jumpingfish

At 9:30pm, I stood up. “Ok, I’m going outside now. Six minutes to go.”

The sky was mostly clear. It was dark — as dark as it can be with streetlights every half-block. We walked across the street and down a house or two and turned to the southwest.

Trudy held her hand up to block the glare from the headlights of a car down the street. I looked around wondering if we might sit down instead of standing. We waited. And then at exactly the appointed hour and minute, we saw a bright light flicker thru the leaves of an Oak in the distance.

I backed up a few steps until the bright light was visible over the treetops. “There it is,” I said.

Trudy looked at me and then in the direction I was pointing. A dim reddish point of light was climbing from the southwest, getting brighter and whiter with each passing second.

“It’s going right over us,” Trudy said quietly. “Right over our neighborhood.”

There are astronauts up there. What are they doing right now? Experiments maybe. Or maybe maintenance. For all I know, they might be on a spacewalk repairing some broken cable or replacing some broken box. And there are flight controllers in Houston watching the progress of that orbit, watching from a different perspective than ours.

Years ago, when we were very young, we had debates in school. Formal debates with teams and captains and judges. One of the debate topics I never quite understood asked whether or not the space program was justified. This was the seventies. We were still flying to the moon. It was so obvious to me that the topic seemed almost silly, nothing more than an excuse to form teams and have a debate. I wondered how the kids on the other side could pretend to argue the opposing view.

Resolved that the manned space program is a good thing…

Look up at that bright light passing over. It’s almost all we have now. No rockets launching astronauts into space. No space capsules reentering and splashing down. Russian rockets instead. Soviet era capsules landing hard in the steppes with a billowing burst of dust.

Dust blowing in the wind. After coming back to earth. After many orbits, ninety minutes each, just like the one that just passed over our neighborhood.

It was early evening. Everyone was gone. I was staring into my monitors clicking at the keyboard.

The janitor came around the corner pushing his cart, emptying the garbage cans and dusting off our desks.

I turned to look at him. “Hi Carlos,” I said.

He mumbled which was unlike him. Usually he comes by and says “Hello David” in an upbeat voice, sometimes talking about his other job, sometimes talking about his wife who is due in July. But today he mumbled something that I couldn’t hear.

“Why you call me Carlos,” he said. “You always call me Carlos. I’m not Carlos.”

I was stunned. Embarrassed. Ashamed. It was something I took seriously, our conversations in the early evening, the fact that we addressed each other by name.

“What…?” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Marco,” he said.

“Oh gosh. And I’ve been calling you Carlos for months. I’m so sorry.”

So how perfect is that. Mr. InTouchWithThoseAroundHim has been calling Marco Carlos for months in smug satisfaction that he knew the man’s name when indeed he was just as oblivious as anyone else in the building.

More oblivious.

From the street, you could see clouds in the west. From the highway, you could see dark skies. From the overpass, you could see towering thunderheads with dark black foundations and columns climbing into the sky where here and there there were breaks in the clouds that revealed vistas of billowing white and gold against a blue sky.

From the driveway when we got home, there was a smell of rain. In the distance the thunder of an approaching storm rolled over the hills, that crushy, gravelly thunder that sounds like it’s crackling about in the clouds from horizon to horizon, gathering its strength, getting ready to let out a crashing boom.

Then came the lightning. Bright flashes of strobe light following by crashing thunder. And finally came the rain. Drop by drop at first, then a steady stream. And then there was a lull. And then a deluge. Torrents of water fell from the sky. The wind thrashed the trees mercilessly as we stood fretting that the Arizona Ash was certain to finally fall on top of the Texas Redbud which bloomed so much this year.

Water poured off the eves, overwhelming the gutters, white caps spilling over the edges throwing a frothy mist upward in the wind. And then hail came. Gently at first, chinking against the windows. Then more earnestly, gathering white piles here and there. And then the onslaught began in earnest. Fallen hail covered the sidewalks. It floated in ice-jams in the streams of water running around the corner of the house. It looked like winter outside, such as it is in Texas.

And we thought of our tomatoes, as we seem to do at this time of year.

Think of them with us, those tomatoes that replaced the first crop that got caught in the freezes of several weeks ago. Those tomatoes that were starting to climb up their cages, that had begun putting out yellow blossoms. Those tomatoes that had given us renewed hope that we might actually get fruit before the heat of summer sets in. 

Think of them and weep.

But then think of it, just think of it: all that rain. 

Subject: PTO. Yes, I really mean it this time.

I mashed the button to send that one-liner. I stashed my laptop and zipped the bag shut. And then with a wave to the rest of the crew, I headed for the door.

It was noon on Friday. The bugs were fixed. The issues resolved. I had been trying to take a couple days off for a week or more, and finally it was time.

The air was warm. The sky was blue. The Elm trees were pushing out their spring green finery. The sun was beaming down from the sky. And there were birds (I kid you not.): Mockingbirds and Wrens and Cardinals were singing in the thicket on the far side of the parking lot.

I got into the car, rolled the windows down and turned up the stereo loud. Barry White was playing, The First, The Last, My Everything.

I rolled the windows down farther. I turned the stereo up louder. And I sang all the way home.

We were talking about being far away. How I have lamented being the only one in the family west of the Mississippi. How I felt completely removed from them all, removed from all that coming and going and the closeness that characterized the family of my youth. How my brother and aunts and cousins and grandparents evolved new relationships as time went on but mine felt frozen in the 1970s.

“But here’s the thing,” she said. “In many ways, we know more about you than about each other.”

(Because of this, she meant. Because of the many words posted online over the years.)

I smiled. 

I smiled, because of course these words are not me, not even close. The sun, the blue sky, the smell of Agarita blossoms on the wind, or Irises and Spiderworts standing tall, or wild, yellow Daisies, or wild pink Primroses. They’re nice, and all that, but what about the other side? There is another side. … So I smiled.

“There’s so much I don’t write,” I said.

What about the feeling of time lost over those years when I was commuting long distances? What about the cancellation of programs that I had stacked my adult life on? What about the anxiety of being a new architect on a project who is constantly out of sight and out of mind? What about quitting your job in your fifties and starting at a new place back at the starting line? What about the question I was asked, “So what did you do in your last job?” when it became apparent to that person that I wasn’t a database wiz. Or similar questions when I struggled with new development tools? Or the dark, nagging thoughts that woke me in the middle of the night making me sit up with hot sweats and a deep rush of anxiety attacks? What about…

“There’s a lot I won’t write about,” I said.

… um, except that now I kinda have and now they kinda do.

Nevertheless, caveat lector.