The Time of My Life
Page 8
Those were my thoughts as I looked at the unopened letter of Pat Colonna. So you can imagine how my spirits sank when I read it.
“You, my mother and Harper Lee notwithstanding,” it began, “To Kill a Mockingbird has become the principal goal in my life. I would be most happy to bestow on you, my mother or anyone else who agreed with your column the mockingbird which has kept me awake all night, every night for the past month or more…. Catch it and it’s yours…. Your musical tastes must run to recordings of garbage trucks on their rounds or nine-year-olds practicing “Beautiful Dreamer” on the piano…. You can testify one goes on until sunup. My bleary eyes and tired brain are apt testimony. I am convinced he never sleeps—except when I am at work…. You hear soft, musing music in the lower registers. I swear the mockingbird in my neighborhood can not only imitate woodpeckers, but mechanical sounds. His imitation of a power saw lacks only a better physical apparatus on his part for sheer perfection. This is only one of the many imitations from nature and man he can do…. Please, Mr. Woolley, come get your mockingbird.”
The little dots in the foregoing indicate parts of the letter I left out in order to spare your feelings, gentle readers. But you probably suspect, as I did, that its writer loveth not mockingbirds. My first thought was that I had crossed paths with the madman who attacked Michelangelo’s Pieta with a hammer at the Vatican a few years ago. But the postmark said Denton.
“Ah,” I mused. “This must be one of those soreheads who got upset last year just because a few million blackbirds chose Denton as the place to rest for a few weeks from the labor and perils of their migration. Unhinged by that visitation, this person probably has extended his aversion for blackbirds to feathered creatures in general, including even the sky’s sweetest singer. The whole city may be in the grip of antifeather prejudice.”
Indeed, the letter indicated as much: “A friend of mine…told me her normally mild-mannered physics professor husband…leaped out of bed one midnight and pursued a mockingbird across neighborhood fences, throwing rocks and using language she’s heard neither before nor since. I am not ashamed— yea, I am proud—to say I have done the same.”
“The life of a bird in Denton is hard,” I concluded, envisioning midnights full of fence-climbing professors, ricochetting stones, and shouts of blue language. “Someone must help those people—and those birds.” I dialed Pat Colonna, who is a woman, it turns out.
“Where have you been?” she blurted. “I’ve been waiting for you to catch this pest and take him away. As far as I’m concerned, he’s yours now. He’s your responsibility, and I want him out.”
I told her that if she would think nice thoughts about her mockingbird, he might stop imitating power saws and sing Mozart and Vivaldi, as mine does. A mocker is a sensitive musician, I explained. He feels the mood of his audience, and when he gets bad vibes, no telling what he might do—maybe even train wrecks or sonic booms.
She broke. “I’m a Christian,” she sobbed. “My mother loves mockingbirds as much as you do, and I’m not really an antibird person, either. I’ve tried and tried to see something poetic about him, but I’ve failed.”
I begged her to be patient and keep trying, but she refused. “If anyone knows a humane way to get rid of a mockingbird, I would like to hear of it,” she said. “But he’s got to go. I’m tired. I want to sleep.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her the awful truth. One mockingbird is more stubborn than a million blackbirds.
July, 1979
The Mystery of the Sea
HAVING GROWN UP where rain was the equivalent of gold, I am awed by large bodies of water. Lakes, rivers, the ocean—even small livestock tanks gouged out by bulldozers—all are wonderful and mysterious to me, full of life and possibilities and dangers as foreign to me as the rocks and arroyos of West Texas would be to sharks and shrimp.
My awe is shared by many who live in my home place. It’s said that more West Texans enlist in the Navy than in any other of the services, and the region spawns a disproportionate number of fanatical fishermen who cheerfully drive hundreds of miles for the chance to wet a hook.
Theirs is a passion I don’t share. Although I have joined their marine safaris from time to time, my rod and reel were only an excuse to be near water. I’ve secretly hoped I would catch nothing.
The truth is, I hate fishing. It’s an aversion born not of squeamishness or sentimentality, but of laziness. The result just hasn’t seemed worth the effort. So when my lady and I journeyed with our sons—her two and my two—to South Padre Island on vacation, I was appalled by the virulence of the fishing fever that attacked them.
I had bought my own small sons the cheapest rigs I could find in hopes they would break or be impossibly fouled within an hour or two. My lady’s teenagers arrived with equally promising tackle—rigs so majestically complicated that such novices as they couldn’t possibly master them before natural adolescent frustration drove them to beach or pool, leaving me at peace with books, breeze, and beer, communing with Neptune.
The first day went well. My sons, for reasons still unclear, buried their tackle on the beach, allowing the sand to so mess the gears that I could in good conscience upbraid them for their irresponsibility and impound the spoiled equipment in a closet. I was also pleased to learn that the teenagers’ complicated rigs had come without operating instructions. Ah, well, I sighed. Too bad. So swim. Look for seashells. Chase girls. Play Frisbee.
But I learned that I was struggling against an ancient and insane tradition stronger than us all. When sons go to the water, they are supposed to catch fish. And when things go wrong, fathers are supposed to know what to do. Their maleness and my fatherness were at stake.
Yes, I spent the next morning cleaning sand from the devilish Taiwanese reels so simple that a child can operate them. Yes, I drove the older boys to a sportinggoods store that sold the same complicated rigs (also Taiwanese), where the too-accommodating proprietor showed them that with five minutes’ instruction even beginners could aspire to Moby Dick.
They fished and caught things. Crabs. Ribbonfish. Dogfish. Croakers. Every sort of trash known to the sea. They also hooked enough edible specimens to require a homecooked fish dinner, and that, of course, spurred them on. The eldest of the troop even showed an alarming willingness to clean their catch after the younger and more fastidious members lost interest in that less thrilling side of the angler’s craft.
But Nature eventually comes to the aid of the patient. In my case, catfish were her agents.
Although I consider their meat among the delicacies of the deeps, catfish aren’t cuddly. They’re ugly and armed with sharp fins that can maim the unwary. And instead of nice, shiny scales that can be scraped away, they’re covered with tough, slimy skin that must be peeled away with pliers and a great deal of struggle and cursing. After skinning one and one-half of a catch of six, the juvenile fish-cleaners’ enthusiasm flagged, and I was stuck with the rest.
It was then that I invoked the Code of the Wet: He who catches also cleans. The fever broke immediately. We all silently agreed that our duty to maleness and fatherness was done. And the sea was wonderful and mysterious again.
July, 1979
When the Family Got Together
My MOTHER, an only child, birthed three sons and two daughters during six and one-half years of the Great Depression and World War II. And from the time that she and our grandmother moved us westward from Central Texas to make a new start after that war, we were considered a close-knit family.
Without being told, we were aware of the two women’s struggle to shelter, clothe, feed, nurture, and educate such a large brood in such hard times. As we each grew older and more independent, we knew we were expected to do as well as we could in school, to work afternoons and summers when we could find jobs, to stay out of trouble with society and the law, and, upon graduation from high school, to embark toward our own destinies with a maximum of moral support and a minimum of money from home.
We stuck together in tough times, too. Any bully who insulted a sister or beat up a little brother had to contend with the rest of us. Young swains who wanted to escort my sister home from dances felt compelled to ask me, the eldest, for permission, and I was bold enough to turn some of them down.
I was the first to leave home, of course, and wandered farther than the rest, to regions still unvisited by them and into endeavors and dreams still foreign and mysterious. Sometimes I’ve been the family hero and often the prodigal son for whom the fatted calf was slain.
The others departed, too, as their times arrived, some with their goals and futures already etched in their minds and others groping and fumbling for a sense of themselves and their destinies.
To a stranger, our behavior since then might seem to belie our closeness. We rarely have visited one another or chatted on the phone or written letters or even exchanged birthday cards. I don’t even have the mailing addresses of some of them. We’ve kept track of each other through our mother and grandmother, who manage to keep in touch with all.
Whenever one of us has needed help, though, the clan has rallied with calls or letters offering emotional support, prayer, or whatever was needed to help the stricken over the hump. “There isn’t a one of us who wouldn’t mortgage his home to help one of the others,” my youngest brother has said, and he’s right.
But we hadn’t gathered in one place since 1966, when I returned from years in New England and we met at my middle brother’s place to introduce brides and children added to the family while I was gone. The family went on growing after that, and our professional and family schedules made reunion more and more unlikely.
This summer, though, an eighty-six-year-old retired teacher, a county official contemplating retirement, two writers, a banker, a husband-wife insurance agentry team, a General Land Office agent, an electrical contractor, a librarian, a teacher’s aide, a housewife, and thirteen children (nine boys, four girls, ages seven to seventeen) gathered for a day at the old home place—perhaps for the last time, since the elder members of the younger generation will begin their own wanderings soon.
I was nervous, driving there. My own life had taken many twists and turns since we last convened. Others had endured hard times, had made tough decisions. I barely knew some of the children—had lost track of the order in which they had come and their ages. Inevitably, the lives of all of us had become more separate over the years as my brothers and sisters and I inexorably became the older generation, worrying in our turn for our young. Were we, in any meaningful sense, still a family?
Our conversation at first was the thrust-and-parry humor of our youth. It had always hidden as much as it expressed. But there were none of the old hostilities or feuds or in-law conflicts that mar so many families. We ate, drank beer, made peach ice cream, ate that, too, and told conflicting versions of our foibles and adventures of long ago. We compared children, debating which resembled which parent in appearance and personality, fretting that they were repeating too many of our own mistakes. We enjoyed it, but it was obvious that we really had little in common.
Then, in the last hours of our meeting, my brothers and I took a ride in a car and began talking of the sacrifices our mother and grandmother made in our youth and the pride we felt in them and in each other for managing, in wildly various ways, to make a good life.
“Those women sure raised a bunch of individuals, didn’t they?” one brother said. “It’s amazing that the three of us, so different from each other, are sitting here talking like this.”
The other brother replied, “It’s the differences that make it good.”
And I realized it had always been that way. Love was all we ever had in common.
But it was always enough, and still is.
July, 1979
The First Lady Writes a Letter
THE RECIPIENT WAS FLATTERED. Living out in the sticks as she does, she doesn’t get many letters from the First Lady of Texas. She was surprised that the First Lady even knew about her and her town, so remote is it from the centers of Lone Star power. The First Lady’s husband, the governor, apparently didn’t know about her and the town when he was running for office, for he never went there, which isn’t surprising, because most governors and gubernatorial candidates don’t go there. It’s so far away, and there are so few votes there.
So the recipient was curious and, of course, excited when she opened the envelope and began reading. The First Lady saluted her as “Ms.,” which the recipient thought was a typographical error. It’s spelled “Miz” out there. But she was pleased with the folksy tone of the letter: “When Bill and I first talked about his running for Governor, very few people thought he could win,” the First Lady wrote. “But I knew he would be elected Governor because of the kind of man he is. He sets a goal and then works to achieve it and does. Of course, he couldn’t have won without the help and support of many, many Texans who share his principles.”
The recipient was surprised that the First Lady was telling her these things. The recipient had been elected to public office for more than thirty years on the Democratic ticket and had been a staunch supporter of John Hill for the office that the First Lady’s husband now held. The recipient had had a lot of fun lately, reminding the Republicans of her town that they were the ones who had put the governor in office. She had enjoyed the blushes of embarrassment and agonized mumblings that constituted their response. They had seemed peeved that the First Lady hadn’t written them a letter.
“And Bill can’t be successful as Governor without more of that help from Texans concerned about our state’s future,” the First Lady continued. “He must be able to show that Texans support his programs to reduce taxes, control spending and produce more energy. That’s why Bill’s advisers asked me if I could write and ask you to do two things.”
The first thing the First Lady asked the recipient to do was fill out a questionnaire. But it wasn’t an ordinary questionnaire: “This poll was prepared exclusively for your use. Your copy is registered as poll No. 104496KG. Only your survey has this special identification number.”
It was sent to the recipient because she was a “key opinion leader” in her town, the First Lady said, and when the polls of all the “key opinion leaders” were tabulated, they would be released to the press and sent to members of the Texas Legislature, the U.S. representatives and senators from Texas, and even President Carter.
The recipient was getting light-headed. Imagine. Not only had the First Lady and the governor’s advisers recognized her as a “key opinion leader” in an area where opinions had never been solicited by anyone, but even President Carter was hanging around the mailbox, waiting to see what she thought.
Fanning herself with a copy of the Baptist Standard, the recipient scanned the First Lady’s observations about taxes, energy, the right to tap wires, etc. Yes, yes, the recipient would fill out the questionnaire! But what was the second thing the First Lady and the governor’s advisers wanted her to do? Near the bottom of the second page, she found it: “Bill needs you to become a Sustaining Member of the Governor Clements Committee. Bill needs to be able to…— tell you of his plans and ask you to contact your legislators if you agree with him; and—count on you to encourage your friends and associates to support proposals of his with which you agree.”
Imagine! Not only did the governor want to know what she thought about things, but he was going to confer with her and other
“key opinion leaders” in the sticks before he did anything else stupid, like cutting the state road funds in the county the recipient was helping administer or slashing the raise that the recipient’s mother thought she was going to get in her teacher retirement pension. Could it be? Was Texas government really going to consult the people?
The recipient envisioned the looks of amazement and envy on her friends’ faces when she would flash the “handsome, personalized membership card with your name and Sustaining Member number” that the First Lady was going to send her. Hell, she was ready to ask, “John Hill Who?” She read on. It was a long letter.
“Please, right now, will you make a Membership donation of $500, $250, $100, $50, $25 or whatever you can give to the Governor Clements Fund?”
Was this really the wife of the president of the world’s biggest oil drilling contractor asking her for money? The wife of the guy who spent all those millions to become governor?
The recipient sighed. They were nice, those dreams of President Carter waiting by the mailbox, of the governor and his lackeys calling to ask what they ought to do next. She especially regretted the handsome, personalized membership card with her name and Sustaining Member number on it. But being a “key opinion leader” just couldn’t be worked into her budget.
Maybe she would accept the offer the First Lady made in her charming P.S., though: “The engraving on this stationery is the oldest known picture of the Mansion, made shortly after the Mansion’s completion in 1856. I hope you’ll come by for a tour when we finish restoring it!”