The Time of My Life (12 page)

It has been that way, I guess, since the beginning, which was in 1888, when a little Tennessean named William Benjamin Bloys wanted to be a Presbyterian missionary to India but was turned down because he wasn't healthy enough. His church sent him west as a missionary to the cowboys instead. I don't know how healthy one had to be to go to India in those days, but traveling Bloys's territory—all of Texas west of the Pecos—on horseback must have required a little stamina, it seems to me.

Noticing that it was awfully hard to get cowboys to come indoors for anything, Bloys preached outdoors on the ranches. And as more and more ranch families began requesting his services, he decided to hold a camp meeting and chose Skillman Grove, a popular campsite of the Overland Trail stagecoach drivers and soldiers, as a central location for it.

All the families thirsting for the Word weren't Presbyterian, and Bloys's decision to make his camp meeting interdenominational may account for the general lack of sectarian rivalry in the region. To this day, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) ministers alternate in the pulpit at the campground, and—with many additions over the years—they still preach to the same families Bloys preached to in 1890. The Baptists, perhaps believing that Baptist cowboys needed more preaching than others, started their own, additional camp meeting thirty-one years later.

Many descendants of the original cowboys don't live on the ranches anymore, of course. They leave comfortable homes and churches with stained-glass windows in Dallas and Houston and Albuquerque and Phoenix, drive hundreds of miles to the camp ground, don the boots and hats of their heritage, and reaffirm their familial and religious ties to the place. For some, no doubt, a week-long dose of religion is enough to last all year, as it was for many of the cowboys. For others, it's the main event on a crowded church calendar.

For still others lately the Paisano and Bloys camp meetings have become something else: a chance to look at the natives and eat a free meal before they move on to the next tourist attraction. The natives don't really mind tourists dropping by, especially those who make at least a token donation for the food they consume. But they
do
mind those who park their campers on the fringe of the campground for the entire week, eat the faithful out of house and home, and never attend a service.

That, they say, isn't very Christian.

August, 1979

Disarming the Airport Kid

T
HE
KID
WAS
SEVEN
years old, a redheaded, freckled type wearing boots and a cowboy hat. Anyone could see that he was an experienced traveler. He swung his bag onto the conveyor belt of the airport security X-ray machine with the casual flair of a rodeo hand hefting his saddle onto one more bronc. The canvas bag was a tattered thing with a broken strap, held shut by a piece of cotton rope.

The woman assigned to keep hijackers off planes at Midland's airport gazed at the X-ray screen, her eyes narrow with suspicion. “You got anything besides toys in there?” she asked in her official voice.

“No, ma'am,” the kid replied.

“Well, there's something funny about one of them toys. I'm going to open that bag.”

She untied the rope and rummaged among crayons, glue bottles, comic books, crumpled bits of paper covered with childish drawings, and pieces of those cheap plastic toys that the Taiwanese design to fall apart as soon as a kid tries to play with them. She eyed each piece disapprovingly, as if wondering what kind of parent would let a kid lug such trash aboard a big, important airplane full of important attache cases full of important papers.

“I could swear I saw…,” she muttered under her breath. She squinted like a nearsighted grandmother threading a needle. The line behind the kid was growing, but she didn't care. Here it is!” she said at last. She groped to the bottom of the bag and came up with a blob of red plastic, about three inches long. “You can't carry this on the plane.”

“I carried it down here on the plane,” the kid said.

“Well, you can't carry it back.” the woman said. “You can't take guns on a plane.”

It was a water pistol of vaguely space-age design, of the type that hangs in plastic bags on racks in supermarkets and convenience stores. It had a white plastic trigger, but no more resembled a gun than the kid resembled Yasser Arafat.

“It just shoots water,” the kid said. “It's not even loaded.”

“It's still a gun,” the security woman said. “And you can't take guns on airplanes, no matter what kind they are.”

“What do you want me to do with it?” the kid asked.

“Take it back to the lobby and give it to whoever brought you here.”

“We're all going on the plane,” the kid said, indicating his father and brother behind him.

“Throw it away, then. It's The Rules.”

The kid's father was about to protest, but the kid waved him away. “It leaks, anyway,” he said. He carried the pistol to the waste basket near the security gate, dropped it in, gathered up his toy bag, and started down the corridor.

But the security gate beeped when his brother stepped through. The woman made him empty his pockets, in which he was carrying a travel alarm clock in a plastic case. It was ticking. “Okay, go ahead,” the guard said.

What went through her mind during that interchange? I wondered. Did she suspect that the redhead was a miniature terrorist who, once aloft, would pull the red plastic water pistol on the flight attendant and demand to be flown to Six Flags? If that were his scheme, wouldn't the cotton rope be more effective than the little toy? Might he not bind the attendant and hold her hostage? Or hang the pilot?

What about the mysterious liquids in the father's shaving kit? Nitro? What about the ticking alarm clock? Shouldn't she have X-rayed that? Couldn't it be a bomb? Unlikely, but more likely than a .45 disguised as a red plastic water pistol.

Maybe none of those possibilities inhabited her skull, or she's simply one of the tribe that governs us so much of our time now, one of the robots stationed at the intersections of our lives to see that we obey The Rules. There's no room in such heads for reasons, for explanations, certainly no room for exceptions and no time for courtesy. There's only room for The Rules.

Maybe The Rules don't mention cotton ropes or after-shave lotion or alarm clocks, but they do mention guns. And a gun is a gun, even if it's made of red plastic, even if the X-ray shows it's as empty as the security guard's head, even if it leaks. And, as the kid was experienced enough to know, when a robot says, “It's The Rules,” it's pointless to argue.

August, 1979

Pussycat and Mockingbird

I
WISH
I
WERE
a naturalist, so that I could explain what's going on in my yard, or at least understand it.

Loyal readers know that my fief is inhabited by two beasts of the nonhuman persuasion: a cat and a mockingbird. At least I still think of them as nonhuman.

Having grown up in country where animals—even horses and dogs, those favorites of sentimentalists— serve utilitarian purposes, I don't usually indulge in anthropomorphism, enlarging the circle of
homo sapiens
to include creatures with feathers and fur. Pet banty roosters, I learned early, eventually wind up on the dinner table, and pet pigs go to their rest as cracklings and bacon and ham and lard. Good dogs are meant for hunting, and those useless ones that hang around the house and follow the kids around and get petted and stroked sneak off at night to run in packs and be poisoned by sheep ranchers. Horses and men in that environment are natural enemies. I never knew a horse that wanted to spend the day under the sun with a bit in his mouth and a woolen blanket and a saddle and a man on his back.

Years in cities weaken one's understanding of the natural order of things, I guess. And maybe the wild streak that remains in even the most docile of domesticated animals is diluted further by constant contact with man, away from others of their own kind.

Pussycat, for instance, originated in as wild an environment as can be imagined—a New York City alley—but spent years on Park Avenue. When she moved to Texas, she would sit for hours in the living room window, gazing at the crape myrtle and the chattering birds in it as if trying to remember—“I think I'm supposed to do something with that swaying green thing…but what? Something tells me I should want those feathery things…but why?”

For her the yard soon became what it was for me and the lady who came with her—a place for lying in the sun—and she more and more frequently responded to our sweet-talk in tones that sounded eerily like conversation. Her natural cat sounds were employed only with neighbors of the feline male gender who would drop by to ask her how it was going and what she was doing Saturday night. Her replies were so nasty and final that even her most persistent suitor—a long-legged, orangish fellow with more energy than grace—stopped coming around.

Pussycat, we concluded, had decided she was human.

Mockingbird, however, remained a wild spirit, darting constantly from front yard to back, down the alley, across the street to his favorite utility pole, guarding his territory with the ferocity of a Scot, spilling his songs with the profligacy of a drunk who has inherited a distillery. Like Bobby Burns, he was redeemed from common rowdiness only by the beauty of his music.

I don't know when the two met. They were first observed together on the patio—he in the tree that branches over the fence and shades the table, and she on the back step. They were making noises at each other, and we surmised a territorial dispute. The tree was his, we imagined Mockingbird saying. Okay, but the step was hers, Pussycat was replying.

The second meeting we saw was in the front— Mockingbird in the crape myrtle, Pussycat sunning atop the low brick wall near the door. The bird's single shrill note, repeated and repeated, filled the living room. If Pussycat answered, we couldn't hear her through the glass. She seemed to be trying to ignore him, but the tip of her tail, which was draped over the wall and out of sight of the bird, flicked, flicked. Why? Was she angry? Upset? Was latent feline instinct stirring at last, urging her to the attack and the taste of warm blood? There was no telling. When she came inside, she didn't mention Mockingbird.

Then, the other afternoon, when the sun was at its lowest and hottest, I slouched at the patio table, musing sweatily on life's puzzlements, while Pussycat lounged on the sill above the geranium, apparently sleeping. Wings fluttered into the tree above me, and she raised her head and looked at Mockingbird, and he looked at her.

He sounded a single, strong, clear note in which I heard neither proclamation nor warning. She responded with a call she had never used in our conversations with her or her scolding of the rejected suitors. Her jaw trembled like the chin of a soprano reaching beyond her range.

Mockingbird repeated his note.

Pussycat repeated hers.

He repeated his.

She repeated hers.

Oblivious to me, they sang their two-note antiphony on and on. Then, as suddenly as he had arrived, Mockingbird fluttered away, and Pussycat asked to be let into the house.

Has she tired already of being human? Does she aspire now to birdhood? Has she finally found her lover, and is he teaching her to sing?

I wish I understood, so I could explain.

September, 1979

A Sad Little Note

K
EN
KESEY
WAS
LATE
for his appearance at North Lake Community College, and the house was packed, and the audience was beginning to squirm. So Kesey's co-star for the evening, Larry McMurtry, stood up and offered to answer questions. Any question about literature or writers or writing, any question at all.

One student asked him if he thought literature and writers and writing were becoming obsolete, I mean, with movies and TV and all. And McMurtry said he didn't think so. Maybe books were “out” for a generation or two because of the wretched way literature was being taught, with the teachers making students dissect a book for symbols and whatnot so that reading was no fun and turned a lot of kids off. But teaching has improved during the past fifteen years or so, and reading is “in” again because more people are discovering that reading is a pleasure that can't be had any other way, and it's also one of the less expensive pleasures these days.

The row in front of me was full of students busily taking notes on everything McMurtry said, including the fact that McMurtry and Kesey had met in a writing class at Stanford University many years ago and had become friends but hadn't seen each other in a long time because Kesey lives on the West Coast and McMurtry on the East Coast.

I became interested in the things the students were writing down and wondered why they were writing down such things. Were they expecting a pop quiz after Kesey arrived and he and McMurtry had finished doing whatever they were going to do? “Where and when did Kesey and McMurtry meet, and why don't they get together more often now?” I imagined one of the new, improved English teachers asking. And those students, having memorized their notes, would all make A's.

The note that really made me nervous, though, and tortured my mind the rest of the night, was carefully penned by the young man sitting directly in front of me. He held his note pad in exactly the same position on his lap throughout Kesey's long reading and McMurtry's second, final, question-and-answer session, and my eyes kept wandering down over his shoulder and sticking at the same place.

“Reading,” the young man had written, “is pleasure.”

McMurtry had said that, all right, and I agreed with him. Having grown up in that primitive “linear” time when print was king, I never became a resident of Marshall McLuhan's “global village” of TV and cinema, although I enjoy visiting it from time to time. I still remember the joy of reading
Treasure Island
, the first “real” book I attempted, and the feeling of regret that came over me when I finished it. I wished the adventures of Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver could go on and on. But soon I discovered that other books were filled with other people's adventures and thoughts and love and beauty, and I was hooked on reading forever.