I am standing on the playground holding a baseball at West Canyon Elementary School. Sara by Jefferson Starship glitters off Rachel’s small pink and white transistor radio. She’s talking to Kim. I like both girls, but I think I like Rachel more because she is tall; has dark hair and green eyes. She kind of reminds me of Grace Slick. My Dad plays White Rabbit in the garage while he builds model airplanes, but that’s Jefferson Airplane. The band is different now and goes by Starship, probably because of the Space Shuttle.
After lunch is over on Fridays we can bring a doughnut back to homeroom and eat it at our desk. I watch Ricky take a huge bite from a maple bar and lick frosting from his spindly fingers. He’s all sticky smacking. It bothers me. He isn’t really part of the class. Twice a week he joins us in homeroom for a couple of hours. He spends most of his time in a small classroom across from the library. Every now and then I’ll see him there when I pass by and he’s usually laughing really hard; his whole mouth wide open with sound you can hear from the cafeteria. Sometimes it’s hard to be nice to Ricky.
Ed stands all alone on the blacktop, which is now a patchy whitetop in the snow. He’s wearing a new coat, new gloves and holding a nice Wilson indoor/outdoor basketball which he’s sort of talking to. He bounces it once but the ball gets away from him and he lurches at it, fumbles it and lurches again. He nearly falls over but he gets control of the basketball and after, looks around. He doesn’t see me. I don’t want him to. I watch him slowly rotate the ball against the front of his beige parka until all the packed snow falls away.
I stand at the fence on the edge of the playground and look out over Ustick Road and the open farm field beyond. It’s a bright fall morning and a little chilly. The air smells like burning leaves and dirt. I’m not really looking at anything. I can see the teddy bear in Jessica’s lap. She is holding it gently at her side while she sits quietly in her wheelchair and listens. She giggled a lot, but her smile was far away and that always surprised me. She wore the prettiest dresses. After Sunday School, when her Mom came for her, she shimmered! Before they closed the casket, Jessica’s Mom situated that teddy bear into the triangle of her little girl’s left shoulder and arm and breast. She then leaned over Jessica and kissed her on the forehead one last time. I wasn’t there; I just heard about it.
Mrs. Southern hopes we all stayed warm during the night. It was certainly a night to turn the heat up high, she says. Greg, sitting to my right, tells Mrs. Southern he doesn’t need heat in his house because his Mom just gives him an extra blanket to sleep with when it gets this cold.
It’s always dark on the bus ride to school. By the time we get to Chicken Dinner Road the frost on the window is gone and I can see the migrant workers out in the field pulling up potatoes with their hands.
***
I met George Saunders at BookPeople in Austin, Texas in 2017. I listened to him read from his novel Lincoln In The Bardo. I did my best not to let my emotion show as I stood behind a low bookshelf a little to the right and behind the seated area. His spoken words, taken from the pages he wrote, were amplified through the microphone in a textured tenor. He was thoughtful and human. I could imagine him writing. I wanted to walk up and give him a big hug, but that would have been wholly inappropriate.
Later, after the reading, I stood in line for the signing. I watched him as I moved forward. He was kind. I thought of the commencement speech he gave at Syracuse University in which he admitted his own failures of kindness.
As I handed him my copy of his novel I thanked him for writing it; thanked him for his skill with the language. He looked at me and asked, “Are you a writer?” I told him, “Yes.”
***
I haven’t been visited by any heavenly angels, not yet, but I know a ghost. He’s one of my strange angels. I discovered him in Vilvoorde, Belgium on or around the 21st of October, 1993–or, rather, he discovered me.
I was standing off to the side of the Grote Markt on a bright morning after a heavy rain. The air was redolent of suikerwaffles and bratwurst sausages and Drum tobacco–a confluence of sweetness and fetid decay and all the ancient years of a place I had no way of imagining before I got there. I had come on an errand for a church I no longer have any feeling for and view, in retrospect, as only the quaint and insipid little cult it shall remain. At the time, however, I thought I was there to bring eternal understanding to a lost, well-meaning people in need of an over-confident and franchised Corporate-America-Jesus-solution to unanswerable and largely irrelevant mortal queries. Truth be told, I never actually believed any of it even when I told myself I did. But, in all fairness to that morning, and from the start of that time as a mormon missionary I actively mirrored my unfolding experience and newly discovered Europa-eyesight into a calibrated version of impressions I held from my father’s experience and stories of Marseilles, France some twenty-five years earlier. We, father and son, in a manner of time and space across distances were almost sharing a concurrent moment where two slots of fluency bridged into one–I saw my Dad in me and he saw me in him in one fluid context. We were shadows and light for each other, both living and thin and new and untainted by all the poison and glory and mystery of this old world. We shared all of this in letters, back and forth, between Belgium and Colorado. I looked out on a scene I am certain I had known before and, surmise, I will know again. I thought of Jim Morrison and understood firsthand why this was indeed the strangest life I’d ever known. I scanned the marketplace and noted the old ladies with the heavily laden bags full of fresh fish and vegetables. They all looked the same; boxy, thick, wise and stubborn with eyes focused only on the acquisitions they dutifully closed and then loaded onto the backs of bicycles much like the ones I’d seen in old black and white footage from World War II. The men weren’t much different; round, in bowler caps, all smoking stubby cigars and long pipes or rolled cigarettes. And then, every so often, a stunningly beautiful tall, blonde woman with incredible curves, and usually hard face, would walk by and I would relinquish the earnest idea of salvation in Jesus just to undress her in some dark alley. I was nineteen and at the height of my youth and virility. I personified high, wide and handsome; I was tall, muscular, in possession of a head full of luxuriant Beach-Boy-blonde hair, combed like JFK on a fine morning standing in a long navy suit-coat with leather black gloves and shiny black shoes and clear lungs taking in lugubrious draughts of gritty, dangerous air. In spite of this confidence I was not there to conquer nor was I there to be noticed, but as is often my problem in life, I can’t not be noticed and I latched onto a disheveled man, across the way, some sixty-five yards to the left of where I then stood. He watched me with steel-blue unblinking eyes. His face was dirty. He tarried under a dilapidated makeshift green canvas tarpaulin wrapped about his body with punched-out holes for his arms to stick through. He wore charred green from head to foot and his boots were torn wide open. Our eyes met and we held the gaze for a long second. I was the one to look away first. He scared me. When I looked up again, after a beat, he was looking over his shoulder as a rotund balding man in a white apron handed him a heaping bun full of sausage and onion with greasy, dripping mustard. He stood there for a long few seconds and held the sandwich. It started to rain again. I moved a little closer with a sudden desire to offer him my coat but the thought was not well considered and I wasn’t sure what I was motivated by. To this day, I wonder if I would have approached him had he not looked up which he did one last time. I froze. He looked right through me and I’ll never deny that for a fleeting instant I swore I knew who he was. It didn’t make any difference and already I sensed the disheveled man hadn’t noticed me at all. He devoured the sandwich with assiduous abandon and then wiped the yellowed grease from his mouth with the back of his hand. He waded into the Grote Markt of Vilvoorde like a piece of flotsam in an eddy suddenly pulled back into the moving stream, and was gone.
My Dad told me once a long time ago that one of my gifts in life is the power of discernment and I think when he told me that he was already aware of the fact that in this life, it’s not so much what we see, but rather what we choose to recognize in what we see that tell us who we really are. I knew when I saw the disheveled man he’d remain with me ever after. I’m still looking for him in this crowded life. Sometimes I think I see him in myself.
***
On a clear night just as the sun was setting, we gathered in a quiet place in an open meadow where Moose were known to roam freely. We rose in unison and in reverence and took hold of Old Glory. Its edges were frayed; its colors faded. We stood in a large circle and spread the flag amongst us, wide and taught, over the top of an open campfire and then sang America The Beautiful. We didn’t know the verses beyond the first and so we sang it three times through and on the fourth, just as the words God shed his grace on thee came, the flag lifted well above our heads and out of our fingers into a roar of flame I still feel on my face, still see in my eyes.
I love this country. It was made to be made again, to be made better when darkness has wearied its hopes and dimmed the vision it was once born into.
***
For one full-dark second there is nothing. And then a line of vertical light carves the silhouette of a woman in a dress opening a door, curtain-like–left-to-right–out into the American West. John Ford got it right in 1956 with the opening sequence to The Searchers. Just out beyond the door I am now standing in is a land untamed and timeless. From the staked plains of northwestern Texas to the hot open high desert in southeastern Utah where Monument Valley sighs between red sandstone buttes, is a kaleidoscopic backdrop upon which all of our passing silhouettes find depth, texture, and meaning. We’re here a moment and then we go on. From West Canyon Elementary to Vilvoorde, Belgium we all have the same beating heart and life goes on. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t carry Jessica in my heart and her little teddy bear in my back pocket. I’m as much the disheveled man as any there ever can be and sometimes life hurts so much I think living in it might actually require being willing to let it go just as it is. When the sun goes down on this life, for me anyway, I think I’ll be singing along with Bruce Springsteen and remembering all those moments along a path when it felt like I found a six-inch valley running through the middle of my soul. I may be a nobody, but I’m all American.
RCS
10 June, 2020