Tall, slim and graceful, a lovely pine sways

Elegant arcs, dark against a luminous blue sky

Across the meandering glassy stream, is a

Gentle swelling hill with pink boulders improbably stacked

Resting, rough edges smoothed, lichen splashed, doing that

Lizard thing in the sun.

“Come, come the pine beckoned,

Elegant branches weaving blue shadows,

Come, come dance come, come sway,

Sway with me amid the hills.

Enjoy the grass, drink the flower wine.

Savor blowing wind and crystal liquor stream.”

Resting, soaking up the sun, the boulder smiles

“Look at me, worn and smooth.

Time has fitted me into place.

Snows, wind, ice, and rain burnish daily

Eliminating the rough, making me comfortable,

Suitable for the place I need to be.”

“Long have I sat watching the stream.

Watching it wander to and fro.

Feeling it push against my feet.

Carving slowly, polishing there,

Lifting the hill, making soft the valley floor,

Spreading me out for nodding flowers, dancing pines.”

“Come boulder, come.

We will wander the hills see new views.

Enjoy the world, leaving our mark.

Come with me, embrace the day,

Fondle the night with gleaming stars and silver moon,

You and me.”

“I can not,” boulder slowly sighs.

“You see my partner there.

We fit along the rounded seam,

Time and adversity polished smooth.

Inextricably bound as one. We are

Enjoying the view”

A parting wave,

A graceful toss of breathy bough,

A moment gone, so lightly passed,

As if it did not matter.

Moving on into the past

With hurried pace.

A tighter fit, for tempest borne.

A soft caress

A warm embrace,

Of shared sun and sky.

A tender, gentle, cozy laugh.

“Look at you, you old coot.”

Life often takes us down roads to destinations we would not have chosen could we have seen the end from the beginning. Such was the case for my brother and I in the Abilene, Texas of the middle 1960’s. My father, an aspiring History Professor, taught at Abilene Christian University while working on a doctorate in Latin American History. Eventually we would spend two years in Fort Worth, Texas while he finished his PhD, but that is an entirely different story with a very different ending. As a junior member of the faculty at a small, but growing, private school, my father did not earn a particularly large salary. We lived in a nice house, ate plenty of good food, and enjoyed a good standard of living; however, my father drove older cars in order to stretch his paycheck as far as possible. For a time the family heapster was four-door Corvair.

We cruised around Abilene and out into the country in this light blue auto. For a time, my father preached at a small church in Shep, Texas, just a smidge over forty miles from Abilene. In those days of looser attitudes towards safety, my brother and I often wrangled over which one of us would ride on the small dash in the back of the car as we returned to Abilene after the evening service at Shep. I always enjoyed watching the stars wheel and turn as we rumbled down 277, a two lane state road. Like any older car, our Corvair came with a variety of unique characteristics; one of which was a small hole in the rear floor-pan.

I do not remember which one of us discovered this small aperture to the outside world from the back seat, nor do I know why looking at the asphalt rush past was so intriguing. But hey, who truly knows what goes on inside the head of six or seven year old boy, least of all that boy. We would clamber into the back seat and then wrestle to watch North or South first slip past at a scorching thirty-five miles per hour. Then we discovered a new game.

Again, memory fails me in the exact origins, but one of us would slip small bits of trash through the hole while the other one looked out the back window to spy some familial litter bouncing down the road behind us. This was great fun and we never had to pester Mom or Dad. We scoured the car for gum or candy wrappers to shove through the hole. Light colored items were best as they were visible against the oil-streaked asphalt of the age. We could not foresee the unhappy destination that awaited us. We just enjoyed our new game. We were not hurting anyone. Then one day, we made a precipitously bad, no horrible, decision.

My mother had to run a few errands. She gathered up her rather unruly bunch, secured her purse, applied a splash of lipstick, secured her hair under a fetching scarf, and headed out in our Corvair. Somewhere along the way her purse ended up in the back seat with Brian and I. In a brutal convergence of circumstances, we ran out of detritus to jettison at the same time. Which one of us was the dumper and which one of us was the spotter remains locked away in the deep vaults of the cave of my memory. It is enough to note that we discovered my mother’s purse to be a treasure-trove of items small enough to fit through our portal to the road; soon a string of lipstick, fingernail files, and other important ladies’ items were bouncing down South First…do not ask me why my memory is so clear on that point.

Eventually my mother wondered at the levity and general party atmosphere emanating from the back seat. As any good parent would, she inquired as to the cause of such bonhomie. Logic and good sense rushed into our minds at bit too late, so we sat there, mute lumps oozing guilt. Ultimately under the harsh spotlight of a mother glare we stammered out an explanation. My mother, in a move Mario Andretti would admire, whipped the Corvair into the parking lot of Burro Alley on the corner of South First and Willis where she soon discovered the absence of several small items. In very clear and unambiguous language, we learned that her purse was never to be used as source material for our game and we were to spend the rest of the outing sitting in the back seat with our hands in our laps. I do not remember being told to stop playing the game, just that her things were not viable candidates for ejection. Yes, that day, we discovered that the Corvair was truly unsafe at any speed.

Life often takes us down roads to destinations we would not have chosen could we have seen the end from the beginning. Such was the case for my brother and me in the Abilene, Texas of the middle 1960s. My father, an aspiring History Professor, taught at Abilene Christian University while working on a doctorate in Latin American History. Eventually, we would spend two years in Fort Worth, Texas while he finished his Ph.D., but that is an entirely different story with a very different ending. As a junior member of the faculty at a small, but growing, private school, my father did not earn a particularly large salary. We lived in a nice house, ate plenty of good food, and enjoyed a good standard of living; however, my father drove older cars in order to stretch his paycheck as far as possible. For a time the family heapster was four-door Corvair. We cruised around Abilene and out into the country in this light blue auto. For a time, my father preached at a small church in Shep, Texas, just a smidge over forty miles from Abilene. In those days of looser attitudes towards safety, my brother and I often wrangled over which one of us would ride on the small dash in the back of the car as we returned to Abilene after the evening service at Shep. I always enjoyed watching the stars wheel and turn as we rumbled down 277, a two-lane state road.

Like any older car, our Corvair came with a variety of unique characteristics; one of which was a small hole in the rear floor-pan. I do not remember which one of us discovered this small aperture to the outside world from the back seat, nor do I know why looking at the asphalt rush past was so intriguing. But hey, who truly knows what goes on inside the head of six or seven-year-old boy, least of all that boy. We would clamber into the back seat and then wrestle to watch North or South first slip past at a scorching thirty-five miles per hour. Then we discovered a new game.

Again, memory fails me in the exact origins, but one of us would slip small bits of trash through the hole while the other one looked out the back window to spy some familial litter bouncing down the road behind us. This was great fun and we never had to pester Mom or Dad. We scoured the car for gum or candy wrappers to shove through the hole. Light colored items were best as they were visible against the oil-streaked asphalt of the age. We could not foresee the unhappy destination that awaited us. We just enjoyed our new game. We were not hurting anyone. Then one day, we made a precipitously bad, no horrible, decision.

My mother had to run a few errands. She gathered up her rather unruly bunch, secured her purse, applied a splash of lipstick, secured her hair under a fetching scarf, and headed out in our Corvair. Somewhere along the way her purse ended up in the back seat with Brian and I. In a brutal convergence of circumstances, we ran out of detritus to jettison at the same time. Which one of us was the dumper and which one of us was the spotter remains locked away in the deep vaults of the cave of my memory. It is enough to note that we discovered my mother’s purse to be a treasure-trove of items small enough to fit through our portal to the road; soon a string of lipstick, fingernail files, and other important ladies’ items were bouncing down South First…do not ask me why my memory is so clear on that point.

Eventually, my mother wondered at the levity and general party atmosphere emanating from the back seat. As any good parent would, she inquired as to the cause of such bonhomie. Logic and good sense rushed into our minds a bit too late, so we sat there, mute lumps oozing guilt. Ultimately under the harsh spotlight of a mother glare, we stammered out an explanation. My mother, in a move Mario Andretti would admire, whipped the Corvair into the parking lot of Burro Alley on the corner of South First and Willis where she soon discovered the absence of several small items. In very clear and unambiguous language, we learned that her purse was never to be used as source material for our game and we were to spend the rest of the outing sitting in the back seat with our hands in our laps. I do not remember being told to stop playing the game, just that her things were not viable candidates for ejection. Yes, that day, we discovered that the Corvair was truly unsafe at any speed.

Drive almost any F.M. (Farm to Market) in Texas and you will find at least one. The faithful gathered there twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday in sun-backed clapboard shotgun Churches, that still dot the landscape. Step inside the quiet, cut with slanting beams and listen. Hear the soft echoes of singing from worn dusty hymnals that still gather in the stillness between the pews. See the leather-faced men, and women, that defiantly wrenched a living from sandy scrub. Veneration of those self-made-independent-men-women informs our theology. Like Noah and the other patriarchs who stood alone with God, they faced great adversity, armed with fifth Sunday singings and potlucks, unaware of the source. Meringues and casseroles lined up on folding tables beneath a straggling Live Oak, planted in belligerence, against a cobalt blue sky. Sister Harshberger’s deviled eggs always set the bar high. The next round of farmers and ranchers frolicked in the spaces between the rows of cotton that press up against the caliche parking lot and dust-coated Fords, Chevys, and Dodges; after a good year Lincolns, Plymouths, and Chryslers sprout from the same dust. These grim prophets stride out of the bleak countryside with their message of hard work and unremitting faith. They believed in a God that wanted us to be self-determining, stand on our own, and carve out our niche with one hand on the plow and the other on the Bible. They knit together the thought fabric of West Texas, a place of harsh flatness, astringent weather, and heart-aching sunsets, with the warp and woof of sweat and toil. Muleshoe, Sudan, Lazbuddie, Friona, Bovina, Shep, and countless others strewn across the landscape each have their monuments. An F.M. tour of the caprock reveals these testimonials to stolid faith and hard work. And if you pause, in the quiet glow of setting sun, they will come to you and speak of their dreams and desires, failures and hurts. Some still grow under the silent sun. Others dried up and blew away leaving only the bleached ebenezers where ghosts still gather to commiserate about this year’s cotton yield.

The dregs of sweet tea swirled in the small glass cup. Iraqis do not hurry. I suppose a culture that reaches back over four millennia discarded urgency long ago; perhaps when they embraced generational thinking. The meeting, replete with Samoons, Dolmas and endless cups of syrupy sweet tea, stretched late into the afternoon. So, after promises, farewells and collecting security forces while the sun dropped toward the tent of evening, two HMMWVs (High Mobility Multi Wheeled Vehicles (Hummers)) snarled down the elevated stretch of the Qidisaya Expressway heading toward BIAP (Baghdad International Airport). Light drained from the sky, leaving behind a gauzy purple where early stars winked on in the spreading blackness. Urged by nervous drivers, engines and tires roared. Crouched behind dully gleaming SAWs (light machine guns) armored men resolutely scanned the dark houses flicking past. The thin sheet steel of the turret provides scant protection. Ignoring safe speeds the small convoy raced toward the FOB (Forward Operating Base) and perceived safety. Without warning emerald tracers reached out from the hulking mass of houses, hoping to greet, to touch the crouching men sweating in their heavy burden.

“Sir! They’re shooting at us!” bellows a driver.

“I see.” the figure replies out of the grim darkness, “Just drive fast. They can’t hit us from this angle.” Dun HMMWVs and flaring bullets race together in a meeting engagement of peril, perspiration, panting, and pounding heart. At the last moment razor green lines arc past, disappearing into another shadowy mass of homes. Thrumming tires fade into the darkness.

Inside the FOB, relieved men gather around vehicles as engines softly ping in the night. Evaporating sweat cools them as they chat. Helmets hang from canteens as they start to account for comrades and equipment. Some rattle belted ammunition back into metal cans, Tupperware for soldiers, to wait the next round. Perhaps then they will burst out in that burning ecstasy of purpose fulfilled, racing out to their destiny accompanied by the strange pops of atmospheric applause.

“Sergeant, thanks for the use of your vehicles.”

“Sure thing Sir. Just try to get back before dark next time. I heard you ran into some fireworks coming back.”

“Yes, but it was nothing serious. Just some harassing fire from the houses along the route.” Another bulky figure in full-battle-rattle resolves out of the darkness, shuffling past the now quiet HMMWV.

“Hey Sarge, did you have an extra antenna kit on this vehicle? ’Cause I don’t remember those holes in the side of this hummer.”

“Has anyone seen Jody?” Confidence evaporates as the men nervously glance around. Unnoticed, dark liquid slowly drips from the floor of the HMMWV, disappearing into the thirsty sand.

The old rail-bed climbs, twisting through the trees.

Douglas Firs and Ponderosa Pines chat

With the Aspens and Oaks in shorter groves

As the wind blows. Their intermittent shade

Pools in blue cooling spots where we pause, rest

Luxuriating in the breeze that climbs

Out of the Tularossa basin to

Carry away the sweat of our effort,

As we slake our thirst from crackling plastic.

“It’s just around the bend,” I say, “Perhaps.”

“I’m glad we came,” you reply, “Look at that.”

And so I do, loving the way the wind

Lifts your silvery gray hair framing your

Face in gentle waves that you brush away.

Thirst abated we move on from one view

To the next with me wondering, will the

Thunder catch us in the open again,

Laughing as we dodge the fat pregnant drops,

Their day trip from the valley completed.

Perhaps the tall Ponderosas will catch

Trailing skirts of the cloud just long enough.

Then we see it, a gray, graceful curve thrown

Out across the canyon by engineers

And laborers, a marriage of thought, sweat

And pine spanning a dark problematic

Place with an elegant exercise in

Geometry. A gentle hand finds mine

The view is great I’m glad we came this way.