The Time of My Life

by Bryan Woolley

  On March 5, Mrs. Roundtree took the bus downtown and went to her bank to cash a check. Part of her money was in her coin purse, she said, and part still in the envelope the bank had given her. She was standing at the bus stop at Main and St. Paul, waiting to catch the Gaston Avenue bus back home. Because of her poor eyesight, she didn’t see the bus approaching until it was very near, and its door opened before she had counted out her fare from the pennies, nickels, and dimes in her purse and the envelope. In her haste and confusion, she leaned her gold-headed cane against the newspaper box at the corner and for got it when she stepped onto the bus.

  “The bus went about five blocks before I missed my cane,” she said. “I got off at once and waited on the corner for the next bus back to Main and St. Paul. I got back in about fifteen minutes, I guess, but the cane was gone. I went into the card shop near the bus stop and asked the lady behind the counter if she had seen anyone pick it up, but she said she hadn’t. I looked for the policeman on the block, but I couldn’t find him.”

  So Mrs. Roundtree boarded the Gaston bus again and went home and spent the next couple of days on the phone. She called the police. She called the pawn shops. She called every lost-and-found place she could think of—six of them. She called the newspaper and placed her ad.

  The gold knob and mother-of-pearl shaft that belonged to Mrs. Trabue of Carthage would alone have justified all the effort. It apparently is a very elegant cane. But the advertised “sentimental value” of the cane went far beyond the knob.

  “My son, who was a doctor at Rusk State Hospital, took the handle of my mother’s umbrella and made it the head of a walking cane for me,” Mrs. Roundtree said. “It was a lovely cane, of sycamore, beautifully carved and varnished. I don’t know whether he made it himself or had someone make it for him, but he in tended to give it to me for Christmas in 1977. But just before Christmas—on December 19—he was killed in an automobile accident near Weatherford. We found the cane in his room later.”

  Since then, her son’s last gift has been her dearest possession. “It made walking such a pleasure,” she said. “It gave me such a warm feeling. I felt that my mother and my son were helping me walk, you see. Every time I walked down the street, I had beautiful thoughts of them, and of them helping me.”

  Mrs. Roundtree doesn’t believe her cane was picked up by another elderly lady who has trouble seeing buses and walking, and she can’t imagine what value it would have for a thief. She still hopes its finder is looking for her and will return it when he learns who lost it. “There’s a reward,” she said. “It’s not a big one. I live on Social Security, and I don’t have much to give. But there is a reward.”

  So far, though, the police haven’t called to tell her a thief has been caught. No pawnbroker has reported the cane’s presence at his window. No lost-and-found person has announced its recovery. No one has re plied to the ad. Mrs. Roundtree’s life has lost a lot of its pleasure, and a gentle anger sometimes creeps into her voice.

  “Whoever took it will have to answer for it sooner or later, won’t they?” she said. “They’ll face the Lord, and He will ask them why they didn’t return my cane, and they’ll have a hard time answering, won’t they?

  “Oh, I can get another cane and walk,” she said. “The thing I miss is the warm feelings that cane gave me. I’ll never again feel like my mother and my son are helping me. I feel like I’ve lost them all over again.”

  March, 1979

  Einstein in the Davis Mountains

  OVER THE YEARS, I haven’t spent much time thinking about Albert Einstein and his theories. The word physics has always sounded ominous to my ear, like leprosy or hookworm. If someone said to me, “Poor Lucas died of physics the other day,” I would believe it. And through all my years of high school, college, and graduate school, I avoided physics like, well, like the plague.

  The word mathematics produces the same effect in my mind. “The mathematics has old Cora down in the back again” makes perfect sense to me.

  Although I wasn’t as successful in avoiding mathematics as physics, I got off with a light case. My al gebra teacher taught me that x stands for something unknown, but I remain serenely uncurious about the mystery, preferring to think of x as the middle letter in “Texas.”

  Oh, I’ve been aware of Einstein. His picture was on the cover of Life once. A kid who made better grades than the rest of us was called “Einstein.” There was a sneer in our way of saying it. Somehow I heard of “the theory of relativity,” and as I grew older and better educated, I learned that Einstein (the original, at Princeton) had won the Nobel Prize, that he had something to do with the invention of the atomic bomb, and that some people thought “E equals mc2” was a major breakthrough in something or other. To me, it just looked like a more complicated version of x, so I ignored it.

  But I watched a two-hour program called “Ein stein’s Universe” on TV the other night for two reasons: (1) ever since Quo Vadis? I’ve watched every thing with Peter Ustinov in it, and (2) the program was filmed at McDonald Observatory, north of Fort Davis, and I never turn down a chance to look at the Davis Mountains.

  I was pleased to notice that the BBC had the foresight or good fortune to film the mountains early in the fall, while they were still lush green from the good rains they got last summer. And I was glad to see that Ustinov seemed as puzzled by the astronomers’ explanations of things celestial as I was when I used to drive up Mount Locke to peer through McDonald’s big telescope at some blob that looked less like a star to me than a splattered bug on a windshield. The actor’s responses to many of the scientists’ lectures seemed to be British equivalents of “Well, I’ll be durned,” which is what I used to say.

  I wish I could report that I understand “E equals mc2” a lot better now than I used to. But the scientists’ explanations—reduced to the most elementary language possible, I’m sure—just confused me and made me a little less comfortable with the way things apparently are.

  Although my comprehension of Isaac Newton’s physics is almost as hazy as my knowledge of Ein stein’s, I’ve always been satisfied with my sort of comic-book understanding of his theories. I like the apple falling on Isaac’s head. I admire his straight beams of light, his space that stretches as open and true as a Panhandle road, his time that moves at the same pace everywhere, his universe that works like a clock. I understand clocks. As long as you keep them wound up, they keep ticking, measuring out time in a sensible, reliable way.

  But it ain’t so, says Albert. Light curves, space is closed, time moves at different rates, depending on the circumstances, clocks mislead. And, the post-Einstein astronomers say, there are black holes out there, waiting, waiting to swallow everything, even light itself. Those indigestible tidbits, combined with the undeniable historical evidence that atoms, when split, make big booms, portray Einstein’s universe as a pretty scary place.

  Because it was filmed in the Davis Mountains, though, there were things in the program to which I could comfortably relate.

  The mountain peaks in the distance behind Ustinov and the astronomers and their explanations—they’re old friends of mine. I know them all by name, and although the scientists said that the rocks in their in nards are moving like the tides, they remain my symbol of constancy and eternity.

  And the warped pool table that Ustinov used to demonstrate Einstein’s theories—I’m sure I used to shoot eight ball on it in Alpine. I learned pool on that table, in fact, and the balls behaved for me just as they did for Ustinov, circling inexorably toward the center, away from the pockets. My game was so influenced by that table that now, more than twenty years later, pool balls I shoot even on flat tables circle in that same way, abhorrent of sides and corners.

  And, finally, the Fort Davis—Marfa highway. That was where the motorcyclists roared back and forth, viewers will recall, while the scientists tried to explain motion and light and time to the baffled Ustinov. Every hill, every fence post, every yucca along that stretch of pavemen
t is familiar to me. I used to speed along it very like the cyclists, in fact, but in a 1953 Plymouth.

  Having shunned physics and short-shrifted mathematics, I had no idea that I was demonstrating Einstein’s theory of relativity. I thought my urgency had something to do with girls.

  March, 1979

  Why Bosses Don’t Like Cats

  “WHO THE HELL does like cats?” asked Town & Country, the magazine for rich people. And nobody did, at least among the presidents of two hundred top American corporations.

  Napoleon hated cats, too. So did Hitler. I recall no U.S. president who was partial to cats. Franklin Roosevelt’s Fala, Richard Nixon’s Checkers, Lyndon Johnson’s beagles—dogs every one. If there has ever been a cat in the White House, it seems to have escaped the notice of history and the media.

  Town & Country offers an explanation, of sorts. “Give the millionaire executive, banker, even lawyer, a dog to train, a horse to school and perhaps a parrot to teach. Fine. All are in the realm of a structured, orderly way of life.”

  Balderdash.

  I know of no more structured, orderly animal than the cat. A cat doesn’t like to get its feet wet. It keeps itself clean with a diligence that many humans would do well to copy. If it leaves the backyard, no posse is needed to find it, for it always comes back. All it requires of the coinhabitants of its household is food, water, and a clean litter box. It knows where the best sun falls into its dwelling at various times of day, and it can be found in those places at those times. It knows where the best shade is, too, and the best views from the windows. A cat doesn’t terrorize children, bite the mailman, or leap upon guests. It doesn’t make incessant noises at the moon and turn neighbors into enemies. It can be left alone over weekends without de stroying the house.

  Cats require less fuss and worry than goldfish, yet they rival the more troublesome dog as companions. They’re certainly less costly than horses and more affectionate than parrots or hamsters and more socially acceptable than monkeys or boa constrictors.

  Cats love a “structured, orderly life,” in fact, and one would think them perfect pets for a busy executive, general, or dictator. But they aren’t admired by such people for two reasons, I surmise: cats won’t be owned, and they won’t be bossed.

  Corporation presidents, millionaire bankers, U.S. commanders-in-chief, and European emperors are used to being in control of their environments, and the more powerful they are, the more firmly in con trol they are. If they don’t actually own all they survey, they’re in charge of it in some other way. And the people with whom they deal from day to day—junior officers, bureaucrats, employees, even wives and children—are expected to obey the word from the top, or at least give the impression of obeying.

  So are the animals that Town & Country mentioned. Dogs have no pride. They fawn. They cower. They roll over and play dead or jump through hoops or beg for food—whatever they think will make the boss happy. The best-trained horse responds most quickly to bit and crop and spur. The most highly prized par rot repeats the greatest number of its boss’s words with the least coaxing.

  Cats won’t do any of that, and maybe that bothers the presidents of the hundred top corporations.

  The cat who lives in my house is a ten-year-old pussycat named Pussycat. Her lineage is nothing to brag about. She originated in an alley in New York City and owes her life to some kind person who rescued her from a pound. Her coloring is ordinary black and white, her only distinctive marking being her nose, which is half black and half pink. One of her green eyes waters—a legacy of her difficult kittenhood, probably—and gives the impression of perpetual boredom. She would draw no crowds at a cat show. A dog of her wretched beginning and present luxury would be grateful, would come when called, would wag his tail. He would solicit my affection. He would worship me.

  But Pussycat is as arrogant as any of the presidents of the hundred top corporations. She lounges in the sun in my favorite chair with an air of belongingness that makes me doubt whose chair it really is. She sub mits to my petting and stroking only when she is in the mood for it. She doesn’t lie at my feet as a dog would, but sits quietly on the fringe of the house hold’s activities, never participating in its silliness, just watching condescendingly, like a long-suffering grandmother stuck with the babysitting. When she wants something—food, water, to go outside—she asks, but never begs. If she desires affection she curls up in the nearest lap and purrs. It’s up to the owner of the lap to respond or not.

  We who love cats love them not because they’re subservient and obedient like the dog, the horse, the parrot, but because they aren’t. We’re fascinated by the jungle grace that millenia of “domestication” haven’t diminished. We admire the totality of their poise, the quickness of their reflexes, the singlemindedness of their leisure.

  In the best person-cat relationships, both require space, privacy, silence. There is no owner and no chattel, no boss and no servant. Both are aloof. No question of pecking order ever arises.

  When I told Pussycat that the presidents of the hundred top corporations don’t like her, she flicked her tail once and closed her watery eye. She couldn’t care less.

  March, 1979

  Rites of Passage at Six Flags

  BACK IN THE EARLY 1960s, when it opened, Six Flags over Texas was educational, sort of. The amusements park was divided into six distinct sections—one for each of the six nations which laid some claim to Texas at various periods in its history—and the costumes of the workers and the entertainments in each section were related, however vaguely, to that nation. Parents who took their kids there could, by fudging a little, justify their expense as “educational” and feel virtuous.

  As the park has grown over the years, its historical theme has been diluted. Oh, LaSalle’s River Adventure, the Caddo War Canoes, and a few other of the original “historical” rides are still there. The gun-fighters in the Texas section still show us how the state got its reputation for violence, and the rideless Confederacy section is still the most gracious part of the park. But the most popular rides now—the Texas Chute Out and the modern roller-coasters, Big Bend and Shock Wave—have no historical pretenses about them. They’re simply updated versions of traditional amusement-park chills and thrills, as appropriate to Coney Island and Atlantic City as to Arlington.

  That was bound to happen, I suppose, as soon as Six Flags over Texas spawned Six Flags over Missouri and Six Flags over Georgia—parks whose names make no historical sense at all, whose logic is only corporate—and the newer parks began influencing their parent.

  I’m not bemoaning the change. There have always been better places than Six Flags for kids to learn Texas history. But the park has been, and remains, a good place to learn things if you focus on the young, rather than the old.

  There must be adults somewhere in its management and operation, but they’re invisible to the public. For Six Flags is the kingdom of the young. The rides, the food stands, the maintenance crews all are manned by fresh-faced high school and college students. The performers in its shows are just as young. And the tasks of them all are done with diligence and cheer, a pleasure to watch. Thousands have spent their summers working there, I suppose, and the fact that Six Flags is as bright and clean now as it was the first time I saw it—long ago, on its inaugural day—is a testimony to teenagers’ capacity for hard work and responsibility.

  The customers are a study, too. In their own kingdom, the young fight less among themselves. They’re less sulky. They wait patiently in line for what they want. They don’t write graffiti. When their peers are in positions of authority, they don’t even talk back. They behave as we wish they would at home.

  And parents who wonder what their uncommunicative fledglings really care about can find out simply by reading the T-shirts that pass, for a shirt without a message is a rare thing at Six Flags. They care about their schools. They care about music (divided about evenly between rock and country), they care about their cities, about sports, about beer
, about their churches, about hamburger joints. They care about themselves. Those T-shirts that don’t advertise some favorite something-or-other advertise their wearers—their machismo, their sexiness, their humor, their with-it-ness. Some day, no doubt, some graduate student in sociology will write a Ph.D. thesis on T-shirts as runes of the youth culture. I recommend Six Flags on a sunny day as the place and time to begin the research.

  But for the parent who goes to the park year after year in the company of his own young, its excitements and pleasures serve above all as a measuring stick of the growth of the offspring and the equally rapid decline of his own youthfulness. In no time, the child who stared from his stroller, fascinated but baf fled by the colorful goings-on, is being lifted aboard the little airplanes that fly in smooth, sedate circles and the merry-go-round’s gentle, unscary horses. In a season or two, when the planes and horses begin to bore, the kid’s thirst for excitement is satisfied by the attacks of the plaster Indians along LaSalle’s river or the mild horror of the tub ride through the dark cavern. And in another year or two, he or she can be per suaded to risk the log ride down the rapid water and, after its thrills become merely exciting and not terrifying, ask to make the trip again.

  These are rites of passage, as real and important as pocket knives and lipstick, and the doting parent notes each one in his mental book of memories. There comes a time, though, when the passage is complete, when it’s the children who do the cajoling, daring the old man to attempt the Texas Chute Out with them, or the Big Bend, a time when Dad would rather sit and watch, when he’s glad the line for the Shock Wave is too long to be endured patiently and he’s still able to lure or bribe the children to some less frantic fun.

  In another season or two, curiosity will overwhelm them, though, and they will insist on standing in the hot sun for however long it takes to ride upside down and scream.