaching back to the old world. James Nefendorf lived in the family home, a nineteenth-century German structure typical of the area. It stood well within the city limit of Fredericksburg and, being made of thick limestone, remained cool throughout summer, and retained warmth in winter. He once gave me an arrow point he had found on the land he ranched far outside of the city, where sheep, goats, and some cattle grazed the scrubby brush country of oak and juniper escarpment. I remember once he arrived with other men in old pickups, speaking little. There were flea collars latched to the ankles of their work boots to protect from chiggers and ticks. An open barn made of oak and juniper shaded their fleece shearing with a low, sheet-metal roof. A few yards away stood what in my family we referred too simply as “the old house,” a turn-of-the-century wooden cottage framed on stacked limestone. It had a wood stove, a linoleum floor in the kitchen, and rooms with ancient furniture now used as bunks for hunters who leased the land each fall. An Aermotor windmill, made in Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century, drew water into a raised cistern near the house. Pipes carried water to nearby stock tanks. A Chinaberry grew up next to the back door and out further on the rolling hills stood oaks and brush that filled out for miles beyond, a few disused stone fences disintegrating back into less rigid forms, while down the gravel road a mile or so there lay extensive barbed wire fences and cedar posts, a common sight from the small farm-to-market roads that wound back through the hill country for miles, where ranchers and hunters made their way, in polite isolation, and watchful civility. After a hamburger, perhaps at the Deluxe Café, I followed my parents back into the RV and we headed outside of town in a darkness that enveloped the edges of the road. Arriving late that autumn night my father balanced the wheels of the camper so that it was level. My mother prepared the bedding for her and my brothers. My father and I spread sleeping bags on two of the bunks in the front room. A chill gripped the house but I remember a bare kitchen bulb and a transistor radio with country music scratching through a tiny speaker. Outside, pissing on limestone and flint, and next to a shed, the milkyway spread out far in ways that were impossible to experience in Dallas. I buttoned my denim and breathed in the chill. Darkness like no other darkness. New moon. I zipped my down vest. I wonder about that moment, what I can recall of it, having just relieved myself on the stones and dry soil by a barbed wire fence. It was weird news that young person would encounter on the trip back. Jonestown. Mass suicide. What do these coordinates indicate? I asked my mother the obvious: why would so many people take their lives? I recall now the rush of the highway. She was so young. They were crazy, my father said. A cult. Leo Ryan dead at the airport in a country I had never heard before. The news brought this collective otherness—this drama—from far beyond my experience. And yet, the world was rigged for destruction. Any moment, a line could be crossed. The selvages of diplomacy—of family and friendship—perhaps the very fabric of social life hinged on sudden and instantaneous death. That night, driving through the darkness toward Dallas, away from the nostalgic country calm of the old house, I thought of the little packets of Kool Aid my mother made for us, adding sugar to the pitcher, those long summer days. I liked it.

2009-08-15T09:34:00.000-07:00

Driving once through Wichita Falls, the North Texas town crushed by an F4 tornado in April 1979, I witnessed that spring’s tremendous decay. The wreckage spread out through yards and down streets, homes exposed and gutted, with collapsed roofs and shattered windows. Panels of billboards had been blown out and everything possessed a curious patchwork of ruin, as if the something prior to disaster had left a presence only by which to punish the memory of place for those whose bodies absorbed the effaced blocks of city waste. The name of God or Jesus figured also in the city’s collapsed form, little crosses and withered Church of Christs and Pentecostal slabs lay splintered, exposed to the wrath of some greater geography. The sound of the engine’s rotation rattled through the F-150. I wanted to open the doors. Jump out into Wichita Falls. The tornado possessed my imagination of who I was or how I carried myself for others. I longed for turquoise jewelry Navajo style; a feather in my hat; brass belt buckle; lizard boots; Wranglers. Charlie Rich sang: I Know You’re Tired of Following My Elusive Dreams. But They’re Only Fleeting Things. His baritone voice crooned out into a great emptiness, and substituted for it, briefly. Crisp morning light and hot sunshine warmed the vinyl and metal dash. In images of the Wichita Falls tornado there are small signs of what's to come, as if some prescience of disaster was withheld by the landscape. The Trade Winds Motel, in one photo, stands against the black force of the tornado. The flatness of the land beyond beckons the wind, those ancient surfaces razed by centuries of invisible weight and the more visible forces of cloud and rain, of the dense funnel pressures that rearrange the scenery, uprooting cottonwoods and mequites, as closer to the flaked limestone and shale soil (Pennsylvanian and Triassic marine sediments) bluestem and cordgrass, needlegrasses and foxtail bow under the atmospheric pressures. To my mind, absorbed by the feathery cirrus bands approaching from the Panhandle, great freedom and flexibility lay in those giant formations—some pre-human and unspecified force moved parallel to the ongoing dreams and nightmares cut with cement and metal on those plains. The big sky mirrored geographic terrain, only its morphology was composed—and disintegrated—at a more rapid pace. This was a lesson too in the soul’s uneven geography, regardless of whether or not I understood so.

2009-08-12T10:10:00.000-07:00

The floorboard of the truck was covered in rough vinyl and a boy played, scooting from the seat down to the floor and back up, pushing his butt up to the edge and dropping suddenly. Outside car lights flashed in the approaching dark and out on the water of Lake Ray Hubbard red and green boat lights popped like little wet gems in the night. Some boats moored near the highway with lights still fishing through the darkness for perch or crappie or whatever it was out there. But who knows? I would remember this drive for no particular reason several years later as I traveled with my family back from Colorado in the summer heat. I looked at the blond head of that child whose face pressed against the window on the bridge hurtling over the lake into East Dallas. I don’t know why this boy survives now except that earlier this evening I found with my sons at a local vinyl record shop a Charlie Rich greatest hits album from 1972. But it wasn’t until the following year that I remember his singles on the air in my father’s white cab. What a voice! Hey, Did You Happen To See the Most Beautiful Girl in the World? The headlights aimed toward us and vanished. The black expanse of lake pulled away and orange streetlights illumined broken glass and shredded tires on the road’s edge. A strip of weed and grass median separated concrete from metal guardrail and the trash of the fields expanded beyond us to the townlets of Rowlette and Rockdale. I remember fidgeting, tired, eyes on the lake and the road. Charlie Rich’s voice promised a magic gateway to beauty—some notion of sexuality I couldn't understand as sex but felt as some mixed up and incomprehensible desire. And When We Get Behind Closed Doors arrived to my young body with an urgency of inexperience and half-knowledge, awakening a kind of darkling spirit in me. What were behind those doors? Where did they lead? To the most beautiful girl? The noise of the highway hummed against my ear when I pressed my cheek to the glass. Through the other ear came Charlie Rich’s voice from KRLD radio. Beyond the glass the twilight weightlessness of the bluestem outskirts of Dallas feathered away into a dreamy darkness that blurred out against a featureless horizon of orange haze and occasional spotlights. No One Knows What Goes On Behind Close Doors.

2009-08-09T16:49:00.000-07:00

In a dream I am old, walking through the small co-op grocery store, the one before the makeover into an upscale-looking food boutique. I see a young woman pushing a cart with two children. I approach them, begin to say their names and anticipate smiles and kisses. And then I look again. This is not my family, just an image projected from long ago. I am old, my children grown, my wife old, too. The grocery store erodes under broken glass—the heavy drag of time marks its mottled features. The sun whitens the surface of the parking lot. When I wake up I am back in bed with my family. A spring morning. Possible pandemic announced on the radio. The children run naked, playing monsters. The world will end, or it ended, or it won’t. There will be loss and acquisition. Their bodies move between the possum haw and plumbego. My old man future self looks back at me down a long corridor. At the other end, I am playing in a yard near my mother’s gardenia bush. The three of us hardly recognize the other. The phone rings. The children run. And it rains. Later I look again. I play in the ligustrum, the afternoon sun bright on green leaves. Many times I pretend I am someone I’m not. A cowboy. An astronaut. Once Donny Green frightened me when he told me the world would end in a firestorm. Bombs on missiles were aimed at North America. The world was rigged for destruction. The memory remains distant. It’s difficult to see Donny’s eyes, his blond hair and lanky form. His German mother survived the Second War. Married a G. I. Her English came to my ears with extraordinary weight. I was shy to speak to her. Jolly woman. She smoked in her living room. The glow on the end of her Virginia Slims cooled under the crush she gave it in the glass ashtray. I could see her belly when she laughed falling out from under her shirt. Back in the driveway the sun burned through the branches of a plum tree above a chain-link fence. The world could evaporate. The world could dissolve under the heat and pressure of vast bombs. Donny’s mom’s German voice carried across the street. He said men had hair on their penis. “On their penis,” I said, incredulous. “On,” he said. Perhaps he got the preposition wrong because of his German mother’s mutt English. I thought he must have meant “around” or “near.” I hoped he was wrong also about nuclear bombs and infernos and the end of the world. He ran home, his feet hitting the smooth pavement. Sycamore branches dropped dried pods and I’d crush them with my sneakers, or pull them apart. Watch the tiny seedlings sail away into the wind. I would take bark from the tree and crunch it in my hands while waiting for the snow cone truck. St. Augustine green grass. Grape sweet sticky syrup. I ate the snow cone by the gardenia bush. My mother carried clothes to the line. I went to her. I asked if bombs would blow up the world. She said no. But, I said, there are bombs. Yes, she said, nuclear bombs. I don’t remember what else she said. Or what I felt or said or did. How do you reconcile certain facts, like the inevitability of pubic hair, or the certainty of cold war? A cold war that could burn out the earth. When that boy looks forward to me now I think of nothing to say to him. He goes back to the sycamore. To the gardenias. He’s not looking for his mother. Not listening for the snow cone truck. Donny Green’s mother’s voice fills the street. My children walk along with me in the grocery store. They don’t know the boy I knew. They won’t hear Donny Green say “dick hair.” But let me leave that boy as he goes to the garage, retrieves a bicycle, and rides down the driveway and onto the sidewalk in front of his brick house beside the sycamore and flowers.