The Time of My Life (9 page)

Lucas worried about it for most of a week. Maybe the woman would never come back, but she might. Even if she didn't, somebody else might want to mail a child someday. Finally he phoned the Mail Classification Center at the main Dallas post office and asked for his wife, Carolyn, who works there. “Find out if it's legal to send a little boy through the mails,” he said.

“I thought it was the biggest joke in the world,” Mrs. Lucas said later. “But my husband swore the woman was serious, and one of the guys who work with me said he believed she was. He said he read somewhere that something like that had happened in England, and maybe that's where she got the idea. Maybe they can do things like that over there. England's postal system is entirely different from ours, you know.”

Mrs. Lucas wasn't certain mailing a child was prohibited here, either. She combed the rules and regulations of the Postal Service. Little boys weren't mentioned specifically, but she concluded he must be covered by Ruling 124.293B2: “No warm-blooded animals except day-old poultry are acceptable.”

“I couldn't imagine a little boy sitting there in the belly of a plane,” Mrs. Lucas said. “That would be frightening, and I don't think that part of the plane is even pressurized. We don't send baby chicks by plane. They go by truck.”

Maybe Customer Service told the woman that. Or maybe she got a better deal at UPS.

June, 1979

A Study in Courage

F
OR
THOSE
WHO
GREW
up with him, Albert Fryar was our symbol of courage and our evidence of the fickleness of the Fates and the fragility of life. He was our reminder that the awful things that happened to those people in the newspapers could happen to us, too, and that we were lucky if they didn't.

In the last days of the summer of 1951, in the first days of his eighth-grade year, Albert got polio. He went to his first few classes, then stayed home with what seemed to be the flu. When he didn't get better and his illness was diagnosed as what it was, Fort Davis was shocked, and then terrified. The disease had ravaged other parts of Texas every summer for years, but our town in the cool Davis Mountains had never experienced it. Polio was one of those things that happened only to other people.

Then Henry Dutchover got it and died, and Eddie Webster got it and died, and Lois Smith got it and walked with a limp and finally moved away, and Nell Rinehart got it and recovered and moved away, too, as almost all of us did after high school, in search of more education or jobs or spouses or adventure—all

the reasons young people leave small towns and go to bigger ones.

But Albert didn't die and didn't recover and didn't leave. He had suffered the worst kind of polio there was—the bulbar strain—and everybody expected him to die as Henry and Eddie did, but he surprised us. He endured iron lung and physical therapy and came home wasted and crippled, but alive. He resumed his life as fully as anyone can who is suddenly, inexplicably, burdened with braces, crutches, wheelchairs, and a body, face, and voice that didn't even resemble what he had been.

Fort Davis clasped him to its bosom as only a small town can—not pityingly nor condescendingly, but simply as one of its own who had gone away and come back. The teachers demanded as much from him as from the rest of us, the boys buddied with him, the girls dated him. Eventually he got rid of the crutches and the wheelchairs, and we got rid of our memories of what he had been and accepted him as he was. When he graduated, he went away to college like the rest of us, but he didn't stay long. He had never been much of a student, anyway. He came home and got a desk job with the highway department and won an award as an outstanding handicapped worker and then got laid off and never worked again.

Horace Crawford and Bill Young and I and Albert's other pals and girlfriends had gone away by then and didn't come back except to visit, so he became good friends with our younger brothers and sisters as they took our places in the band and on the football team and the student council, before they went away, too.

Then, as he grew older, he became friends with older men and women, for almost everyone in the town was either much younger or much older than he. I don't know at what age he made the switch.

The real passion of his life never changed, though. When he came home from the hospital, he acquired an ancient Ford, which became a rolling clubhouse for him and the rest of us. In it we sat at night on the banks of Limpia Creek and committed our adolescent sins: smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, telling dirty jokes. And with Albert steering and giving orders, we pushed the old car homeward down the winding mountain roads on those frequent evenings when it ran out of gas.

Cars—old ones, especially—became his life. He searched the countryside far and wide for ancient wrecks standing in yards and garages and bought them and hauled them to the shed he had built near the house where he lived with his father and mother. Then he searched again for the parts to make them run. In his shed, Albert was a sort of greasy wizard, struggling to restore life to rusty hulks that others had given up for dead. Watching him, I wondered secretly whether his bringing ruined machines back to life was a substitute for an impossible desire to repair his own wrecked body and make it run again.

I wondered a lot about him, secretly. During the years of our growing up, after his illness, I kept wanting to ask him what he had experienced, how he had felt through it all, what had made him go on. But I never got the nerve. And years later, when I was writing a novel about a polio epidemic in a smal town, a story in which one of the characters was partially modeled after him, I went to his house intending to ask. But again, nerve failed me.

Last summer, while my small sons pretended to drive his old cars, making childish engine noises with their mouths and honking the ancient horns, while Albert hobbled about his shop showing me prizes from his latest hunt and spouting his encyclopedic lore of automotive antiquity, I almost asked him if he had read the book, and if he liked it. But I didn't, and he didn't say.

Well, Albert is dead now. My mother called, in tears, to tell me he died quickly, unexpectedly, of a heart attack at age forty-one.

And all I can think to say is, Dear God, please give him what he deserves, finally.

June, 1979

To the Residents of
A.D. 2029

E
VERY
WRITER'S
SECRET
dream has been fulfilled for me. I know, as surely as anyone can know such things, that my works will be read fifty years from now. Well, one work, anyway.

This is because Collin County is about to dedicate a new courthouse and jail in McKinney, and somewhere in the vicinity of that structure the Collin County Historical Commission is going to bury a time capsule that will be opened in A.
D
. 2029, assuming that somebody's still around then, and that he can read. And I've been asked to contribute something to the capsule, probably because Mrs. Elisabeth Pink— the lady responsible for its contents—and I knew each other slightly long ago, in an era that by 2029 will be known as Prehistory. My contribution, Mrs. Pink's letter says, “could be either on our current status or what you think the future will hold.”

I wish I could report to the future that our current status is hunky-dory, that we live in the Golden Age of something or other. Until recently it was possible for Americans to believe that. There's no doubt that in the twentieth century, at least, the people of the United States have enjoyed the highest standard of living that the world has known up to this point in history. We've had so much of everything, in fact, that we've thought our supplies of the essentials of life—land, food, air, water, fuel—would last forever, and we've been wasteful. Sometimes we've even been wasteful of human life itself.

Lately, though, a sense of decline has set in. We've begun to realize that we're in trouble. We've poured so much filth into our water that much of it is undrinkable, and no life can live in it. Even the life of the ocean, the great mother of us all, is threatened. Scientists say the last wisp of pure, natural air in the continental United States was absorbed into our generally polluted atmosphere over Flagstaff, Arizona, several years ago. Parts of our land are overcrowded, parts neglected, parts abused, parts destroyed. We continue to depend on unrenewable resources—petroleum, natural gas, and coal—for most of the fuel that heats and cools our homes; runs our industry, agriculture, and business; and propels our transportation. We've suddenly discovered that those resources are disappearing forever. Without usable land, air, water, and fuel, food production would be impossible, of course. In addition, the United States and the Soviet Union are at this moment trying to make treaties that we hope will keep us from destroying all life and the possibility of life if we decide to destroy each other before the fuel runs out.

So I would classify the current status that Mrs. Pink mentions as shaky, which makes the outlook for the future—even so near a future as A.
D
. 2029— uncertain.

An uncertain future is no new thing, of course. The future has always existed only in the imagination, a realm of hope and dread with which we can do little more than play games. But the games sometimes become serious. The Europeans postulated another land across the ocean for centuries and then came and found it. Jules Verne traveled under the sea and to the moon in his mind many years before we could make the machines to catch up with him. If, as we say, Necessity is the mother of Invention, then Desire is the father of Possibility.

Because of man's amazing record of making his dreams come true, I refuse to be pessimistic about the future, despite the frightening aspects of the present. As long as we—both as a race and as a crowd of individuals—retain our capacity for dreaming, we also keep the possibility of doing. And when doing becomes necessary, we invent a means to do so. Especially when we're in danger, as we are now.

Some of our present dangers surely will be around in 2029, for they're part of being human. We're too far from solving poverty, disease, and probably even war to be done with them in another half-century. Collin County probably will still need its courts and its jail— maybe more courts and a newer, stronger jail.

But if my generation and my sons' generation do what we must to prolong the possibility of survival and the likelihood of this being read, most of the problems about which I'm worrying may seem quaint. If so, they'll be replaced by others that will seem as serious to those who gather to open the time capsule as mine do to me. Golden Ages exist only in retrospect, never for those who are trying to cope with them.

So for the beleaguered residents of 2029 I wish four things:

—A deeper understanding of history, to better avoid repeating the errors of the past, for if each generation keeps on inventing its own mistakes, some of the old ones will have to be thrown out.

—A healing of the schism between man and the rest of nature. Our present disrespect for the natural world is our most serious stupidity to date. We must realize that man can't long outlive the other living creatures.

—A wider and more profound appreciation of beauty. Music, poetry, pictures, and stories feed the soul as surely as wheat and meat and rice feed the body, and the soul of America is malnourished.

—A sense of humor. If man ever stops laughing at himself, he can no longer endure life, nor will he have reason to.

June, 1979

Listen to the Mockingbird

I
N MY
BACKYARD
is the greatest gift Texas can bestow on one of its residents, especially at this time of year. Not a swimming pool. A mockingbird.

Swimming pools, though nice, aren't free. They cost a lot of money to build, and more money and work to maintain. Better than owning a pool is having a friend who owns one and invites you over on hot days.

Mockingbirds, on the other hand, are free—so free that you can't even choose to have one. They choose you. I wish I knew how they make their choices.

I lived for a time in a place surrounded by beautiful trees, a sort of Walden Pond without water. One of the reasons I moved there was that I thought at least one mockingbird must live somewhere amongst all the lush foliage. Dozens of squirrels did, and a raccoon, several bluejays and cardinals, and, for a time, a black goat.

And grackles. Oh Lord. Sometimes thousands of them were whooping and hollering like the customers of the Texas Tea House on a Saturday night and befouling my stairs and my car and anything else they thought I might care about.

But never did I hear the mockingbird's song or spot his white-striped gray wings fluttering through the green.

Then I moved to a more typical North Dallas neighborhood, where sticks with five or six leaves on them are considered trees and anything that grows taller than a man is a wonder of nature. And I awoke one morning and discovered myself blessed. A mockingbird was singing outside my window.

There's no mistaking a mockingbird's song, and to compare it with any other is to do the mocker injury. While lesser birds do their best with the few notes at their command, the mockingbird's voice ranges over the whole musical landscape—dark and brooding as Beethoven or Mahler at times; at others as crystal bright as Vivaldi or Mozart; sometimes as raucous and lusty as Leadbelly.

Whatever his moods or mode, there's no confusing him with any other bird, for his virtuosity floods the air like rain, reducing the sky's other musicians to apprenticeship roles, even triumphing over the cars and motorcycles that roar along my street.

Lying abed and listening that first morning, I remembered the last mocker I had heard, last year during a soft summer night in the Davis Mountains. I had heard or read that a mockingbird sometimes sings all day and all night without ceasing and never repeating himself. I don't know how long this one had been at it, but it was near midnight when I stepped into the yard and after 2
A.M
. when I went to bed, and there was no hint of weariness or boredom in him yet. He ranged from meditative sonatas to labyrinthine fugues to bombastic proclamations, while nocturnal hunters fluttered mutely after their flies and gnats and meeker bird souls huddled among the dark branches, probably wishing to God he would shut up, but afraid to complain.