By Summer's End

by Pamela Morsi

That was a weird idea. I was uncomfortable with it. I guess Marcy could see that; she changed the subject.

  “So Dawn and Sierra went downtown,” she said. “When do you register for your school?”

  “In public school you just show up,” I explained from vast experience. “If you live in the district, they have to take you. They’ll send for your records and all that stuff afterward. But for private school, you’ve got to get accepted. Sierra really wants to go. And this is the last day to get in.”

  “Today’s the last day to register?” Marcy laughed. “I would have suspected that your mom would be the type to leave things to the last minute.”

  It sounded like that might be a criticism, but Marcy said it so nicely, smiling at the same time, that I could hardly imagine that she meant anything bad.

  “I don’t know when they’ll be back,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Marcy said. “You can give these forms to her for me, can’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “When I got her message on my phone this morning, I just had to rush over here and hand over the paperwork myself,” she said.

  “Mom called you?”

  “Yes, she’s decided to take part in the CAVA training session next week,” Marcy said. “That’s not a commitment or an obligation of any kind, of course. We want all our volunteers to know exactly what they’re getting into before they join up with us. We think the training sessions are structured well enough to give them that insight.”

  “My mom is taking training to volunteer with foster kids?”

  Marcy nodded, obviously pleased. “And I know she’ll be great at it,” she said. “She has a wonderful rapport with young people and a very genuine understanding, not only of the system, but how it feels to be tied up in it.”

  “Mom doesn’t like to remember all that,” I said.

  “The harder you try to forget something,” Marcy said, “the more it stays in your mind. I knew Dawn was one of us the moment I set eyes on her. It’s something about that stubborn chin, I think.”

  When Marcy left, I when went back in the house. Vern was in his study. I could see he was engrossed in something, but I decided to bother him anyway.

  “That was the woman from CAVA,” I told him.

  He glanced up. “She hasn’t given up on Dawn yet, huh?”

  “Mom’s agreed to do the volunteer training,” I said.

  Vern turned away from the computer at that. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head.

  “I’m surprised,” he said.

  “Me, too.”

  I walked over and sat down in the leather chair. Neither of us said anything for a minute or so. I guess we were just trying to take it all in.

  “What do you think it means?” I asked.

  “I suppose it means your mother is planning to stay awhile,” he said. “Although I guess we knew that she’d be here at least until the treatment series is complete.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “And I think it means she’s feeling better,” Vern said. “This might be an interim stage to getting back into the workforce. She might be testing her stamina.”

  “Yeah.”

  We continued to sit there, privately speculating.

  “Do you think that school is going to take Sierra?” I asked him.

  He looked up at me. “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know. They may already have all their vacancies filled. I’m sure they do take on kids whose parents don’t pay. But there is probably a qualifying process for that, maybe even a waiting list.”

  I nodded.

  “Just don’t get your hopes up,” he said.

  “It’s not my hopes,” I told him. “I don’t even care if Sierra’s disappointed, though I’m sure we’ll have to hear about it for eons to come. I just hate for Mom to go out in the world, thinking she can change things and finding out that she can’t.”

  Slowly Vern nodded.

  “Some things just can’t be changed,” he said.

  “I know,” I told him with a sigh.

  There were so many things in my life that I wish could be changed. I felt a momentary sadness that was almost overwhelming. But it was immediately followed by a rush of optimism.

  “Maybe it’s like fractals,” I said hopefully. “If we just alter the equation a little bitty bit, it makes all the difference.”

  Vern’s expression was an unspoken question.

  “Mom got cancer so she came back here,” I explained. “So we had to meet you and that alters the equation. Maybe the outcome will be different now, it’ll look totally different. Isn’t that what I learned about chaos theory? You change the equation and it all comes out totally different.”

  Vern frowned. “That’s only half of it,” he said.

  “Half of what?”

  “Half of chaos theory, maybe not even half, it’s a portion of the theory. Perhaps not even the most important portion.”

  “So what’s important?” I asked.

  He hesitated, thoughtfully gathering his words. “Let me see if I can explain it. Try to get it down to a nutshell,” he said. “Chaos theory is really misnamed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s really not about chaos,” he said. “It’s about order. But when it was discovered, they didn’t know that. A meteorologist named Edward Lorenz was working on the problem of weather prediction. He tried to model weather on a computer. It made sense that if you put in the many variables with the correct data that the computer could reasonably be expected to come up with a close assumption on the weather.”

  “But it didn’t work,” I said.

  “No, it didn’t. It wasn’t even close,” Vern said. “It was like the fractals. The slightest change in the equation, a degree of temperature or a knot of wind, made a vast difference in the outcome.”

  “Yeah, you explained all that to me,” I told him. “It’s the butterfly effect.”

  “Right, sensitivity to initial conditions is chaos. But that’s not the end of it,” Vern said. “That’s the part that intrigues people, but it’s useless without the rest of the theory. What Lorenz eventually realized, along with May and Mandelbrot, Koch and other pioneers of this science, was that this was a new way of looking at order. In all of scientific history we only knew two kinds of change. A steady state, where the variables never change, and periodic behavior where a system goes into a loop repeating itself indefinitely. Chaos variables change and they never loop but, over time, on a graph you can show that the presence of chaos actually produces ordered structures and patterns on a larger scale.”

  “Huh?”

  “Lorenz decided to graph his theory on a chaotic system,” Vern said. “He used a water wheel.”

  “What’s a water wheel?”

  “It’s like that big mill at Pigeon Forge, where the water turns the wheel to grind the corn.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, remembering the trip to the Dollywood theme park.

  “The water pours into the containers or buckets on the wheel’s rim. If the stream of water is too slow, the top buckets never fill fast enough to overcome friction and move the wheel,” he said. “But if the stream is faster, the weight starts to turn the wheel.”

  I nodded, recalling how the big wooden wheel turned on the side of the building, pouring out water as it went along.

  “The rotation might become continuous,” Vern said. “That’s what you’d want on a water wheel. But if the stream is running too rapidly the buckets might fill too fast. That can make them swing all the way around and up the other side. If it did, the wheel might slow, stop and reverse its rotations, turning first one way and then the other. The uncertainty of the speed of the water makes it a perfect chaotic system.”

  “Okay.”

  “Lorenz decided to put the equations for this on a graph to show that it was neither steady nor periodic,” Vern said. “He wanted to show that it was a whole new type of change, a change that couldn’t be predicted.”

 
“That makes sense,” I said.

  “It does,” Vern agreed. “It made sense to Lorenz, too, but something surprising happened. Let me see if I can get a picture of his graph.”

  Vern turned to the computer and Googled Lorenz Attractor. He quickly sorted through the first citations and clicked on one that brought up a three-dimensional image of a half-folded spiral.

  “It didn’t matter that all the points on the graph were different, that each shift in the equation resulted in a vastly different outcome; as more and more points were noted down on the graph, a clear pattern emerged. It stayed on the curve, a double spiral. No matter how far away or how close it diverged, this pattern remained. It never repeats, but it definitely shows order.”

  I looked at the Lorenz Attractor on the screen. It was a beautiful fractal, as pretty as any I’d created. But, I could see what Vern was saying. It really didn’t seem random, accidental, easily manipulated or vulnerable at all.

  “No matter how arbitrary a system appears to be, if taken in a large enough context, a pattern emerges. It’s not the steady change or the periodic change that we’re most familiar with, but it is just as definitive.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I told him.

  Vern nodded. “I’m not sure yet that any of us do,” he said. “Mandelbrot looked at coastlines. A map of a coastline will show many bays. Measuring the length of a coastline off a map will miss minor bays that were too small. Or walking along the coastline misses microscopic bays in between grains of sand. No matter how much a coastline is magnified, there will be more bays visible if it’s magnified more.”

  “So the fact that each time you magnify you get more, that’s a pattern,” I said.

  “That’s how it seems,” he said. “The applications of chaos theory are infinite—seemingly random systems produce quite detectable patterns of irregularity.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  Vern nodded. “Wow, indeed. What seems to be emerging in scientific thought is that a universe of disorder is, in its way, ordered. A small change in the equation of a chaotic system can cause a drastically different outcome. But at some level, that outcome is negligible to the overall pattern of the system.”

  “So what appears to us as chaos, is actually order,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “And there are philosophers and social scientists who take that theory into a real-world example,” Vern continued. “They would say that a family is a chaotic system because if you have a tiny problem or a huge problem, either can make dramatic changes in the life of that family. But perhaps, just perhaps, that doesn’t really have that much effect in the ultimate destiny of those persons.”

  I thought about that for a long moment before I spoke.

  “So Mom will stay here, or she won’t,” I said. “And Sierra will either get into the art school, or she won’t. But somehow everything will work out like it’s supposed to.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe that’s it exactly.” Vern sighed heavily and then smiled at me. “Or maybe we could help.”

  He reached over and started flipping through the phone book. He ran his finger down a page and then picked up the phone and dialed a number. It was a half a minute before anyone answered.

  “Hello, this is Vernon Leland,” he said. “Does James Palmer still teach there? He’s headmaster? Great, could I talk to him, please?”

  Vern turned to look at me as he waited. “This has to be our secret,” he said.

  I nodded mutely.

  “Jim, hi, it’s Vern Leland,” he said and then paused. “Yeah, we’re doing fine, fine. How’s Rosalee and the boys?”

  Vern listened to the other end of the line, smiling nodding.

  “Is Clint still thinking of MIT?” he asked and then waited for a response. “Well, tell him when he gets to the point that he needs reference letters, I’d be happy to write one.”

  The guy on the other end of the line apparently tried to refuse such a generous offer.

  “No, really. I’d be delighted,” Vern insisted.

  There was a lot more talk from the other guy. He was telling some story about his son, I guessed. Vern laughed out loud at one point and philosophized about raising children.

  “Actually I’m calling to ask a favor,” Vern told him, finally getting to the point. “My little granddaughter, Sonny’s oldest girl, has moved back to town with her mother.”

  That bombshell evoked a certain amount of surprise.

  “Yeah, it’s great,” Vern assured him. “Anyway, she’s got her heart set on attending the arts academy.”

  It seemed like that pleased the guy, as well.

  “The problem I have is that her mother won’t hear of me paying for her school,” he said. “Do you think that I could set up some kind of anonymous donor situation where I could take care of her tuition and supplies and her mother not be aware of where that’s coming from?”

  The discussion for that seemed to go on forever.

  “Yeah, I know it’s the last day,” Vern said. “Her name is Sierra Leland. She and her mother are down there right now applying for admission.”

  More listening.

  “If you could, I’d really, really appreciate it.”

  When he hung up the phone, Vern turned to give me a big grin. “It’s probably not going to change the world,” he said, “but your sister is in.”

  SONNY DAYS

  32

  Sonny went to work with the Brotherhood of Timber Workers. The national organization had so little hope for widespread unionization that they put very little pressure on him, so Sonny was able to devote his energies to things that were important to him. Mainly he focused on workplace safety issues and he made some headway. The union certainly didn’t have the authority to shut a site down and they didn’t have enough members to pose any sort of effective work stoppage, but just being there made supervisors less willing to put up with risks and gave them an excuse to be more proactive with company administration.

  It was a surprise to Sonny how much he liked the work he did. The job didn’t pay that well and didn’t utilize much of his education and skills, but he began his workday eager and enthusiastic. That counted for a lot.

  It counted for a lot even with Dawn, who found that her days as a stay-at-home mom were behind her. Her wages as a Case Assistant were now required every month for keeping up with the mortgage and paying the bills.

  She continued to pursue her education. But her sights were higher now and progress was slow. She’d decided that she wanted to get a master’s in social work, qualifying her for top leadership jobs in the department. But the graduate program at the university was a full two years past the B.S. degree. And taking one course a semester was not a lot.

  “At this rate, it’s going to take me fifteen years,” she complained to Sonny.

  He nodded. “If you want me to take on more of the responsibilities for the girls,” he said, “I will.”

  She shook her head. “They’re growing up so fast,” she said. “I want to be there. I want to be with them.” Dawn sighed.

  “I could take on a second job,” Sonny suggested. “Then maybe you could quit work and devote yourself to school full-time.”

  “No, I like my job,” Dawn insisted. “I’d miss it if I quit and I’ve learned things that they just don’t teach in class.”

  “That’s probably true,” he admitted.

  “I guess I just want everything,” she said.

  Sonny laughed.

  “And you deserve it,” he said. “I wish I could give it to you.”

  She grinned at him. “You’ve given me everything I ever wanted,” Dawn told him. “And you’ve taught me to want more.”

  “So it’s all my fault, huh?”

  “Absolutely,” she teased.

  Despite their struggles and the constant stress of living paycheck to paycheck, Sonny would have described their life as happy.

  The girls were in elementary school. As different as sisters
could be. Sierra was a little social butterfly, flitting through the world with a thousand friends and a complete grasp on the personal lives of each and every one of them. Which she generously shared around the dinner table most evenings whether the rest of her family was interested or not.

  She’d chatter about whose parents or grandparents were divorcing. Which moms were having babies. Hairdo comparisons of all the female teachers. And which clothes, bags, shoes and school supplies were cool and which were not.

  Dakota, on the other hand, was a top student and endlessly curious. Sonny found her grasp of science amazing. They went on rock hound expeditions. Experimented with backyard garden plants. And speculated about mummies and dinosaurs for hours on end. Her love of library visits rivaled his own.

  Their differences created a natural amount of sibling stress. There were frequent exchanges of catty remarks. Occasional rows and tantrums. Territorial disputes and accusations of favoritism on both sides. But the two girls cared for each other and had a basic underlying security in their parents’ love and respect. That seemed to carry them through the worst of sisterly strife.

  Dawn and Sonny were proud of both their children. They applauded their strengths. Helped them make the best of their weaknesses. And managed it all with patience and good humor mixed with parental pride.

  As the years progressed, family life got more hectic. There were piano lessons and science club projects. The girls played soccer. Neither were exceptionally good at it. But Sonny coached and they both wanted to be on their daddy’s team.

  The winters brought basketball games and snowy mountain weekends. The summers were about hiking in Cades Cove and trips to Norris Lake.

  The spring that Vern took retirement caught Sonny slightly off guard. He knew that time was passing, that his children were growing, but somehow he’d been lulled into a feeling that his world was stable, that nothing would change. But, of course, change is inevitable.

  “It’s not like things are perfect,” he told his father over a game of chess. “I don’t make enough money to really support my family the way I should. Dawn’s still trying to eke out a college career one class at a time. Sierra probably won’t even be able to go to college if she doesn’t start making better grades. Dakota is way too observant and she’s sensitive. I worry about how she’ll get by if life ever gets tough for her.”