Falling Through Space (24 page)

The pilot turned around in his seat and smiled at me. “Actually,” he said, “it might be better if none of us touched anything.”

I sat strapped into my seat, so thrilled it's a wonder I can remember any of this, as the computers landed the Concorde on the island of my genes. The Concorde now weighed two thirds less than when it took off. We had burned up the weight in fuel which is why this experience will soon be a thing of the past. I was lucky to have been there and to have thought I was rich enough to buy the ticket. The memory of that flight, of that moment when I went past my experience of myself, will be with me always. I was a golden Icarus who did not fall to earth but went gently gliding down.

T
HERE ARE PEOPLE
in the world who do not love the hot heat of summer. They are the same people who never read
The Bobbsey Twins in the Country
, who never had Fourth of July parades around their neighborhoods, whose brother never set off a whole package of firecrackers in a culvert and lived to tell the story. I love the heat. I know how to turn the air-conditioning down to sixty without a trace of guilt. It's survival of the fittest in the mortal world, and I come from a long line of men and women who knew how to fill a room with fans. Ceiling fans, rotating fans, tall fans that blew a steady breeze into my face when I was five feet tall. I was destined to grow up to be a woman who could turn the air-conditioner down and pay later. Best of all were hand-held fans, with which people of good will fanned each other. My six-foot-four inch grandfather used to fan people with his hat. I have a vivid memory of him standing on a country road fanning the man who was changing the tire on his Ford.

In the Deep South of my childhood we worked summer the way people in Minnesota work their frozen winters. We knew how to find shade, how to sleep away the hottest hours, how to kill flies and mosquitos, how to fish and barbecue, and use the heat to prove our mettle and our skills. We did not complain all the time about the heat. We moved the fans around the rooms to create breezes and watched the skies for rain and laid down on clean white bedspreads and read books.

I am always nostalgic during summer. Every summer brings memories of the ones that preceded it. Only yesterday I looked up and noticed the tulip vine was blooming beside my mailbox. Another year has passed. I had forgotten that scraggly vine produced those exotic, indescribably beautiful flowers.

Forty years ago this summer, I ran away and got married. In a borrowed Chevrolet, with an eighteen year old boy from Georgia, wearing a white dress with pearl buttons down the front, in a fever of curiosity, I got married. The boy and I bought a license and found a judge and promised to love each other until we died. Perhaps we do. Perhaps we will. It would never have happened in January.

One of my favorite things about summer is that the neighborhood children don't have to go to school. They have time to cut the yard, wash the windows, and accompany me on bicycle rides. They bring me up to date on the lyrics of Pearl Jam, the desperate politics surrounding election to the cheering squad and the dark side of the personalities of various high school and junior high school teachers. If you think adult life is fraught with peril, spend some time talking to people in the ninth grade.

Summer is always rich in children where I live. My grandchildren come to visit. Since I am fortunate in having married and bred at an early age, I am still sufficiently ambulatory to accommodate them when they wish to learn to ride bicycles and horses. This summer I am thinking of taking the thirteen year old out to a country road and teach him to drive. In honor of the summers long ago when my uncle let me drive trucks and farm equipment on my grandmother's farm. Also, in honor of Eudora Welty's great line, “Oren was eleven, a wonderful driver.”

There are, of course, dark sides to summer. Lying in wait for the fine, fat arms and legs of the children are the bugs of summer, the flaw in paradise, the mistake that proves that if there is a God he is far from perfect, maybe even daft.

Who would make a tick? There is no conceivable, earthly use for a tick. A tick is not going to turn out to contain a cure for cancer. The tick is at the top of a list of reasons I might conceivably be glad when autumn comes. Ticks, wasps, flies, gnats, mosquitos, chiggers, maggots, fleas. To be balanced against butterflies, fireflies, dragonflies, honeysuckle, gardenias, robins, and the long days.

It is June 26th as I write this. We are past the zenith; we are on our way to winter. But first the real heat will set in. Drought will scare me into watering the trees; midday will be impossible; the interiors of automobiles will be too hot to touch. I will desire naps and wear shorts, even though fifty-nine year old women should probably be jailed for exhibiting their sun-damaged legs to the general view, or, even the uncritical eyes of their grandchildren.

I will lie down in the sun in the swing. I will add another layer to the subcutaneous damage to my skin. Who cares, I will think, drunk on the sun, what am I saving anything for? I will take a radio outside and play it on the back porch. I will watch a seven year old tirelessly hammering open hickory nuts for the squirrels to eat. I will feed the dog my son brought home to visit and promptly forgot.

“You want to go swimming?” the child will ask.

“Not till your food digests,” I will answer. There is nothing I like better than passing on an old wives' tale to a child. “The chlorine will turn my hair green,” I will add.

“Do you want it to?” she will answer. Seduced by her candor and her patient dedication to the welfare of the squirrels, I will rise from my lethargy and take her “to the pool.” I wish I could take her on the great summer swims of my youth. Once I sneaked off with my cousin and went swimming in a cow pond. Once we sneaked off at night and swam in a borrow pit. Once I swam across a lake without a rowboat or a lifevest. If it was summer I was in the water. Only once in all that time did my hair actually turn green.

One never to be forgotten summer, I discovered a stash of magazines in my grandmother's attic. This was long ago when magazines routinely published continued stories. I was reading a continued novelette in
The Ladies Home Journal
. I had finished the first two installments and couldn't find the conclusion. I searched everywhere. I tore the attic apart. It was the story of a war wife whose young husband was shot down in the South Pacific. He crawled to safety in a cave but was reported missing in action. After three years, the wife has given up and is engaged to marry a naval officer. The young husband has been found and taken to a hospital in California. He has amnesia. All he can remember is the name of his wife. Angela Jane, he keeps repeating. A woman doctor who is in love with him is hot on the trail of a cure and an identification but she is conflicted. If he recovers his memory she will lose him. The young wife is picking out her blue dress for her second wedding. To be continued.

There were wasp nests in the attic. I was in constant danger as I searched for Part Three, which I never found. For years I asked magazine readers about that story but never found a soul who had read it or knew the ending. This tale makes a fine metaphor for summer. All that heat and drama, all those unresolved conflicts.

I have never wasted a summer, and I do not forget them. The heat imprints them on my brain. Winrers all run together in my mind. I am wearing turtlenecks, building fires, turning up the thermostat, stamping my feet, locking doors, thinking,
it can't be dark yet. It's only six o'clock
.

In dreams of summer, I am always on a sleeping porch. Crickets and tree frogs are singing. It is the middle of the night. I am wide awake, scratching my chigger bites, thinking of wasp nests I will destroy with my broom, grateful another day has passed without my being bit by a tick carrying Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, or, other, yet to be named and identified, diseases.

I
TURNED AROUND
the other day and realized that summer was beginning to end. Late August, early September. The leaves will change and I will return to my books. Time to learn something. Time to study stars or atoms or time itself. Not that time exists. It is a construct, like language or belief. I intend to stop believing in it.

It has been a wonderful summer in the small university town where I live. Children came to visit and stayed for weeks. They had parades and sang to me and slept without moving through the long, hot nights. I slept near them, dreamless, timeless, caught in the wonder of their lives.

The days run away like wild horses over the hills, a poet wrote. It is that keen ecstasy which ends as summer ends. Time to open my closet and look things over. Move the dark clothes a little closer to the front. The black wool suit, the tweed jacket, the cocktail dress. Serious clothes. Not these cotton rags I pull on in the morning and dust the piano with on my way to bed at night.

There is a roadrunner living on my roof. He moves from the old hickory tree at the back of the house to the hickory in the front yard. This is a well-established pathway, having served generations of squirrels. We knew he was in the neighborhood. Several people had sighted him. I myself had seen him once, running beside the fence line in the direction of a wooded lot behind the houses. There has been a plethora of development in our town. The wildlife is doing the best it can under the circumstances.

It was my lifelong devotion to the theatre which led to my discovering that the roadrunner was living on the roof. An eight year old named Aurora and an eight year old named William were in the bathroom putting on clown makeup for a clown show. “Will you put up the tent cover so the show can go on in case of rain?” they asked me. “Of course,” I answered. “Anything for art.”

I went outside and began to drag a set of steel tent poles along the concrete porch. The noise startled the roadrunner from his afternoon nap, and he came tearing down across the roof. He spread his six-foor wingspan and flew the length of the porch, amazing my Bavarian daughter-in-law, who clutched the baby to her breast, believing she had seen an American eagle.

Where will the roadrunner go when the leaves turn yellow and carpet the concrete porch? Perhaps he will still find a way to live in my yard. Perhaps he will go back down the hill and live in one of the houses the greedy contractors are building in the flood plain that used to be a woods and a pasture. People in my neighborhood have watched with great interest as the new drainage ditches have failed to carry away the water when it rains. Surely no one will buy a house built on the lowest place in ten square miles. Perhaps they will. Human nature is very strange and hard to understand. Perhaps I will turn into a social critic now that fall is near. I will go down there and put up a sign that says, DON'T BUY A HOUSE HERE UNLESS YOU WANT WATER IN YOUR BASEMENT.

What
will
I do now that fall is coming? The children have all gone home. I can't hide behind my grandmother plumage any longer. I have a book to write. And one that will be published in September. That should be enough for anyone. But this time of year is insatiable. It wants vastness and adventure. Some hard use. Learn the Chinese language. Build a cathedral. Do yoga. Study Zen. Stop desiring anything. Anger, Greed, Pride, Fear, Desire, the five daughters of Maya, King of Darkness.

Hurry up, fall is always saying. Time is growing short. We don't have forever. Except I don't believe that. We have whatever we decide we have. Weeks spent with children pass like hours. Months spent writing a book seem like a weekend. Hours wondering what to do next seem like eons. Minutes waiting for someone are a well-known eternity. The main thing is to keep moving. Keep the pace that children keep. They rise from sleep and move into a day like sunlight. They burn until they fall. We are tilting on our axis. We are tilting further from the sun. Cold days and long nights are waiting. Exciting. I will shake out my sweaters and my high-heeled shoes, get airline tickets to northern cities, get a flu shot, get ready.

Enough of all this leaf, flower, bole. Enough of watching my neighbors water their lawns. Fall is the time for flowering. Gather in the sheaves, take the goods to market. I want to see Angel Corella dance at the American Ballet Theatre. I want to fly to London and see
Richard III
. I want to work all morning and exercise in the late afternoons and watch the senators fight on C-Span. In short, I am waking up, here at the end of summer, in the temperate climes, on the planet earth, in the only world there is.