The Time of My Life (10 page)

The next morning he was still there, perched at the top of the same old elm, as vainglorious as before. I wondered if he ever slept.

My Dallas mockingbird apparently takes a siesta in the heat of the day. Or maybe he's just more considerate than his country brother. He's silent during the torrid hours, when man and beast and bird are seeking shade and coolness and quiet, saving his song for an attentive audience.

On weekend mornings when the weather is right for brunch on the patio, he performs from some place in the alley near our fence, so my lady and I need not miss a single note while at table. We have our eggs and wine to the melody of our own tiny chamber orchestra.

And in the evening, when the sun has gone behind whatever horizon it can find and its light has lost its ferocity, the mockingbird perches atop a utility pole across the street—surely the highest point in the neighborhood—in such a way that his trim profile is silhouetted against the orange and blue darkening sky.

There, as he watches the light go and night come, he meditates. His soft, musing music is in the lower registers—cello and double bass and French horn, as opposed to the violins and trumpets of the morning. And I imagine him in a sweet, melancholy frame of mind, regretting missed opportunities, mourning lost loves, contemplating death and eternity.

It's at those times that I almost think I understand the mockingbird and his choices, why he prefers the solitary elms in West Texas and a North Dallas utility pole to the translucent green tunnels of the woods.

The woods are too small and close to contain his music and his thoughts. Only the sun and clouds and moon are setting enough for his performance. Only the great blue dome itself is stage enough for his magnificence.

It's the sky he needs.

July, 1979

Mockingbirds: The Other Side

N
ORTH TEXAS
, I'm pleased to report, is full of people who love mockingbirds. After writing a piece a couple of weeks ago expressing my admiration and affection for the mocker who lives in my neighborhood, I received letters from readers in Argyle, Honey Grove, Balch Springs, and Kaufman, and even a couple from hurly-burly Dallas, all relating mockingbird stories and expressing love for the music of our official state feathered friend.

“Isn't this nice?” I thought. “Amidst the toil, turmoil, anxiety, and desperation of our hectic modern society, there are still those who appreciate the peace and beauty of nature, who pause from their grinding daily routines to drink in the sweetest music this side of heaven. Such response to a tiny creature of the air pumps new courage into my tired heart. At this moment I feel hope blazing anew under the cold ashes of my cynicism and general disgruntledness.”

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.

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

H
AVING
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

M
y 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.

Our adopted hometown, Fort Davis, was kind to us. We had a happy childhood there and made our contributions to the town and church and school. At one time the five of us constituted almost a fourth of the tiny high school band. We got along with both the Anglo and Mexican-American factions in the school, who were often at loggerheads in those days, and we sometimes wound up as compromise candidates for various offices and honors. One year, as president of the band, I had to kiss my own sister during halftime ceremonies at the homecoming football game. She had been elected band sweetheart.

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?