The Time of My Life (15 page)

You try again. Ah. It rings. Click. Ah. A voice.

“This is Southwestern Bell….” The recording completes its seven-second speech and hangs up. You call back, as the recording advises you, eight or nine times. Sometimes you get a busy signal. Other times you get the recording that tells you to call back.

At last a human voice answers. You're so surprised that it takes you a moment to collect your thoughts. No, you don't want a phone in every room of your house, you tell the lady. A couple will do. You make your choices from the cornucopia of styles and colors that Southwestern Bell has available.

She asks for your social security number. Why does she want your social security number? you ask. She says you can't get a phone without a social security number. You give her your social security number.

She asks for the name of a relative to contact. You're fifty-two years old and don't stay in very close contact with your relatives yourself. Why does Southwestern Bell need the name of a relative to contact? you ask. You can't get a phone without a relative to contact, she says, so you give her the name of your sister. You hope your sister won't mind Southwestern Bell calling up to chat now and then.

Time passes. Problems arise. You can't find time to go to the phone center and pick up your phones. What to do? Southwestern Bell probably has given up on you, you think. Maybe you should call and replace your order. This is a mistake.

One day you come to work and find a note on your desk. Mrs. X at Southwestern Bell in McKinney wants you to call her as soon as possible. You call. You get a busy signal. You call again. Busy signal. And again. The same. And again.

Ah. It rings. And rings. And rings. It rings thirty-one times. Nobody answers. Not even the recording. You go to lunch.

When you return, there's another note on your desk. Mrs. X at Southwestern Bell wants you to call immediately. If you don't, Southwestern Bell can't give you a phone. So you call. Busy. You call. Busy. You call. Busy.

Ah. It rings. Click. Ah. A voice. Is it…? No, it's
not
the recording!

It's a
human
voice!

“Is this Mrs. X?”

“No, Mrs. X is busy.” But it's a feminine voice, a pleasant voice, a kind voice. You decide to tell the lady your problems. You tell her about the busy signal. You tell her about the recording that hangs up on you. You tell her how upset you've been.

“I know it's terrible,” she says. “This office services McKinney and Lewisville and The Colony and Allen and….” She names several other North Texas towns. “It's a fast-growing area,” she says, “and we have only five incoming lines and six people to answer the phones.”

“But why does the recording keep hanging up on me?” you ask.

“We don't have a system that lets you wait.”

“Motels and airlines have systems that let you wait,” you say. “Why doesn't the phone company have one?”

“I don't know. We just work here. Nobody cares about us.”

“But what if the big boss in the big office in Dallas needed to call you? He could never get through, could he?”

“Oh,
he
could get through. He has a special number.”

The phone center opens at eight o'clock in the morning. You can go there and pick up your phones, she says. Everything is going to be all right.

You show up at 8:15 and ask for your phones. The lady hasn't received your order, she says. No order, no phones, she tells you. Sorry.

On second thought, don't imagine it. Only the name of Mrs. X has been changed to protect the innocent.

December, 1979

Heroes Are Where You Find Them

W
HILE
DRIVING
through Dublin, Texas, one day, I told my sons about one of the memorable experiences of my childhood—the time I met Gene Autry.

“It was during World War II,” I said. “Gene wore his Army uniform when he rode Champion in the Dublin rodeo parade. Later, he stood in the middle of the arena and sang ‘You Are My Sunshine,' and everybody cheered. I got to meet him after the rodeo, and he shook my hand.”

I've been to Dublin only a few times since that long-ago day, and as I drove through the town every detail of that meeting—my first encounter with a hero, my first brush with the famous—flooded my mind with sweet sadness.

I remembered myself as a towheaded, six-year-old farm urchin dressed in striped overalls and no shoes, gazing worshipfully into the eyes of my number one hero, a peace-loving, milk-drinking cowboy who had donned the uniform of his country and was taking a brief rest from the war to come home and visit his horse and sing. Only Norman Rockwell could have done the scene justice.

“Who's Gene Autry?” my ten-year-old asked. The eight-year-old said nothing, having nodded off during my story.

“He's the guy who sings ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,'” I said.

“Oh,” he said.

Our conversation died. My sacred memory was desecrated, my frail bubble of nostalgia shattered. My sadness was no longer for the boy in the striped overalls, who's gone forever anyway, but for the blond boy on the seat beside me and his redheaded, sleeping brother, my flesh and blood, who would never understand Gene Autry or Roy Rogers or Johnny Mack Brown or Tim Holt or the Durango Kid. I remembered a Saturday morning when they were younger, watching an ancient rerun of the Lone Ranger on TV with them. I loved every minute of it, but they were bored—as bored as they were now with Gene Autry.

And I realized that all my boyhood heroes were fictional or real figures from the past. The permanent residents of my juvenile fantasy world were Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Jean Lafitte, Buffalo Bill, Sam Houston, Sam Bass, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, all the Union and Confederate soldiers who had served at the ruined nineteenth-century military post where my friends and I played our games, all the Indians they fought, and the movie cowboys I've mentioned.

My only “contemporary” hero had been my own Great Uncle Bryan, a rancher who wore boots and spurs and was magnificent on horseback. He it was who, when informed of my ambition to be a cowboy, gave me my first glimpse into the reality of cattle-country society and economics: “Son, don't grow up to be a cowboy. Grow up to be a cow
man.
”

It suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea who my sons' heroes were. They didn't inherit my love of history. They're too young to have seen my movie idols, even on television. So far, they've shown little interest in sports. I tried to remember names they must have mentioned in the course of our conversations and play during this Christmas holiday visit and their past spring and summer visits—the times they come to me from the place where they live. There weren't many. Han Solo, R2D2, C3PO, Luke Sky-walker—all the characters of
Star Wars
, which they had seen several times. Buck Rogers. The characters of
Star Trek
. I recalled no others.

“Ah,” I thought. “We have no mere generation gap here. We're looking into a chasm of centuries. I was born into a world of kerosene lamps and outhouses, and my heroes lived in the past or were portrayed as living in the past. They all were rugged individualists who pitted their wits and bodies against the earthly wilderness and each other. These kids were born into a world of rockets and computers and lasers. Their heroes inhabit the future. They are creatures—and robots—of the cosmos, who deal with meteor showers and totalitarian satellites and the like and move not from village to village and fort to fort but from planet to planet and galaxy to galaxy.

“Can it be?” I thought. “Will they have no memory of meeting a childhood hero in the flesh? Can the real world become so dull, so lacking in opportunities for adventure, so bereft of dash and color, that they must reach into the dark mists of the future, and even into other galaxies and solar systems, to find someone to admire, someone to imitate, someone to want to be?”

As we sped free of Dublin and my Gene Autry memory into the empty countryside, I and the boy beside me withdrew into our own thoughts and fantasies. For many miles, we were as remote from each other as Julius Caesar and Darth Vader. But finally I had to know. “Son, who are your heroes?” I asked.

“Superman and you,” he said.

I gave him a hug.

January, 1980

A Fable or Parable or Something

A
S TREES
GO
, it was nothing special. It wasn't a spreading chestnut under which a village smithy might have stood, or a mighty oak that from a little acorn grew. It wasn't a redwood, and the most fanatical environmentalist wouldn't have enlisted in its cause. A charitable critic would have called it nondescript.

But my lady and I grew up in towns different from each other in every way but one: their dearth of trees. The few trees we knew were there because someone had planted and nurtured them, somehow encouraging them to take root and survive in spots that wise seeds and seedlings would never have chosen for themselves. The part of Dallas in which we now live is no primeval forest, either. This tree was our only one, and we loved it.

We loved it not only for its uniqueness in our landscape, but also because its being there was its own doing. In a neighborhood where no blade of grass dares be taller than any other and bushes seem to grow in square-cornered, symmetrical shapes, our tree grew free, unintimidated by the blocks and acres and square miles of pampered conformity that surrounded it. It didn't participate in that landscape anyway, having chosen a place for itself that even weeds shunned.

It took root in a strip of dirt about two feet wide between the concrete of the carport and the concrete of the patio—a spot never nourished by mulch or fertilizer, a spot blocked from the morning sun by the high wooden fence that separates the patio from the carport and blocked from the afternoon sun by the carport roof.

It settled there as a seed, I suspect, nine or ten years ago, five or six years after the patio and the carport and the fence were built. And it survived on whatever nutrients the native earth contained and whatever rain dripped from the carport roof. It not only survived, it flourished, growing straight as a sequoia toward the narrow slit of sky between fence and roof.

By the time my lady and I moved into the place, the tree had sprung free of its dark confinement. We saw it first in winter, and its tangle of bare, skinny branches clad in smooth, humdrum gray didn't merit sighs of ecstasy, but we valued it even then.

The patio, the fence, the ugly carport roof—even the utility pole beyond—were preferable to the parking lots that dominated the views from the apartments we had looked at, but the tree was what made this place really different from the others. Though no masterpiece of nature, it was something alive to look at through a window that otherwise provided a vista of straight, man-made lines and deadly earnest utilitarianism. In the spring, we hoped, it would also turn green.

The reality exceeded our expectation. The weight of its new leaves and twigs bent the tree's branches just enough to arch them over the fence and form a shady bower over one end of the patio.

We hung flower pots and wind bells from the lower limbs. We set a table and two chairs in the shade and ate our meals there, and worked there sometimes. The cat crept along the fence and played leopard in the miniature jungle of leaves. The local mockingbird came there to sing.

On most summer afternoons the weather was more pleasant under the tree than in the air-conditioned house. And when the sun was low and hot and no breeze came to help the shade and we were forced to retreat indoors, the shadows of the leaves still made pleasing patterns through the window.

When we sent photographs of our surroundings to relatives who had never seen them, it was the tree and the bower it made that they praised for the peace and beauty they formed on an otherwise ordinary slab of concrete.

Because the tree wasn't visible from the street or even the alley, my lady and I regarded its presence as a secret. Like children who had sneaked a puppy into their bed, we were pleased with ourselves. Amongst the crew-cut lawns and sculptured hedges of North Dallas, we had adopted a shaggy arboreal foundling of questionable pedigree. We had harbored a renegade and found reward in his company. We had kissed a frog, and he had turned into a prince—a spindly prince, but the only one in the yard.

But our tree wasn't a secret, of course. The landlord knew about it. And one day, while nobody but the cat was at home, a gardener came and chopped it down and cut it into pieces and stacked it beside the garbage cans in the alley. My lady wept, and I cursed, and the landlord said he was sorry, but he was worried about what the roots might do someday to his concrete slab.

And he's raising the rent to pay for the gardener.

January, 1980

Then Along Came Dick Cockrell

J
UST
WHEN
YOU
START
thinking everybody has gone soft, that nobody gives a damn about anybody else, that the world's supply of heroes has dried up, somebody like Dick Cockrell comes along.

Cockrell is the Irving truck driver who pulled into a roadside park between Tyler and Canton the other day and saw three men trying to force a screaming woman and her two young daughters into a car. Cockrell wasn't the only bystander in the park. Eight or ten travelers were standing around watching the woman's struggle, but they weren't inclined to interfere. Cockrell, however, was. When the woman screamed, “Please, help!” he commenced to.

First, he commenced to break the jaw of the guy with the knife, the one who told him to get back in his truck and mind his own business. Then he commenced to break the arm of the guy who hit him in the face. Then he proceeded to disarm the guy with the knife and the broken jaw, who had stabbed Cockrell in the leg while was breaking the other guy's arm. Then he broke the blade off the knife. Then he kicked the third guy in the groin. Then he calmed the mother and the children, who had been threatened with rape. Then, when one of the attackers tried to make a getaway in their car, he reached in, popped him another one, cut the engine, and broke the key off in the ignition.