Fiction Spot: The Last Running Summer

THE LAST RUNNING SUMMER

Today, he has the memories of his childhood self running.  Running with his two legs.  Sometimes, he thinks those memories are dreams, fantasy images of a very young boy.  Sometimes the images are from the perspective of  himself running in his own body.  Sometimes he is the observer, dreams or memories of him running across the field with his cousins on those long, golden summer and autumn days.

He remembers the days that seemed to go on forever, the sun-scorched, coarse grass that was, in the later days of the season, slightly too long for the games of tag, touch football, kickball or whatever they chose on any given afternoon.  The days grew long, overlapping into dusk on that summer and fall stage of recollections.

The most vivid memories were of the games that played on even after the sun slipped below the horizon, lit by a lone utility light atop a pole not far from the house.  It was the kind of light they tell you about, warn you about in the middle of many country fields–the ones that they say not to walk to in an emergency because they look closer than they are–that one can parish  in the distant journey to that beacon whose welcome is illusion a siren especially in those snow-swept storms that used to visit the Midwest more than once each winter.

That summer and fall in 1965, Donny and his cousins benefited from the illusion that it was not time to come in for the supper the grownups ate while the playing kids’ plates cooled like the crispness of the first days of school that came after their fun.  Their parents let them play that summer–play past the small pangs of hunger forgotten amid the fun–or duty.  Past some bed times.  Past any concept of “future” that Donny’s four-year-old self could conjure.

They decided, between them, the grownups, that they would let the kids play–instruct the kids to play way beyond the regular boundaries of time, competition and exhaustion.  Some of the older kids knew.  The younger ones would know it time: know why, this summer, they were allowed to ignore the dinner bell, play past their hearts’ delight–play with respect for nothing except the rules of whatever game they were playing and a few bumps and bruises that often visit young bodies that run faster than the wind and the shouts of their names that sail the game into the next harbor of semi-organization.

And with respect for an attempt to let the little kids have as much fun as the bigger ones, especially Donny.
He remembers that summer, not knowing that his one shorter leg made him different.  The other kids saw him as  not much different than any other four-year-old who struggled to keep up with the faster, older kids, and not so different because everything about him was as normal as everything else the family and a few friends had always known about him.

The older cousins knew, partially from what their parents had shared with them, but more from overhearing hushed tones that the grownups felt forbidden to speak but felt the responsibility to share with each other: because that is the adults’ burden; or because they needed to talk through their fears; or because Donny’s problems were easier to talk about than their own problems, relationships, or shortcomings.  The older cousins, taking their first sip of grownup responsibility carried the burden of knowing why that summer, they played into the night, why they were told to play as long as Donny wanted to play, long beyond a four-year-old’s bed time.  As they grew older, they too carried memories of those days.

Donny remembers the illusion of running fast, an illusion created by the gentle prairie winds that blew across the golden fields and his still golden hair.  He was not fast. He was four.  He had one impossibly short leg.  He was the little cousin that the older kids made giggle and chased with no more speed than what would keep him in the game.

He did giggle–a lot.  He was happy.  It was the last summer when he had no inclination that there was anything wrong with his body and it was how the other kids saw him, just as kids see so many other truths with their naive intuition of integrity.

Soon, after the others were shuffled off to school, mostly out of sight and away from the taste of adult responsibility.  Almost like a poorly-kept secret, Donny would be shuffled off to what the doctors where sure was the right thing to do with The Impossibly Short Leg.  Sure that he would be better off without it.  Sure that the prosthesis which would be refitted many times over the course of his next decades, one that would fill his other pants leg the same as his longer leg, would be the best “cure” for Donny’s short leg and clubbed foot.

That fall, while his cousins and their friends played at recess, gym class, ran home from school, chased the girls, where chased by the boys who would otherwise imitate the football game they saw that weekend at the high school field or on television.  Meanwhile, the parents paced daily as if by doing so, they would come to some peace about the doctors’ decision or whether they explained what was about to happen to the little boy or their guilt over having caused Donny’s affliction or the curse that God had placed on their family: to have such an inflicted child.  Donny was having his shorter leg amputated, well above the knee.

Donny does not remember waking up from his surgery, nor the three others that were required before he could have a properly fitted prosthesis.  The encouragement given him by so many of the grownups didn’t register, subconsciously shutting down from the trauma, but giving the impression through his silence to the grownups that he was happy and taking this all in stride, taking care of grownup feelings.

He did not dwell on this change.  He avoided it as fiercely as he avoided the changes that came as his body introduced him to adolescence and avoided again when those changes brought on urges that he would not entertain because what girl wanted to be with a boy with only one leg?

When Donny was born, the nuns who served as the nurses in that Catholic hospital wondered to themselves and out loud, the same way as the disciples asked Christ of the lame man, was it the sins of his parents or the original sin of Donny that left him lame.  They, nor the doctors nor the parents waited for Christ to answer and, instead, wielded the tools God had left in their hands.

Jesus would have said, Donny’s condition is neither the result of his parents or his transgressions but exists in order that the glory and power of God can be demonstrated.  Or he would have said something like that, if our Bibles depict him honestly.  Then, he might have laid his hands on Donny, restoring the leg and showing his glory. Or maybe not.

The nuns, the doctors and the other well-meaning mortal sages were left with their own devices.  Whether they harbored notions that Donny’s parents’ sins brought them to this point, they made the best choice that their limited wisdom could see.  It was probably the right choice but could not have been as glorious as Jesus’.

The cousins would not see Donny again until Christmas at aunt Marilyn’s house–and this time, to them, Donny was “different.” This time, they felt sorry for him.  For the first time, they were fixed with the notion that there were things Donny could not do.  He was a new but familiar stranger and all of them were a little afraid.  The cousins did not know how to play with him.  They did not know how to talk with him.

The family’s  silence was matched by Donny’s who, that Christmas, spent most of his time in the big chair in the living room, next to the tree, mostly watching, with two shoes that hung identically beneath the cuffs of his brand new jeans.  Appearing unexceptional in his muted form, no one would ask of his condition, nor whose transgressions  were to blame, nor whose mortal glory might be stoked.

Midnight Drive from Nowhere

Sitting in the passenger seat of her blue Volvo 240 wagon, the wind animated her hair--hair that had lost all other life from the days of excessive heat and humidity. She was tired, wilted in the swelter. I clutched and shift into fifth gear, turned and see her happy and content.

The tassels of her deep brown locks swirled around her neck and face as disorganized as the rest of the world that had also wilted into a disarray.

We didn't mind. There comes a time in the heat wave when you just give up, realize that the starch in your shirt means nothing after a couple of minutes outside; that the potato salad might just be better left behind; that as hard as you try to protect yourself between the air conditioning of home and car or between car and work or wherever you are going.

Content with our state of disassemble, we sat wordless, headed to her home—or mine, from somewhere—I cannot remember. The destination was defined more by our momentary glances-- caught in between wafts of breeze and a passing car much more in a hurry than two lovers fine with each others' company.

Later, we would lie limp in bed, too hot to spoon, too hot to sleep, but not to hot to trace the space between us with a finger, a light touch through the heavy air.

What did we talk about? Religion, politics, the kids. The future. The past. The present.

The next morning, we wandered out the door, aimless, bearings confused by oppressive stew of weather. Maybe a shower before we found our first appointed stop, unable to tell, neither by how we felt or by memory, whether we had taken one the night before.

In this morning, I could not tell if we are happy, content, thrown back into the real world, unable to put off the facts in this start of the day. Unable to procrastinate those things that are so easy to forget in a cloud of a love. We would find that place of forgetting soon enough in each others' eyes, arms. And maybe a little bit of bravery to talk about those things, and religion, and politics, and love, and the kids, and work, and all those things that make all the questions that surround them so hard to answer.

Happy and content in our mortal, humble ignorance and relative wisdom. Happy to shift into neutral and let the rest of the world be in a hurry to solve the problems that have no answer.

Windows into Grandpa: Part 1

Age had left him to shuffle his feet as he walked across the floor in the duplex he built, the one in which he lived for half of his life. His words were hard for me to understand. It might have been because I was used to hearing Midwestern voices, his the New Orleans accent was too unfamiliar, another language that I strained to hear correctly. But it was really his advanced years, so many years that I, as a child, could not comprehend: So many years that even his wife, official records or any other family member could not be sure how many years it had been. So many years that I was constantly anxious to watch each step, each breath, afraid that he might die at any moment. I was as afraid to lose him as I was afraid that, as a mere child, I was not yet been equipped with the emotional and social tools to deal with such an event if it should happen in front of me. I was afraid of what I would do without him.

Our Grandpa did not always shuffle. As a younger man, and even into late middle age, he was a lean, tall, dark-skinned man with distinctive and strong features in his face and toned muscles that were apparent even under his well-dressed self. And a walk that needed no swagger because it was strong, true and belonged to a man whose beauty struck every set of eyes that were lain upon him. He had the respect of people to whom he gave love, care, and a benign fear of God.

I was afraid of grandpa, not because of what he might do, not afraid of any anger or wrath. As a young child, such a man was a strange sight to me. He seemed bigger than life, and the people who knew him, including my mom and the man who she married, treated him so. But as I grew older, I did not discover the secret to why this reverence persisted. I don't quite know how to explain it , except to tell you a few things that mother would often say about what it was like growing up with him.

Her mother, our Grandma, was a yeller and a spanker. She was larger than life in her own right, big enough to match with Grandpa, maybe his emotional opposite: a woman to fear because of the whippin' you might get if you stepped out of line.

Grandpa never yelled. He never spanked. Mom would say, as many whippins' and harsh words as she got from her mother, she feared nothing more than the possibility that she might disappoint her father. The wince of pain and the lingering fulfilled promise of, “I'll give ya a whippin' so bad, you won't be able to sit down for a week,” from her mom was nothing compared to the deep, dark, empty pang in her heart from letting her father down—a heart to be repaired, soon enough, by the his love and adoration.

Grandpa was a man of few words. Except on Sunday morning. Grandpa was a preacher, pastor of the Second Bright Morning Star Baptist Church in New Orleans, Louisiana.

It seemed like the rest of the week, he read his Bible. Wise eyes peered through large, thick glasses with heavy plastic frames. Quiet in a sea of darting grandchildren and dueling televisions, he sat with the leather-bound Bible, turning the white thin pages with his long, black fingers and thick, ivoried workman's fingernails. I could not imagine when or how this sagacious discipline was cultivated, nor how the dry words of his King James, which I knew well from my days in Baptist Sunday school, could be translated into the rocking sermon that brought the congregation to its feet, caused women to weep and played on well into the afternoon, even on the hottest of Louisiana summer days.

Long, hot summer Sunday mornings. Sermons too long for a small child who had, by a strange happening of fate's logistics, grew up in a sedate, Swedish Baptist church that had services that ended on the hour, leaving just enough time to linger in the foyer with fellow congregants and get home to take the roast out of the oven before it burned.

Grandpa's sermons: too foreign coming from this creature in whose image I was made, Grandpa talking words, like music, that I could not believe were supposed to come out of a human. Sounds so rich and deep, like the most complicated jazz baritone. Too complicated for that small child to decipher.

Grandpa was old, not just in the eyes of a child who could not imagine being “so old.” The years of hard work at a cement factory made use of his long, strong arms, but also consumed his joints and left him with black lung disease. Years of upkeep on the rental properties he owned, the hauling, pounding, digging and mending did as well.

Rock and roll is a powerful thing.  Most people don't know why.  I am not sure, either, but it has more to do with the black church than any of us will admit.  Grandpa was not a fan of rock and roll.  He was not a fan of dancing.  He did not follow Little Richard, Elvis, Bobby Darin or the Beatles.  He did not want to. He did not have to.

The Sunday morning sermon was not the fare of the 17-year-old "Me Generation" teeny-bopper, on the first slope of adolescence, first taste of love's desire, barely off her parents' good-girl leash.  My not-so-vague notions of what whipped girls into a frenzy moments before and after Ed Sullivan introduced the Beatles "I Wanna Hold Your Hand;" or the swiveling hips of Elvis that the camera was only allowed to leave to the imagination of the television audience, pale in comparison to the rocked emotions of a dozen women wearing white in the front pews each Sunday whose lives had already lived bigger sparks of excitement, toil, tears and care than the Sullivan girls would ever feel, even into their old age. 

Sunday morning was not teeny-bopper tame.  Against a backdrop of furniture dressed in Jesus' royal red velvet, behind the pulpit, before the choir, with sunlight streaming in the east windows, Grandpa would rise, dressed in a the sharpest of suits draped over his lean and angular frame.

The sermon—the whole spectacle was hell-defying. It had to be. I did not know at the time, how much even there, in that church, in that neighborhood where if felt comfortable to be black, and at the same time, uncomfortable to be not black enough—that the people who toiled in that sea of humidity, heat and racial strife where profoundly aware of all of this at every moment. The songs, the preaching had to be potent enough to at least hint at some well of salvation and freedom from the present day, heart-hardened Pharaoh.

If Grandpa could defy hell and the apartheid under which his reign dwelt, it would be no problem to move the emotion of more than a few women, no problem to make them “fall out” in their pew, or save them, if for no longer than they could sit in their Sunday best for those few hours each week.

These were attentions that Grandpa would mostly ignore, but Grandma—she would not.

It is said that jazz is that thing that came to birth when European instruments got into the hands of the African diaspora.  It lead to the blues.  It lead to rock and roll.  It lead to a Godawful fear about what was going to happen to the piano and horn lessons that were given to the nice children of middle America: a Godawful fear that this dark music would make their children forget their fear of God.  So it is with the King James Bible.  European instrument of Protestant politics, corrupted in the hands of the Diaspora, what would it sound like?

In the hands of grandpa, King James did not sound as the King intended.  He sat in quiet, most afternoons, with the Bible on his lab, gently turning the onion skin pages, thumbing through the Exodus, the temples, the acceptance of Ruth, prophet after prophet, angle's visit after angel's visit, a birth, life and death, rise from the dead, redemption, sweet redemption.  

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Fiction Flash: Pulling My Summer Kisses

She used to call me, minutes away from my house. Actually more like a hour after having called earlier to say she would be by in 20 minutes. She wanted to walk in all kinds of weather, usually too late at night for a good end of a day. I got in the habit of saying yes. Long walks. I would listen to her talk.

She would say that I walked fast enough, long enough legs to keep a pace that gave her the exercise she needed. She spoke as swiftly as our legs would carry us. I listened, sometimes with care, sometimes with frustration, sometimes with love, and sometimes because that is what I do.

And some days, I would not listen, wonder if I had heard it all before, wonder why she thought explaining it a second and third time would make the story different (even if the names and places were not the same), thinking that maybe I had her same problem years before and why the world had not ridden itself of it by then. I wondered if I was frustrated by her or by myself—because maybe it was just me who had not ridden myself of life's chronic impediments.

Late summer nights with my friend were easiest. Some, I still remember. Let me see. Was it that first summer night lying in the grass in the middle of the nearby college campus or another a few years later? Not sure which one to remember and which to forget.

I don't remember how she described what happened on that later summer walk. Something about the rain. Something about my arms. Something about how hard it is to let someone love her. Something about it being easier to be with someone who treated her poorly than the fear of being with someone who she might disappoint. I said nothing about my fears of the same.

That first summer walk, we lie on the grass, me wondering if I should kiss her. I am still wondering. Instead I just turned periodically to watch her gaze at the sky. I gazed at the sky, too, even though the city lights washed out the night-sky sparkle. Where do we look in those awkward moments? And somehow my mind made this moment into an episode akin to spending an entire dinner looking at a date's earring—too shy to look in the eye; too modest to be caught looking lower.

I was so much more grown up then.

I didn't know how much she wanted me to kiss her. Neither of us realized at the time how much easier life would have been if we had left that later paused walk moment as undisturbed as the first. Years later, on that rainy night, we would fall in deeper than a mere kiss. Rain. Arms. Complicated longings unnecessarily confused by conflicting emotions, sensibilities, and circumstances to avoid.

But that first night was fine the way it was, in the grass with the summer night sky. Hardly a soul crossing campus, no rolling traffic, and no singing katydids. Just the appropriately paralyzing cacophony running through our heads, our shy modesty staring at the summer night sky.