Olive rallied with six more eggs. Then, three days before the fair and two more eggs to go, our weary little dove huddled on her manzanita limb for the last time. We found her in the morning, motionless, like a tiny piece of driftwood washed up on the sand.
“Do you think Olive was happy in a cage?” Jaymee asked Bill as he wrapped the dove in his old red handkerchief.
“Why, of course she was,” he answered awkwardly, trying to make sense out of the bird’s life. Then, in a blur of words that a man could only say to a child, he stumbled ahead. “You took care of her, fed her and gave her showers and a baby. And you told her how smart she was.” He paused. “And she was smart because she knew you loved her.”
“And she gave me her eggs because she loved me too?”
“Her treasures,” he said. “All that she had.”
He watched Jaymee gather two handfuls of pale pink and gray feathers and fill the two empty velvet nests. “Even though Olive died,” she murmured, “I’m going to show my egg collection anyway.”
He smiled and hugged her. “I’ll bet you win the blue ribbon.”
And she did.
Originally published in the September 1997 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.
Summer’s Magical Music
by Allan Sherman
We each have a special soundtrack that conjures that particular feeling of a glorious summer day.
My son and daughter were competing to see who could play which louder: he, a baseball game on TV; she, a Led Zeppelin record. I sat there in the living room with them, my eyes closed, a peaceful smile on my face.
Nancy yelled, “Too loud for you, Dad?”
“Nope,” I said, without opening my eyes.
The enigmatic smile got to her.
“Dad, would you mind telling me what you’re doing?” she shouted.
“I’m listening!” I hollered, still smiling.
This interested Robbie. “To the record or to the ball game?” he screamed.
“Neither!” I shrieked, smiling.
Both of them were fascinated. They turned off their noisemakers. “I was hearing it again,” I explained. “I can close my eyes and hear it again any time I want.”
“Hear what?” Nancy persisted.
“The old Summer Music. The sweet song of Summer As It Was.” And I began to tell them about it.
* * *
Remember? The lazy chimes of ice cream trucks; the yells of boys playing ball in the streets; the drumbeat of moth wings flirting with porch lights. I can still hear the crooner moaning “Say It Isn’t So” on a scratched 78-r.p.m. record, repeated endlessly by the neighbors’ lovesick teenage daughter. I can still hear the baroque toccata of hand-operated lawn mowers, the crackle of backyard wood barbecue fires, the yelps of tiny kids allowed to toast marshmallows for the first time.
In summertime, the Midnight Special sang the blues as it fled through town on its moonlit journey: first, a long, lonesome howl on its steam whistle, then a short one, then another long one as it pierced the distance, the last plaintive howl modulating down to a minor key, kind of sad, like Gershwin. Airplanes were few, but the ones that came over roared and spluttered for attention, and you ran out on the lawn to see the miracle in the sky.
Summer was also the time of stillness, precisely measured by a meticulous cricket.
Summer played a patter song of rain on windowpanes, a xylophone solo on tin roofed garages, and now and then a cymbal crash of lightning that started you counting the seconds to see how far away the timpani roll of thunder was. Summer was also the time of stillness, precisely measured by a meticulous cricket. It was the click-clacking of a stick rattling along a picket fence. It was the excited words, “Got ’im!” from a boy who had caught a firefly in a Mason jar. It was the click of croquet balls colliding, the slap-slap of jump rope against sidewalk.
Summer was the soft rustling of leaves as you walked home on a dark street punctuated by yellow lights, after taking the keenest girl in town to a Fred Astaire movie. It was listening to her hum—“A Foggy Day in London Town”—and then hearing beautiful lyrics forming and bouncing around inside you, but knowing you would never have the courage or the Fred Astaire suave to utter them to her.
In summertime, at twilight, your mother somehow found a moment in the middle of doing everything for everyone, and sat down alone at the piano and played “Clair de Lune”—the one piece she still remembered. Summer was the sound of your father snoring on the couch, each snore fluttering the edge of the sports section he had been reading.
In summertime you could hear the boy who was “It,” his eyes tightly shut as he leaned against a tree, counting to 500 by fives. The good ones did it so fast that the syllables all jumbled together. But they gave an honest count and yelled, “Here I come, ready or not!” Then the scuffling and scampering behind bushes as It ran after his quarry. Then a hush and another boy yelling, “Olee, olee! In free!” And a chorus of galumphing sneakers as boys ran in, safe.
There were kerplunks in the lake in the park as fathers lobbed stones so that sons and daughters could count the ripples. There was the magic flute some talented kids could make with a blade of grass stretched between their thumbs. There was the swoosh-slap, swoosh-slap of the new lawn-sprinkling gadget. The whirr and hum of electric fans. The jangling of marbles in a boy’s pocket—and, from his other pocket, the untimely croak of the faithless frog who was supposed to keep quiet so that Mother wouldn’t know he was in the house. And remember the crackle of cards being shuffled on the screen porch, the tinkling of ice in glasses of pink lemonade?
You thought, as you listened: this is summer; this is the season for which all other seasons exist. And you took a moment to memorize all of its melodies and harmonies forever.
* * *
The smile must have left my face. Nancy asked, “What’s wrong, Dad?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it made me sad to think that you kids missed all that.”
“But we have Summer Music of our own,” Nancy said. Robbie agreed. I looked at them for a long moment, and then suddenly realized that of course they do. And of course it’s different from ours.
Ours was the sound of a neighborhood; theirs is the music of a planet. The melody is motion: jet engines screaming, the crescendo of sports-car gears shifting, the roar of surfing, the petulant whining of dune buggies, the thunder of motorcycles.
I tried to hear summer through their ears, brave and new and honest, minus the candy coating of “moon” and “June” and “spoon.”
Yet they also have a thirst for serenity. And so they steal away in summertime and sit alone on some hilltop, enjoying the aloneness, drinking in the stillness, waiting to hear the stretching of a sunflower. In my ancient summertimes, I simply heard a birdsong. The new ears can hear what kind of bird it is; the new eyes can see how few are left; the new hearts can feel how important it is that this bird and his summer song be cherished.
And so, my dear children, your Summer Music belongs to you alone. It is your own record of those warm and tender seasons of your ripening, when you were growing and stretching and reaching for the sun; it is the rhapsody of being alive, the mad waltz of energy and joy, the bittersweet ballad of first love, the song of all living things singing in unison: I am! I am! And I’m glad I am!
And in that glad cry—for you as for me—is the magical Music of Summer.
Originally published in the July 1971 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.
When Your Best Fish Story Is about Catching a Goat
by Rick Bragg, from Garden & Gun
Sometimes the fish are biting, and sometimes it’s the goats.
I should have given up fishing, I suppose, after the goat. He was not a regular goat. He was more part goat, part rhinoceros, about the size of a small horse but with devil horns. He looked out on the world through spooky yellow eyes and smelled like… well, I do not have the words to say. My little brother, Mark, bought him at the sprawling trade day in Collinsville, Ala
bama, for $75; I would have given him $100 not to.
The first thing the creature did after coming into our possession was butt the side of a truck. You have to be one terror of a goat to assault a Ford. His name, my little brother said, was Ramrod.
“Why would you buy such a thing?” I asked my brother. He told me he planned to purchase a bunch of nanny goats to “get with” Ramrod, after whatever courtship it was that goats required. Ramrod would beget little Ramrods, who would beget more, till the whole world was covered in ill-tempered mutant goats. I think, sometimes, we did not love that boy enough.
Ramrod moved into his new home in a beautiful mountain pasture in northeastern Alabama and, first thing, butted heads with my mother’s ill-tempered donkey, Buckaroo. Buck staggered a few steps, and his head wobbled drunkenly from side to side, but he did not fall unconscious. This, in Buck’s mind, constituted a victory, and he trotted off, snorting and blowing, like he was somebody.
My point is, Ramrod was a goat not to be messed with.
Later that year, I was fishing with my brothers in the pond in that same pasture. The water was mostly clear, and you could see the bream in the shallows and the dark shapes of bass in the deeper end. For a change, even I was catching fish and had pulled in a few nice little bass. My cast, to me, was immaculate, my aim perfect, my mechanics sound, especially for the clunky crankbait I was throwing.
“But I’m not gettin’ much distance,” I complained to my big brother, Sam.
“It’s fine,” he said, and with an easy flick of his wrist, sent a black rubber worm sailing beyond my best cast of the day.
I decided to put a little more mustard on it. I let my lure dangle about a foot and a half from the tip of the rod, reared back, torqued, and started forward with a powerful heave… and hooked Ramrod, who had crept up behind me to do me some kind of grievous harm, right between his horns.
Ramrod, who for perhaps the first time in his long life seemed unsure of what to do, took off running. Sam, who has never been too surprised by anything in his whole laconic, irritating life, gazed at the retreating goat as if this were a thing he witnessed every single day.
“Can’t remember if that was a ten-pound test I put on that baitcaster,” he said, as if it made a difference. “You can’t catch no fish with heavy line. They can see it,” and he made another cast.
The goat ran on. I considered, briefly, just standing my ground and trying to reel him in, to play him like a great tarpon or a marlin. Instead, I began to run parallel with him, reeling in the slack as I did, as I have seen great anglers do with giant fish on the TV. I guess I thought I could eventually get close enough to reach out and snatch the hook out of his head. I truly did not want to hurt him, but that was foolish, of course; you could not hurt Ramrod with hammer or hand grenade.
As it turned out, the point of the hook, not even to the barb, had snagged in the bony base of one horn, and the crankbait jangled atop his head. He was not wounded; he was just mad. He quit running about the time I ran out of line, and my little brother, who had a sort of telepathic bond with this creature, calmly walked over and pulled the hook free while the goat stood there like a pet. Then he and the goat both gave me a dirty look, as if hooking him were something I woke up that morning intending to do.
I was done fishing that day and seriously considered being done for good.
I went back to the pond, frazzled, and—I am not kidding—immediately hooked a water oak, a blackberry bush, and a low-slung power line. I shuffled off with a rubber worm dangling high above me; it was Cherokee Electric’s problem now. I was done fishing that day and seriously considered being done for good. I walked to the house defeated but not ashamed, at least as far as Ramrod was concerned. That goat never liked me anyhow.
Great anglers, the kind who tie their own flies and read the tides and have fished the deep blue for leviathans, will most likely shake their sun-bronzed heads in pity and sad wonder over this. But the bad fishermen out there—you know who you are—will merely nod in understanding and sympathy and, I hope, some degree of solidarity. The only reason they have not caught a goat is that, so far, one has not made their acquaintance or wandered into the proximity of their backswing.
But perhaps the worst thing about it is that the best fisherman I know, my brother Sam, did not even think that, in the long, sad epic of my fishing life, this episode was remarkable at all. He did not even tell it to anyone, not in the decade since. To him, it was just the kind of thing a poor fisherman like me was likely to do, was somehow fated or destined to do, assuming of course that he did not first fall out of a boat and drown.
“What is it, truly,” I asked, “that I do wrong?”
He was too kind to give voice to it.
He just spread his hands, palms up, as if to say: Everything.
Sadly, as a fisherman, I am just missing something, something that is both mechanical and mystical and, I am sorry to say, apparently permanent. Still, fishing is the one thing I will get out of bed for in early morning… well, that and biscuits and gravy.
And, honestly, I’d rather be a bad fisherman than no fisherman at all.
Originally published in the November 2017 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.
• YOUR TRUE STORIES •
CHRISTMAS IN A VENDING MACHINE
In 1997, I was long-distance friends with a girl. After visiting in early December, we were in love. On Christmas Eve, I found an airline running a last-minute special from Memphis to Boston. When it came time for Christmas dinner, I learned that everything in Boston is closed on Christmas night. We gathered our change and raided the hotel vending machine. Our Christmas dinner was Funyuns, Hot Fries, Fritos, Snickers and Cokes while watching TV. It was perfect. Parting was heartbreaking, but temporary. We were married by August. We look back on our “vending machine” Christmas and recognize how special it was. Some people live their whole lives hoping for a special moment like that. Christmas is not about where you are. It’s not about extravagant meals. It’s all about whom you are with, grasping that moment and appreciating how special it is.
—James Jennings New Hartford, Iowa
A LONG TIME COMING
After confirming her pregnancy, my friend told her 4-year-old daughter about the new addition that would be coming, but she made it clear it would be quite a long time yet. Her husband came home and they had dinner and discussed the good news. Finally it was time for bed and her daughter, very distressed, said to her mother, “I know you said it would be a long time until we got our baby, but this is ridiculous.”
—Janet Simmonds Mancelona, Michigan
PHOTO OF LASTING INTEREST
A Perfect Storm Shot
These clouds crawling over northwest Oklahoma in 2017 look plenty angry, but Canadian photographer Vanessa Neufeld wouldn’t have minded if they had been nastier. Neufeld, who died of cancer in 2019, was a storm chaser. It wasn’t all about the chase, however. “A big storm brings a mixed bag of emotions,” she said. “You’re in awe of it, and you’re worried about who could be affected.” In fact, after a bad storm, Neufeld often pitched in with the cleanup. “If anything gets hit, I’m there to help as much as I can.” Photograph by Vanessa Neufeld
Horror in the Heartland
by Henry Hurt
One April morning in 1995, the morning routines of thousands of men, women, and children in Oklahoma City were shattered by one terrifying act.
Each in his or her own way was playing a part in the small daily pageants of life. All were striving for their own version of the American Dream: the Pursuit of Happiness. But on that 19th day of April, dreams were about to be smashed and hopes destroyed by what was then the worst terrorist attack ever to take place on U.S. soil. And yet, after the smoke and the dust lifted, Americans learned of the amazing stories of survival amidst the heartbreak, and the incredible spirit that created them.
The nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in the heart of Oklahoma City had a cheerful face. Across the
front, just above the entrance and behind a floor-to-ceiling tinted-glass façade, was the America’s Kids child-care center. Some of the children belonged to the more than 500 men and women who worked in the 18-year-old glass-and-granite-clad building.
At around six on the morning of April 19, 1995, the area around the building began to come alive as hundreds of people from central Oklahoma—either workers or those with government business—converged on the downtown area. Among those heading toward the building that day was a man driving a large yellow truck, its sides emblazoned with the black-lettered logo Ryder.
Shortly before 9 a.m. the man pulled the yellow truck up to a parking spot on the street in front of the Murrah Building. The truck was just east of the center of the north-facing building. Thirty feet away the children of the America’s Kids child-care center were playing.
Inside the 20-foot truck were 4,800 pounds of a ghoulish, volatile mixture of diesel fuel oil and gray ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which filled as many as two dozen 55-gallon blue plastic barrels. The entire truck was a lethal bomb.
Just a few minutes before 9 a.m., the man lit the fuse and walked away. In the daycare center, the smallest children had just been placed in their cribs to settle down for naps. The older children sang their favorite songs and had free time to play.
Shortly before 9 a.m. the man pulled the yellow truck up to a parking spot on the street in front of the Murrah Building.
At 9:02 a.m., in the cargo area of the yellow truck, the fuse burned down to the detonator. The 4,800 pounds of explosive witch’s brew packed in the blue plastic drums exploded. Searing gasses shot from the bomb at 6,500 feet per second—virtually vaporizing the truck and creating a wave of scorching heat that enveloped the building and spread destruction across a two-block radius.
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