The Time of My Life (6 page)

In my closet at home is a rectangular box made of cardboard, and inside the box is a peacock made of bright red, blue, and yellow silk stretched over a frame of bamboo. The peacock can lie in such a small box because his wings are detachable, and his legs are hinged in the middle. He doesn't look like much, lying in the box like that.

But if I were standing on Flagpole Hill, the peacock would have his wings, and they would be fluttering in the wind. His legs would be latched rigid, and the long silk streamers that serve as his tail would be flowing, and he would be straining to leap out of my hand.

As soon as I let him go, other kite-flyers would turn their eyes away from their own kites and look at him. The children on the seesaw would stop their seesawing and watch him. The Vietnamese family cooking hotdogs under the trees near the flagpole would leave their picnic table and come and ask me if I mind if they stand close and watch, and I would say I don't mind. The father would say that they haven't seen a kite like that since they left their home in Vietnam, and I would say it came from China, and he would say, yes, I know that.

They would watch me make the peacock dance in the sky, and then my sons would make him dance, and each time he would come down he would land on his feet and fall gracefully into the grass. After a while the Vietnamese children would take their turn, too. I would explain to their father that I keep the peacock on a fairly short string because I couldn't get another like him, and I don't want to crash him into the trees. The father would say, yes, and he's a small kite, and it would be a shame to fly him so high that we couldn't see his colors.

The children would make the peacock dance for a long time, and the eyes of the Vietnamese father and mother would follow it carefully, softly, as if they were remembering something.

I had such a day a couple of years ago. And although I've flown kites all my life, it was then that I realized what a marvelous thing Archytas or the Malayans or the Chinese or whoever it was that in vented kites had done. And I wondered why nobody ever erected a monument to that event.

But a marble kite would be kind of ridiculous, I guess. You couldn't even crash it into a tree.

March, 1979

The Widow's Cane

N
OW AND THEN
a story comes along that restores your faith in human nature. Someone risks his own life to save a stranger. A guy pays a library fine that he has owed for forty-five years. A couple with eighteen children of their own adopt an orphan of another race. News like that brightens our day and makes us proud to be members of mankind.

I've been hoping something like that would happen to Mrs. Gladys Roundtree, whose small ad has run for more than a week now in the lost-and-found column of the classified section.

Lost antique hand-carved wooden walking cane with gold head, address of Mrs. Trabue, Carthage, Tx, on the knob. Bus stop Main & St. Paul. Has sentimental value. Reward. 824-6404, 235-5291
.

The cane doesn't belong to Mrs. Trabue of Carthage, but the gold knob—a little bigger than a golf ball—and the mother-of-pearl shaft connected to it used to be part of her umbrella, back when umbrellas were things of beauty and part of every stylish woman's wardrobe. Mrs. Trabue is long deceased now, and her daughter, Mrs. Roundtree, will be ninety years old, come September.

“I'm old,” she said, “and almost blind. I wear two contact lenses, and one of them doesn't work too well. I wear a hearing aid in one ear. I'm practically immobile without something to lean on, but I can still ride the bus downtown and do my errands.”

On March 5, Mrs. Roundtree took the bus downtown and went to her bank to cash a check. Part of her money was in her coin purse, she said, and part still in the envelope the bank had given her. She was standing at the bus stop at Main and St. Paul, waiting to catch the Gaston Avenue bus back home. Because of her poor eyesight, she didn't see the bus approaching until it was very near, and its door opened before she had counted out her fare from the pennies, nickels, and dimes in her purse and the envelope. In her haste and confusion, she leaned her gold-headed cane against the newspaper box at the corner and for got it when she stepped onto the bus.

“The bus went about five blocks before I missed my cane,” she said. “I got off at once and waited on the corner for the next bus back to Main and St. Paul. I got back in about fifteen minutes, I guess, but the cane was gone. I went into the card shop near the bus stop and asked the lady behind the counter if she had seen anyone pick it up, but she said she hadn't. I looked for the policeman on the block, but I couldn't find him.”

So Mrs. Roundtree boarded the Gaston bus again and went home and spent the next couple of days on the phone. She called the police. She called the pawn shops. She called every lost-and-found place she could think of—six of them. She called the newspaper and placed her ad.

The gold knob and mother-of-pearl shaft that belonged to Mrs. Trabue of Carthage would alone have justified all the effort. It apparently is a very elegant cane. But the advertised “sentimental value” of the cane went far beyond the knob.

“My son, who was a doctor at Rusk State Hospital, took the handle of my mother's umbrella and made it the head of a walking cane for me,” Mrs. Roundtree said. “It was a lovely cane, of sycamore, beautifully carved and varnished. I don't know whether he made it himself or had someone make it for him, but he in tended to give it to me for Christmas in 1977. But just before Christmas—on December 19—he was killed in an automobile accident near Weatherford. We found the cane in his room later.”

Since then, her son's last gift has been her dearest possession. “It made walking such a pleasure,” she said. “It gave me such a warm feeling. I felt that my mother and my son were helping me walk, you see. Every time I walked down the street, I had beautiful thoughts of them, and of them helping me.”

Mrs. Roundtree doesn't believe her cane was picked up by another elderly lady who has trouble seeing buses and walking, and she can't imagine what value it would have for a thief. She still hopes its finder is looking for her and will return it when he learns who lost it. “There's a reward,” she said. “It's not a big one. I live on Social Security, and I don't have much to give. But there is a reward.”

So far, though, the police haven't called to tell her a thief has been caught. No pawnbroker has reported the cane's presence at his window. No lost-and-found person has announced its recovery. No one has re plied to the ad. Mrs. Roundtree's life has lost a lot of its pleasure, and a gentle anger sometimes creeps into her voice.

“Whoever took it will have to answer for it sooner or later, won't they?” she said. “They'll face the Lord, and He will ask them why they didn't return my cane, and they'll have a hard time answering, won't they?

“Oh, I can get another cane and walk,” she said. “The thing I miss is the warm feelings that cane gave me. I'll never again feel like my mother and my son are helping me. I feel like I've lost them all over again.”

March, 1979

Einstein in the Davis Mountains

O
VER
THE
YEARS
, I haven't spent much time thinking about Albert Einstein and his theories. The word
physics
has always sounded ominous to my ear, like
leprosy
or
hookworm
. If someone said to me, “Poor Lucas died of physics the other day,” I would believe it. And through all my years of high school, college, and graduate school, I avoided physics like, well, like the plague.

The word
mathematics
produces the same effect in my mind. “The mathematics has old Cora down in the back again” makes perfect sense to me.

Although I wasn't as successful in avoiding mathematics as physics, I got off with a light case. My al gebra teacher taught me that
x
stands for something unknown, but I remain serenely uncurious about the mystery, preferring to think of
x
as the middle letter in “Texas.”

Oh, I've been aware of Einstein. His picture was on the cover of
Life
once. A kid who made better grades than the rest of us was called “Einstein.” There was a sneer in our way of saying it. Somehow I heard of “the theory of relativity,” and as I grew older and better educated, I learned that Einstein (the original, at Princeton) had won the Nobel Prize, that he had something to do with the invention of the atomic bomb, and that some people thought “E equals mc
²
” was a major breakthrough in something or other. To me, it just looked like a more complicated version of
x
, so I ignored it.

But I watched a two-hour program called “Ein stein's Universe” on TV the other night for two reasons: (1) ever since
Quo Vadis?
I've watched every thing with Peter Ustinov in it, and (2) the program was filmed at McDonald Observatory, north of Fort Davis, and I never turn down a chance to look at the Davis Mountains.

I was pleased to notice that the BBC had the foresight or good fortune to film the mountains early in the fall, while they were still lush green from the good rains they got last summer. And I was glad to see that Ustinov seemed as puzzled by the astronomers' explanations of things celestial as I was when I used to drive up Mount Locke to peer through McDonald's big telescope at some blob that looked less like a star to me than a splattered bug on a windshield. The actor's responses to many of the scientists' lectures seemed to be British equivalents of “Well, I'll be durned,” which is what I used to say.

I wish I could report that I understand “E equals mc
²
” a lot better now than I used to. But the scientists' explanations—reduced to the most elementary language possible, I'm sure—just confused me and made me a little less comfortable with the way things apparently are.

Although my comprehension of Isaac Newton's physics is almost as hazy as my knowledge of Ein stein's, I've always been satisfied with my sort of comic-book understanding of his theories. I like the apple falling on Isaac's head. I admire his straight beams of light, his space that stretches as open and true as a Panhandle road, his time that moves at the same pace everywhere, his universe that works like a clock. I understand clocks. As long as you keep them wound up, they keep ticking, measuring out time in a sensible, reliable way.

But it ain't so, says Albert. Light curves, space is closed, time moves at different rates, depending on the circumstances, clocks mislead. And, the post-Einstein astronomers say, there are black holes out there, waiting, waiting to swallow everything, even light itself. Those indigestible tidbits, combined with the undeniable historical evidence that atoms, when split, make big booms, portray Einstein's universe as a pretty scary place.

Because it was filmed in the Davis Mountains, though, there were things in the program to which I could comfortably relate.

The mountain peaks in the distance behind Ustinov and the astronomers and their explanations—they're old friends of mine. I know them all by name, and although the scientists said that the rocks in their in nards are moving like the tides, they remain my symbol of constancy and eternity.

And the warped pool table that Ustinov used to demonstrate Einstein's theories—I'm sure I used to shoot eight ball on it in Alpine. I learned pool on that table, in fact, and the balls behaved for me just as they did for Ustinov, circling inexorably toward the center, away from the pockets. My game was so influenced by that table that now, more than twenty years later, pool balls I shoot even on flat tables circle in that same way, abhorrent of sides and corners.

And, finally, the Fort Davis—Marfa highway. That was where the motorcyclists roared back and forth, viewers will recall, while the scientists tried to explain motion and light and time to the baffled Ustinov. Every hill, every fence post, every yucca along that stretch of pavement is familiar to me. I used to speed along it very like the cyclists, in fact, but in a 1953 Plymouth.

Having shunned physics and short-shrifted mathematics, I had no idea that I was demonstrating Einstein's theory of relativity. I thought my urgency had something to do with girls.

March, 1979

Why Bosses Don't Like Cats

“W
HO THE HELL
does
like cats?” asked
Town & Country
, the magazine for rich people. And nobody did, at least among the presidents of two hundred top American corporations.

Napoleon hated cats, too. So did Hitler. I recall no U.S. president who was partial to cats. Franklin Roosevelt's Fala, Richard Nixon's Checkers, Lyndon Johnson's beagles—dogs every one. If there has ever been a cat in the White House, it seems to have escaped the notice of history and the media.

Town & Country
offers an explanation, of sorts. “Give the millionaire executive, banker, even lawyer, a dog to train, a horse to school and perhaps a parrot to teach. Fine. All are in the realm of a structured, orderly way of life.”

Balderdash.

I know of no more structured, orderly animal than the cat. A cat doesn't like to get its feet wet. It keeps itself clean with a diligence that many humans would do well to copy. If it leaves the backyard, no posse is needed to find it, for it always comes back. All it requires of the coinhabitants of its household is food, water, and a clean litter box. It knows where the best sun falls into its dwelling at various times of day, and it can be found in those places at those times. It knows where the best shade is, too, and the best views from the windows. A cat doesn't terrorize children, bite the mailman, or leap upon guests. It doesn't make incessant noises at the moon and turn neighbors into enemies. It can be left alone over weekends without de stroying the house.

Cats require less fuss and worry than goldfish, yet they rival the more troublesome dog as companions. They're certainly less costly than horses and more affectionate than parrots or hamsters and more socially acceptable than monkeys or boa constrictors.