The Time of My Life (2 page)

The party wasn't to begin until 3:00 on Saturday afternoon, but the florist arrived at 12:30 to pin the color-coded flowers on us—red for Mother and the grandchildren, blue for the great-grandsons, pink for the great-granddaughters, white for the in-laws, and an orchid for Mommy. And the photographer, set ting up his camera and lights in the Limpia lobby, al ready was looking worried. “It's like photographing the crowd at a Dallas Cowboys game,” he said. For half an hour he arranged and adjusted us, trying to fit the whole family onto one small negative, Mommy sitting in an armchair in the midst of us like the queen bee in her hive. And then the smaller groups—Mother and Mommy; Mother and Mommy and the five of us who arrived so long ago in the ‘39 Chevy; then each of us and our own progeny and spouses. It took hours, and by the time we were through, the guests were arriving.

It was the duty of us grandsons to stand at the hotel door and greet them, while the women presided over the guest book and the punch bowl and coffee pot. I was glad I still recognized so many
—
J. D. and Dale Crawford, old family friends and parents of my best high school buddy; Alice Swartz, the only math teacher to ever teach me anything; Lucy Foster Miller, whose lawn and garden I used to water when she was out of town; Ralph Russell, who taught me how to type and thus gave me a livelihood; Tyrone Kelly, still proprietor of the Union, and his wife Audrey, pi anist for the Baptist Church and the whole community; Bit Miller, who could sing “Sweet Little Jesus Boy” and bring a tear to every eye in the house; Annie Lou Clark, music teacher who, nearing ninety herself, had a student recital scheduled for the next day; Fritz Kahl, the best pilot in the Davis Mountains, and his wife Georgia Lee. Some of them I'd seen before on my infrequent trips home. Others I hadn't laid eyes on since I went off to seek my fortune in 1955. But having known them once, I know them always, and our conversations were as if they had been interrupted only a few minutes ago, not twenty-seven years before.

“When I die,” I told Fritz, “I'm to be cremated, and you're to take my ashes up and scatter them over the Davis Mountains.”

“You'd be surprised how often I do that,” he said. And to my wife, a New Yorker, he said, “This place must look small to you, but the kids who went to school in Fort Davis were lucky. My daughters had only three teachers in elementary school—Lillian Mims, Clora Gibson, and Hazel Rau. They handled two grades apiece. They were kind, friendly women, but when they closed their classroom doors, believe me, they
held school
. When the kids got out of there, they had
learned
what they were supposed to learn.”

There were people I didn't know, too—newcomers, retired people, most of them, who have fled the dangerous, expensive cities or the rigors of northern winters to find a place to live comfortably on their pensions. Some have lived there ten years or longer, but if you didn't grow up in Fort Davis, you can be a newcomer for twenty or thirty years. It depends on your finding your place in the community, in the churches, the Fort Davis Historical Society, the schools, and on how often you show up at pot luck suppers and the ice cream parties on the court house lawn.

I don't know what Mommy's duty at the party was supposed to be. Probably to sit in a comfortable chair near the punch bowl and accept the congratulations. But soon she was standing at the hotel door with her grandsons, greeting the guests. She stood there for two hours, not getting tired at all, for what was happening to her was love. And I wondered what it felt like to live almost a century and be loved by so many for so long. “Why don't you sit down a minute, Mommy?” we would say. Our own legs were screaming for relief. “Oh, no,” she would say. “I'm having the time of my life.”

January, 1983

But They Chose Ford

D
URING
THE
1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, where incumbent Gerald Ford was battling Ronald Reagan for the presidential nomination, I found a leaflet on a small table in the lobby of one of the city's shabbier hotels. “Henry Cleaver for President,” it said.

The face in the picture seemed to be smelling some thing terrible. Something rotten in Washington, maybe. It promised “full employment through voluntary participation…education through smaller classes and better equipment…better efficiency in government.” The press, the leaflet said, “has the responsibility to the public for news content.”

As I wondered who Cleaver might be, a mustachioed figure in a brown leisure suit sprang from be hind a big column, much as the premier danseur flies onto the stage during the second scene in
Swan Lake
. “Any questions?” he asked. He seemed to be experiencing the same olfactory unhappiness as the man on the leaflet. He wore a lapel tag declaring, “Hello! My name is H. Cleaver for president.”

“You're Cleaver,” I said.

“Yes, I am,” he sniffed.

“Do you always leap out like that?” I asked.

“Yes. And I've been interviewed three times already. Once by NBC.”

“How long have you been in the race?”

“I started last March,” he said. “I took a look at the other guys and decided I was as qualified as they are. I've been in business. I know how to fire people.”

I opened my note pad.

Q. Fire people?

A. Yes. If Nixon had fired Haldeman and Ehrlichman and that bunch, he would have been all right. And if he had turned over the tapes. Those were the only two things wrong with him. But I can do that. I can fire people. I've been in business.

Q. What business are you in?

A. At the present, I'm unemployed.

Q. What did you do when you were employed?

A. The security business.

Q. Security?

A. Yes. I was a security guard for Montgomery Ward.

Q. Have you campaigned much?

A. In all fifty states.

Q. No kidding?

A. By mail.

Q. Where are you from?

A. About twenty-two miles south of Albany, New York.

Q. But where?

A. I just told you. Twenty-two miles south of Albany.

Q. What's the name of your town?

A. The town of Kinderhook. As opposed to Kinderhook County. It's not a town, actually. It's an un incorporated village. On Route Nine.

Q. Mr. Cleaver, besides your business experience, what qualifications do you have to be president?

A. I'm glad you asked me that. I took a twenty-two-day tour of Russia last summer. And I've answered some international questions, like how to defend Austria from the Soviet Union.

Q. How would you do that?

A. Blow up the hydroelectric plants. If you take away what the Russians want, they don't have any reason to invade Austria, right?

Q. Who asked you about this?

A. A friend of my wife. I don't remember her name.

Q. Do you think you have a chance at the nomination?

A. Sure. The convention is going to be deadlocked, and I don't see any reason why they shouldn't turn to me. Do you?

Q. If they turned to you, who would you choose as your running mate?

A. I have several under consideration. Right now, I'm leaning toward Tower.

Q. Senator John Tower of Texas?

A. Right.

Q. Why?

A. Well, I think New York and Texas would give a nice balance to the ticket, don't you?

Before I could answer, Mr. Cleaver leaped into the elevator and was gone.

August, 1976

King Dolph and the Eagles

N
OW IT CAME TO PASS
in those days that certain shepherds and goatherds in the hills and deserts of the Kingdom of Texas did go out unto their pastures and cast their eyes upon certain lambs and kids laid waste, yea, torn asunder by beasts of the wilderness.

And they were sore vexed and lifted their eyes unto the heavens in despair. And behold, the sun glittered on the wings of an eagle.

The men rent their garments and poured ashes upon their heads and made their way unto Austin, even unto the palace of the good King Dolph (or perchance to the other palace at Uvalde) and made a piteous plea unto him.

“O good king!” they cried. “Our lambs and kids are laid waste upon the fields! Yet the golden eagle, from which we profiteth not a shekel, circleth above with the sun glinting upon his wings! Dost thou not perceive the connection?”

Now King Dolph was a keeper of herds himself and knew truly well from which beasts a herdsman doth profit and from which he profiteth not. Wise ruler that he was, he also perceived in the twinkling of an eye from which beasts a king doth profit at election time, and from which beasts a king profiteth not. A king, he did perceive, profiteth not from eagles.

The king's heart did burst asunder when he saw the weapons in the hands of his countrymen and knew with what eagerness the hands did itch. “Yea, verily,” quoth he, wiping copious tears from his royal eyes. “‘Tis an awful thing to gaze upon lambs lying dead upon the field and great birds without profit soaring freely in the heavens, gathering unto themselves the rays of the sun. If ‘twere the good days of old, I would lead thee and thy vassals against them myself, and smite them hip and thigh with mine own jaw bone. But the imperial government in faraway Washington understandeth not the good ways of old. The faraway rulers understandeth not the joy that leapeth in the hearts of good herdsmen at the sight of skies empty of eagles. And when spies did reveal unto yon government the scarcity of eagles in our land, it stayeth our hand, even unto this day.”

“But sire,” wept the shepherds and goatherds. “Does thou not perceive the connection? The lambs are dead, but the eagle liveth!”

“Yea, verily, I perceive it,” answered the king. “I shall inquire.” So he did urge the imperial Fish and Wildlife Service to bless the slaying of any golden eagle that didst presume to make its home in hills and deserts of the kingdom where lambs and kids did also reside.

And it came to pass that a still, small voice called unto the king. “King Dolph,” it cried, “wherein is the connection? ‘Tis the custom of gold eagles to feed upon mice and rabbits and carrion slain by other beasts. ‘Tis a rare thing indeed to find a lamb verily slain by an eagle.”

“Once is enough,” quoth the king. “When shepherds and goatherds desire to cast their eyes upon dead eagles, who am I to say them nay?”

“But couldst not the Kingdom of Texas pay for the carcasses of the few lambs verily slain by eagles? Or mayhap some group of citizens who doth love to watch the wings of eagles gather unto themselves the sun? 'Twould be but a small price to pay for such a sight. And a rare sight it is, forsooth.”

But King Dolph was not moved. “Thou under-standeth neither shepherds nor goatherds nor kings,” quoth he. “The only beautiful eagle is one spread upon a fence of barbed wire, where thou canst mea sure its wingspan and take its picture and put it in the weekly newspaper. That hath always been the way in Texas. Depart ye, and cry in the wilderness henceforth, if thou canst find any.”

And it came to pass that wild dogs and coyotes and sundry beasts did slay a lamb or kid from time to time. But no more eagles did gather the rays of the sun.

October, 1976

A Quiet Tear for Other Days

W
HILE WATCHING
THE
TV
networks Tuesday night, with all their colored maps, computers, key precincts, pollsters, slightly pompous commentators, and attendant rigamarole of this video-political age, I couldn't help wondering what the folks in Jeff Davis County were doing.

The same thing I was doing, I suppose—slumping bleary-eyed and bloated with junk food, like a kid mesmerized by a nonstop Walt Disney festival.

But when I was growing up in Fort Davis, a mere thirty years ago, before the cable brought television into the mountain canyons, Election Night was really something.

The real Election Night, of course, wasn't in November. It was the Democratic primary in July, when the mountain night breeze was as soft and cool as satin against our cheeks after a blazing hot day. We had a village Republican, though. And a village drunk, a village idiot, and a village atheist. Fort Davis, though small, is equipped with the truly necessary people.

The setting of this extraordinary event was the town square (or plaza, depending on your language preference), which has a small, tombstonelike Confederate monument in the center and was surrounded in those days by the courthouse, the Gulf station, the drugstore, the Limpia Hotel, the Union Mercantile, and Harry Jarratt's Motorport, a garage.

They would set up a big blackboard on the drug-store porch, and at sundown the whole town would gather in the square. The women and old men would stay in their cars and chat with their neighbors through the windows. The young men would tell jokes and smoke and whittle. The teenagers would neck in the tall Johnson grass beside the Union, and the youngsters would pester them and play hide-and-seek among the cars.

There were no presidential candidates on the ballot, but it didn't matter. Everyone knew how Texas would vote in that one later. Except for FDR's fireside chats and Harry Truman's whistle-stop train, which stopped briefly in Marfa, only twenty-one miles away, the president of the United States was as remote from our lives as the king of Siam, anyway U.S. senators were almost as aloof—except for once when Lyndon Johnson flew over the town in a helicopter and landed in a pasture, to which we children rode in the backs of pickups, more eager to inspect the senator's strange aircraft than to hear his speech. And congressmen, governors and lesser state officials were strangers who breezed through the town every year or so to buy coffee at Louie's Cafe and lecture high school assemblies on good citizenship and the glories of the American Way.

There were so few votes in those vast West Texas spaces that candidates seldom considered it worth the gas to come get them.