The Time of My Life

by Bryan Woolley

Although the income tax deadline is in April, it’s in February that we pick up the Form 1040 that has been lying on our desk for a month and thumb through it for the first time, vowing to get through the misery early this year. But we never do, and we feel guilty, and it’s in February that the IRS informs us that last year’s return is being audited.

  Even the holidays in February are second-rate. Groundhog Day and Valentine’s Day are okay, but nobody gets the day off. Nobody gets Washington’s or Lincoln’s birthdays off, either, unless they work for the banks or the government. It’s depressing to walk all the way to the bank in miserable February weather and then find it closed, and more depressing to realize that the taxpayers’ employees get more holidays than the taxpayers, and we wonder gloomily why, but we’re not surprised that it’s so, because that’s the way life is in February. If we want to celebrate February’s holidays, we have to go to sales, even if we don’t want to buy anything. And if we want to buy something, we discover we have no money, and the banks, of course, are closed.

  The Romans, who gave the world Nero and Caligula, also gave us February. In a fit of madness or drunkenness, they added January and February to their ten-month year. Pope Gregory XIII, the last to reform our calendar, could have rescued us from February, but he botched the job, keeping the miserable month and slicing ten days from glorious October. A year or two ago, some U.S. senator, convinced that the world would be better without February, introduced a bill to eliminate it.

  But he introduced it in February, so of course it failed.

  February, 1979

  Book Writers and Book Burners

  I DON’T THINK it’s just because I’m a writer that I feel the way I do about people who burn books.

  Being a writer does have something to do with it, I guess. After all, most of my life people have been telling me to give up writing to do something respectable and profitable.

  Writing is a nutty way to try to earn a living, like acting. When you’re young, everybody tells you that nobody really makes a living that way and that you’re doomed to failure; when you finally get published, everybody thinks you’re a millionaire. But there aren’t many rich people in the business, and making money can’t really be anybody’s reason for going into it. The people who want you to go into medicine or the grocery business are right about that.

  You go into it because you think you’ve got something to say, some Great Message that the rest of the world needs to hear. Or because you like to see your name and face on book jackets. Or you get into it just because you enjoy the act of writing; you get a kick out of taking one of the world’s most ordinary com modities—words—and using them to create new thoughts and images in somebody else’s head.

  That’s why I write. The act itself pleases me. And although I think a piece of writing is incomplete until it has been published—because the link between my head and somebody else’s can’t be made if it isn’t published—I don’t suffer much if some reader or reviewer tells me he doesn’t like what I’ve written in a newspaper or book. I’m just pleased to know he read it. The connection between my head and his has been made, and the world is a little less lonely for both of us.

  But if some joker were to take it into his head that he not only hated something I wrote, but also dedicated himself to making sure that nobody else would have a chance even to see the disgusting thing, well, I would be right peeved. Not only would he be destroying something that I labored over, but he would be destroying that link between me and the reader as well, and we would have nothing left to agree about or fight over.

  And that’s the main reason I hate book burners. I’m a reader as well as a writer, and I enjoy arguing with other writers as much as any other reader does. And when some self-righteous moron takes it into his head to “protect” me from writings that he considers too indecent or subversive or irreverent for my delicate mind or sensibilities, I enjoy telling him to mind his own business and make a point of reading whatever he tries to keep from me.

  So I’m angry with a Pentecostal minister in Adrian, Michigan, named Rick Strawcutter. He and a bunch of Adrian citizens went out the other day and started burning things that they consider pornographic or otherwise unfit for the eyes and ears of decent folks. They burned some Star Wars trading cards. They burned a Johnny Cash record. They burned a novel, called The Man, by Irving Wallace.

  The account I read of the Rev. Strawcutter’s pyromaniacal crusade was pretty skimpy, so I don’t know what he has against Star Wars. I don’t own any trading cards, but I went to the movie and saw nothing in decent or dangerous about it. It was kind of dumb, I thought, but if dumbness is a justifiable reason for bonfires, we’re all in trouble, including the Rev. Strawcutter.

  I don’t know what he has against Johnny Cash, either. I’ve listened to Johnny since I was just a tyke, and he never urged me to commit murder, mayhem, rape, sodomy, or even aggravated loitering. Johnny’s often guilty of excessive sentimentality, I think, but since when is that dangerous to the Rev. Strawcutter and me? If we don’t want to cry, we can turn it off.

  Even Irving Wallace is baffled by the preacher’s incineration of his book. “There was no sex in the novel,” the writer said. “I wrote a novel without sex, so it’s the one that gets burned.”

  I don’t know the Rev. Strawcutter, but I’ve run into plenty of his kind. He doesn’t like The Man because it’s about a black man who’s president of the United States—a fantasy too disgusting for the reverend’s prissy little mind to abide. I mean, if we start writing and reading novels about black presidents, people might get the idea that the world won’t cave in if we elect one. And lordy, anything can happen then. We might wind up with a black Miss America or something.

  I’m really sorry the Rev. Strawcutter burned Wallace’s book. I’ve read a couple of his works and didn’t like them much. I considered them potboilers, just outlandish plots peopled with cardboard characters and twice as long as they ought to be. I have a hunch that Wallace keeps one eye on the typewriter and one on the marketplace while he churns them out, pushing whatever buttons will get him onto the bestseller lists. My mental dialogues with him haven’t been pleasant. Besides, Wallace is a rich writer and I’m not, and I hate that.

  But now I’ve got to read The Man just because the Rev. Strawcutter and a bunch of yahoos in Adrian, Michigan, don’t want me to. And there’s no sex in it, either. Damn.

  March, 1979

  Hanging around the Alamo

  I WAS HANGING around the Alamo the other day, looking at the tourists.

  Tourists are much the same everywhere, I guess. Most dress in clothes they wouldn’t wear in their own hometowns, except maybe in their backyards. They all strike the same poses for whoever’s holding the Instamatic, and most of them spend more time in the curio shop, buying souvenirs made in Taiwan and Hong Kong, than looking at the sight they came to see.

  Alamo tourists are like that. They’re a little disappointed in what they’re looking at, I think. The Alamo is so small and unprepossessing, as historic shrines go, that it can’t live up to its billing.

  And its story, as told in the exhibits inside, requires more reading than most tourists have time or patience for. Unless they’ve paid their money to see the multiscreen slide presentation at the Remember the Alamo Museum across the plaza, most don’t know that the remaining structure was only a small part of the original fortress, and that many of the heroes fell in what is now the lobby of the U.S. Post Office and in the street where the taxicabs are honking and along the line of cheap stores across the way.

  Although some have seen John Wayne’s movie and know that his Davy Crockett and the rest died for “freedom,” not many know what complaints the Texas settlers had against the Mexican government that could have led to such bloody results. Most don’t really care. The Alamo is just one of those things it’s nice to have seen, like Mount Vernon or Independence Hall, but not as interesting to look at.

  Maybe I would have felt the same as they do if I
hadn’t learned the Alamo’s story at my grandmother’s knee when I was five years old. It was the first time I heard of William Travis’s famous line—how on March 4, 1836, after ten days of siege and all hope of help had flown, the Alamo commander gathered his men and told them of their approaching doom if they remained; how he drew his sword and traced a long line in the dirt and said, “I now want every man who is determined to stay here and die with me to come across this line. Who will be the first?”

  And as she told of those men stepping one by one over the line, of ailing Jim Bowie asking his comrades to lift his cot across, leaving cowardly Moses Rose standing alone, my small chest filled with that pride of heritage that makes Texans so obnoxious to the rest of the world.

  I’ve been an Alamo nut ever since. I’ve read dozens of accounts of the siege. I know its history has been interlaced with legend and fantasy and speculation and that grandmothers and textbooks and movies often draw our heroes more heroic than they really were.

  I’ve learned that the battle took place during the Romantic Age, when men everywhere were making noble speeches and fighting revolutions, and that it was more fashionable in those days to die for glory than it is now. I’ve learned that the Alamo’s most famous heroes—William Travis, Jim Bowie, Jim Bon-ham, and Davy Crockett—were rascals of the first order, firebrand adventurers with plenty of past to live down. If they hadn’t been such spellbinders, maybe the more ordinary men in their command wouldn’t have rushed so willingly to their own much smaller measures of immortality.

  But all that matters not a whit to me. My knowledge of my heroes’ weaknesses has made them only dearer to me, their ghosts more accessible, easier to commune with than the noble, strong faces in the shrine’s idealized paintings.

  So every time I’m in San Antonio, I do my Alamo ritual, studying the familiar relics and paintings, reading Travis’s passionate, futile appeals for help: “To the people of Texas and all Americans in the world— Fellow citizens—& compatriots—I am besieged by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna…I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism & everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid and with all dispatch, …”

  The ghosts were particularly active the day I was there, the 143rd anniversary of Travis’s last speech to his men—“I have deceived you by the promise of help….”—and his line in the dirt. The names of the dead on the bronze plaques on the old stone walls seemed more vivid than before, each seeming to call attention to itself: Tapley Holland, Ohio (the first to cross the line); Micajah Autry, North Carolina; Daniel William Cloud, Kentucky; Robert W. Ballentine, Scotland; Asa Walker, Tennessee; Charles Zanco, Den mark. Only a handful of the defenders were born in Texas, I noticed, and nearly all with Spanish names: Abamillo, Badillo, Esparza, Fuentes, Guerrero, Losoya. And I haven’t yet found the plaque of one name on the Alamo’s list of heroes: John, Negro.

  But their birthplaces don’t matter much to history, and neither do the lives of most of them. Some had lived in Texas for years; others arrived just in time to die and become part of a legend, a mystique, a heritage—whatever it is that makes the Alamo the center of the Texan soul as surely as the Temple in Jerusalem is the center of the Jewish soul.

  Maybe that’s what makes the Alamo disappointing as a tourist attraction. The Instamatic can’t capture soul, and the Taiwanese haven’t quite duplicated it. The closest they’ve come is a synthetic coonskin cap and a plastic rifle.

  What the Alamo needs, I think, is my grandmother. “Thermopylae had its messenger of defeat,” she would tell the sightseers. “The Alamo had none.”

  They might wonder what the hell Thermopylae is, but their hearts would be moved.

  March, 1979

  A Blessing on the Inventor of Kites

  BLESSINGS BE UPON the Malayans, the Chinese, Archytas of Tarentum, or whoever it was that invented kites. What a majestic inspiration that first kite-maker had, taking a bit of paper or silk, a few sticks, and a string, putting it all together, and making it fly.

  I’m sure his neighbors regarded him as an idle, useless fellow and hooted as he ran down his neighborhood hill, trailing his contraption behind him. I’m sure they hated him when it soared into the sky like the graceful hawk for which it was named, leaving the dullards to boil their lentils or slop their hogs or whatever responsible people did in those days. And I’m sure they huddled in their huts that night, envious, wondering how the hell he did it but afraid to ask, since they had laughed at him.

  But the first kite-maker was a genial fellow, I’m sure, and gladly showed his neighbors how to make kites and fly them and feel the same joy he did. I haven’t met a grumpy kite-flyer yet—once his kite is in the air, anyway—and I suspect that happiness has been a part of kite-flying since its ancient beginning.

  Of course a lot of people can’t do anything just for the fun of it. Everything has to have some practical application or its existence isn’t justified. So engineers started using kites to carry lines across rivers, generals put lanterns in them as signals to their troops, meteorologists sent instruments aloft in them, the religious flew them over their houses at night to keep the evil spirits away. In 1752, Benjamin Franklin tied a key to the string of his kite and used it to prove the electrical nature of lightning. (That’s the story, any way. I figure he just wanted to fly a kite and couldn’t wait until the rain stopped and made up that business about electricity to protect his reputation as a practical man. After all, who would buy an almanac from a guy who flies kites in the rain?)

  But, by and large, the kite has managed to avoid usefulness, and the dedicated kite-flyer remains the paragon of idlers, surpassing even the fisherman, who is in constant danger of catching a fish, which leads to no end of work. While the fisherman is busy cleaning his catch and cooking it—or trying to hoodwink an unwary neighbor into accepting those chores—the kite-flyer has only to crash his kite into a tree at the end of the day and walk away, serene in his knowl edge that a crashed kite is even more useless than a whole one, common string isn’t worth untangling, and therefore his loss is a happy one.

  I mention these facts because it’s March and windy outside, but not too windy. The sky is very blue, and it’s sunny and cool, and I wish I were Archytas of Tarentum, standing on Flagpole Hill, a grassy slope in Northeast Dallas with a broad field below and just enough trees to require a little skill, but not much.

  In my closet at home is a rectangular box made of cardboard, and inside the box is a peacock made of bright red, blue, and yellow silk stretched over a frame of bamboo. The peacock can lie in such a small box because his wings are detachable, and his legs are hinged in the middle. He doesn’t look like much, lying in the box like that.

  But if I were standing on Flagpole Hill, the peacock would have his wings, and they would be fluttering in the wind. His legs would be latched rigid, and the long silk streamers that serve as his tail would be flowing, and he would be straining to leap out of my hand.

  As soon as I let him go, other kite-flyers would turn their eyes away from their own kites and look at him. The children on the seesaw would stop their seesawing and watch him. The Vietnamese family cooking hotdogs under the trees near the flagpole would leave their picnic table and come and ask me if I mind if they stand close and watch, and I would say I don’t mind. The father would say that they haven’t seen a kite like that since they left their home in Vietnam, and I would say it came from China, and he would say, yes, I know that.

  They would watch me make the peacock dance in the sky, and then my sons would make him dance, and each time he would come down he would land on his feet and fall gracefully into the grass. After a while the Vietnamese children would take their turn, too. I would explain to their father that I keep the peacock on a fairly short string because I couldn’t get another like him, and I don’t want to crash him into the trees. The father would say, yes, and he’s a small kite, and it would be a shame to fly him so high that
we couldn’t see his colors.

  The children would make the peacock dance for a long time, and the eyes of the Vietnamese father and mother would follow it carefully, softly, as if they were remembering something.

  I had such a day a couple of years ago. And although I’ve flown kites all my life, it was then that I realized what a marvelous thing Archytas or the Malayans or the Chinese or whoever it was that in vented kites had done. And I wondered why nobody ever erected a monument to that event.

  But a marble kite would be kind of ridiculous, I guess. You couldn’t even crash it into a tree.

  March, 1979

  The Widow’s Cane

  NOW AND THEN a story comes along that restores your faith in human nature. Someone risks his own life to save a stranger. A guy pays a library fine that he has owed for forty-five years. A couple with eighteen children of their own adopt an orphan of another race. News like that brightens our day and makes us proud to be members of mankind.

  I’ve been hoping something like that would happen to Mrs. Gladys Roundtree, whose small ad has run for more than a week now in the lost-and-found column of the classified section.

  Lost antique hand-carved wooden walking cane with gold head, address of Mrs. Trabue, Carthage, Tx, on the knob. Bus stop Main & St. Paul. Has sentimental value. Reward. 824-6404, 235-5291.

  The cane doesn’t belong to Mrs. Trabue of Carthage, but the gold knob—a little bigger than a golf ball—and the mother-of-pearl shaft connected to it used to be part of her umbrella, back when umbrellas were things of beauty and part of every stylish woman’s wardrobe. Mrs. Trabue is long deceased now, and her daughter, Mrs. Roundtree, will be ninety years old, come September.

  “I’m old,” she said, “and almost blind. I wear two contact lenses, and one of them doesn’t work too well. I wear a hearing aid in one ear. I’m practically immobile without something to lean on, but I can still ride the bus downtown and do my errands.”