Screw up your face. Squint your eyes. Squeeze ‘em tight.
The sky is still blue. The sun is still bright. The water is clear. And the falls are still white.
This is a mighty fine thing to see, a perfect place to be on a hot summer’s day. What more can be said?
Old Man Sycamore stands with his toes in the clear/greenish water of Barton Creek. Beat up by the springtime floods, little of his crown remaining, he pushes up new sprouts from the base of his trunk, an eternal optimist — what are his alternatives, after all? A bright red Cardinal whispers words of encouragement in his ears and then flies off.
Dogs splash in the water. Big dogs. Little dogs. Timid dogs. Happy dogs. Miss Izzy watches them and wags her tail. And she watches the kids playing in the water fall upstream. She would gladly go home with them if she could, but she can’t, so she sits beside me in a little spot of shade that won’t be here for long, beside a slab of limestone with green moss growing on the wet edges that glisten in the noon day sun.
Before long, our shade is no more, and we take refuge on the far bank, on smooth limestone gravel under the canopy of an American Elm. Or rather I sit in the shade, Miss Izzy having chosen a comfortable spot in the sun where she can warm her bones that got chilled from her swim across the creek.
There was a shady spot at the far end of the Walgreen’s parking lot. After dropping Trudy off at the door, I drove across the lot and backed into the shade. I turned off the car, rolled down the windows on and turned on the radio.
A man was walking in the sun across the parking lot and turned in my direction when he spotted me. When he got close, he mumbled something. I turned down the radio.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s been a long time,” he said. “I haven’t seen you since I left.”
It was hot, and he was sweating. And he hadn’t shaved in several days. And his clothes were dirty and rumpled. He fiddled with a cigarette lighter in his left hand.
“I didn’t sleep well last night,” he said. He pointed across the street and said something about the woods behind the shopping center.
“By the creek?” I asked. “On the rocks?”
“Yeah. I didn’t sleep much.”
I frowned a bit and said, “Are there snakes back there?”
You see, this time of year in Texas, when the sun is hot and the temperatures stay high at night, anyone knows to be careful in the shade, to be careful walking on rocks and to be careful along the water, because… snakes. Bad snakes. Because they come out at night.
His eyes widened. “Shoot,” he said as he leaned down to pull up one leg of his pants.
“You can’t see it,” he said, “But the scar is still here from when I stepped on a cottonmouth. It didn’t hurt that much — just felt like a scratch, but the snake opened its white mouth and tried to bite me again.”
My eyes widened. “What happened?”
“I ran out of that woods without any clothes on. I mean I was butt naked.” (That’s what he said.) “I ran towards the street and blacked out.”
He looked at me.
“When I came to, I was in an ambulance. They asked me if I captured the snake.” He laughed. “No, I didn’t capture that snake, I told ‘em.”
Then he looked at me and screwed up his face. “Those shots were the most painful thing I’ve ever felt.”
“I bet,” I said.
He turned his head and watched a woman who was walking across the parking lot.
“That’s my wife,” I said. “I’ve got to go.” And I started the car.
“Ok, man,” he said. He flicked his cigarette lighter a couple times and then walked off.
I know. I know I drew you a card. And I know I got you presents. Although it will come as no surprise to you that I don’t remember the presents I gave. But now, after a too-long delay, I can give you the present I intended.
The result of a long-in-coming collaboration between your loving husband and Ira Ono at whose cottage we stayed during our visit to the Big Island… a collaboration in which I waved my hands and said Blue like the water! and Red and black like Pélé! and in which Ira actually took care of the creating.
Yes, that shot reveals a little bit of clutter. Cereal boxes on the fridge. Tins of mints. Many pens. Many pencils. Barking dogs… But isn’t that the point? To remember that other time, all we need do is look up and remember Hawaii and rid ourselves of the clutter.
Happy Birthday to the fair and industrious Trudy.
When I started working at McDonald’s, they assigned me to the Multimixer making milkshakes.
Back then, you made a shake by sliding a cup with frozen mix up onto a spindle and letting it spin, making a little whirlpool as the chocolate or strawberry or vanilla syrup spiraled in and mixed with the mix.
The problem was, you had to get the timing just right when you pulled the cup off. Too slow, and much of the milkshake stuck to the spindle. To fast, and the spindle would spray stripes of brown or pink or white across your blue McDonald’s shirt.
I was new. And I didn’t have the timing down. On my first night of working the closing shift, the layers of brown, pink and white began accumulating on my chest. I was frustrated. Kevin was working the grill nearby. He must have heard my exasperation.
“Don’t get angry, David,” he said without turning his head. “It’s a long time until close.”
Good advice: It’s a long time until close.
My grandfather was an engineer, and when I was a senior in high school he got me a summer job as a draftsman’s aide an Gilbert-Commonwealth. I worked for the senior draftsman named Jim.
When the end of that summer crept close, Jim talked to me about my plans for college. And he told me how he had been accepted to a university but had decided instead on a blue collar drafting career (something that in those days was a solid guarantee of a good middle-class lifestyle).
This was difficult for me to comprehend.
“I wanted to raise a family and spend time with my children growing up,” Jim told me. It was years before I fully understood.
Good advice: Spend time with your family.
Not long after I started working after college, I was transferred to work on RTDS. It was a small team. It was an exciting place. The people there were at the vanguard of a new way of building control center software. And I was in the middle of it.
Still, the excitement seemed to be passing me by. While the guys I was working with would frequently hurry off to urgent meetings, I sat quietly day after day in the corner at my workstation cranking out code.
Art must have noticed my frustration. He asked me about it one day at lunch. I told him that so much was going on — that I wasn’t part of it.
“Be patient,” he said. Eventually I would get invited to one of those meetings. And then he said that I should just “say smart things.” If I did, they’d start including me. He was right.
Good advice: Say smart things.
“???” Ben texted me this morning. He had been expecting to hear from me but hadn’t.
“I haven’t heard from Santosh, yet,” I texted back.
Santosh is half a world away from his family today on (our) Father’s Day, and I had offered that perhaps he should join us in our plans. But it turned out that he had other plans after all, and so Ben and I soon made ours. They involved (as they often do in good weather) kayaking on the lake.
Soon we were on the water, sitting a good two or three feet lower than the high-water marks visible on the trees along the shore, marks left after they opened all the flood gates on the upstream dams to shed as much water as they could as quickly as they could, because the lakes were over-full with no additional capacity should it rain again (which is has been doing for months).
There we were. Paddling upstream.
Under the Mopac bridge. Past Deep Eddy. Along the north shore, sometimes taking shelter from the scorching sun under a canopy of overhanging Pecan trees. Past the cliffs bedecked with mansions at the top and Canyon Wrens singing their hearts out as if we were in the middle of a wilderness.
We paddled past the swinging tree, where a group of people was swinging from a rope hanging from a massive Cypress and splashing into the water. We paddled past the downstream point of Redbud Island, where dogs were jumping into the water chasing sticks and floating toys. And we paddled toward the dam.
Toward the dam. But we didn’t get there.
As we paddled, the water became swift. And then swifter. And finally so swift that the joy of it left us. Ben looked at me and asked, “What say you?” I nodded and we ceased our paddling to let the current slowly turn our kayaks and then quickly push us back past the dogs and the swinging tree and across the river where the wind coming upstream was a welcome relief from the heat.
We paddled back to where we had started three-and-a-half hours earlier. And from there, we went to have a hamburger.
And now I must confess to you, that I am mighty tired, and I have nothing more to say about this wonderful Father’s Day (for which I am grateful), because I am about to lay me down.
Trudy! I wrote on a piece of paper. Watch out for the spider, Trudy. And I taped the paper to a lawn chair. And I set the lawn chair in the walkway to our front door, blocking the path.
Because there, in that space between the eaves of the roof, a spider had set up shop. And if you weren’t careful, you’d end up with a spider in your mouth.
We haven’t seen these guys for a several years, and we took it as a good indicator of the health of our yard that this spider had strung her web across the walkway. Indeed, I unhooked one of the main guy-wires the day before, but attached to the location, she rapidly redeployed.
So she gets to stay…
…for a while.
“Hi David,” Marcia said. I handed her my salad, which she put on the scale.
“That’ll be $7.29,” she said.
I looked up at her in a brief panic, “My Discover card is missing.”
“Oh no,” she said.
“It’s ok. I have another card.”
I pulled out the other card and swiped it… but the machine prompted me for a PIN. This wasn’t a credit card. It was a debit card that I never, ever use.
In this way, I discovered that not only was my Discover card missing, but so was my Visa, and so was my ATM card.
As panic began to descend upon me, Marcia showed me how to use that debit card as a credit card, which was fortunate, because otherwise I was going to have to abandon the salad and walk out hungry.
I was convinced that my cards, which are prone to sliding out of my wallet, had slid out when I grabbed my stuff from the dresser this morning in the dark. So when I got home in the afternoon, after greeting the tail-wagging dogs and giving Trudy a kiss, I walked into the bedroom. But to my grave disappointment, there was nothing on the dresser.
“And my driver’s license is gone, too!” I told Trudy.
It was gradually dawning on us that somebody had somehow taken my credit and ATM cards and driver’s license. I was cleaned out.
In denial, we began tracing our steps over the last few days. I called the barber shop. I called a restaurant. No joy. Still, there was virtually no time that we could reconstruct when my wallet had been outside my control. How could anyone have stolen anything?
So we began to think the unthinkable… that someone had come into the house Sunday while we were (all four of us) slaving away in the backyard.
Real panic began to set in, and I began to get jittery.
Over and over we tried to find an alternate explanation. What day was it when we went to Lowes? I paid for the popcorn at the movie, didn’t I?
But think about it. If you walked into someone’s house and needed to quickly look in one place for something to lift, it would be the dresser in the master bedroom, right? And my wallet had been there for many hours on Sunday — the only time we were apart.
Somebody had come into the house, made for the bedroom, found what they needed and quickly left.
Oh for heaven’s sake! Certainly not! Trudy kept going over the days, trying to find the explanation. I began to pace nervously back and forth. The jitters got worse, and I began to sweat.
My driver’s license and credit cards and ATM cards. They took nothing else. Just the good stuff.
And then on one of my passes thru the bedroom, I reached into the dirty clothes basket and felt in the pocket of a filthy pair of shorts I had worn Sunday. There was some kind of lump in the pocket. And my heart briefly stopped as I carefully reached in …and pulled out a lump of business cards and credit cards and an ATM card.
They had not been stolen. I had not left them at a store. They had not fallen out on my dresser or anywhere else. But what about my license? It can’t slip out of my wallet. Where was it?
I looked at my wallet again. Pulled out the empty sleeve where my license should have been. And there was my driver’s license in the sleeve backwards so that it seemed to be missing. It had never been missing in the first place.
At some point last night, a wad of business cards and plastic had slipped out of my wallet when I took it out of my shorts, probably at the end of the day when I took a shower and went to bed.
False alarm. Nothing was missing. No one had been in the house.
“I have to sit down,” I said to Trudy.
“You have to get a rubber band for your wallet,” Trudy said. “Just like your father.”
We were going back to work from a lunch of hamburgers and fries. I was telling a story of someone I once knew who had abruptly quit his job and gone to work somewhere else. The economy had been bad. There were funding problems. And eventually other people started leaving, too.
“He must have seen the writing on the wall,” I said.
Camille asked, “What does writing on the wall mean?”
I glanced over at her to see if she was messing with me. Then I looked in the rear view mirror at Kyle.
“What… Is that an old expression!?” I asked him, stupefied that I might be using a phrase that their generation no longer uses —no longer even understands.
“Well,” he said. “It’s kind of an old expression.” And then he explained to Camille what the expression meant as I turned left at the light and lamented my plight.
After some grueling paddling into fierce winds, we finally found calm waters in the lea of the trees and cattails lining the northern and western shores of Lake Walter E. Long.
Kyle and Ry were in a new red canoe. Izzy and I were in our new red kayak. (The colors were coordinated almost perfectly.) And when we spotted a creek with ultra-calm waters, we were all in agreement, because we were all tired out and ready for a rest.
“Now this is more like it,” I muttered only half under my breath. Izzy found the courage to climb back up on the slippery bow. And Kyle threw his anchor so that we could just hang out for a while.
We drank drinks and ate snacks. Izzy found Kyle’s watermelon particularly satisfying. We told little stories about our lives.
I told them about picking up blueprints at the printing department when I worked as a draftsman’s aide my senior year in high school.
“Imagine,” Ry said. “A high school job that would actually look good on your resumé.”
“I used to work with a man,” Kyle said. And then he briefly stopped, motioning towards me. “In fact, he reminds me of you,” he said.
“Oh no,” I thought.
“All he did was smoke.”
What!? All this guy did was smoke and he reminds you of me!?
“He never ate. And I never saw him drink a thing.” Then he turned to Ry. “Just like David. He only drinks coffee. I never see him drink water.”
In the morning. I only drink coffee in the morning. …Ok, ok. I’m busted. At least Trudy wasn’t there, so she’ll never find out about this, because if she did, there would be much finger waging.
She’ll never find out, right?
© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License