And I realized that all my boyhood heroes were fictional or real figures from the past. The permanent residents of my juvenile fantasy world were Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Jean Lafitte, Buffalo Bill, Sam Houston, Sam Bass, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, all the Union and Confederate soldiers who had served at the ruined nineteenth-century military post where my friends and I played our games, all the Indians they fought, and the movie cowboys I’ve mentioned.
My only “contemporary” hero had been my own Great Uncle Bryan, a rancher who wore boots and spurs and was magnificent on horseback. He it was who, when informed of my ambition to be a cowboy, gave me my first glimpse into the reality of cattle-country society and economics: “Son, don’t grow up to be a cowboy. Grow up to be a cowman.”
It suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea who my sons’ heroes were. They didn’t inherit my love of history. They’re too young to have seen my movie idols, even on television. So far, they’ve shown little interest in sports. I tried to remember names they must have mentioned in the course of our conversations and play during this Christmas holiday visit and their past spring and summer visits—the times they come to me from the place where they live. There weren’t many. Han Solo, R2D2, C3PO, Luke Sky-walker—all the characters of Star Wars, which they had seen several times. Buck Rogers. The characters of Star Trek. I recalled no others.
“Ah,” I thought. “We have no mere generation gap here. We’re looking into a chasm of centuries. I was born into a world of kerosene lamps and outhouses, and my heroes lived in the past or were portrayed as living in the past. They all were rugged individualists who pitted their wits and bodies against the earthly wilderness and each other. These kids were born into a world of rockets and computers and lasers. Their heroes inhabit the future. They are creatures—and robots—of the cosmos, who deal with meteor showers and totalitarian satellites and the like and move not from village to village and fort to fort but from planet to planet and galaxy to galaxy.
“Can it be?” I thought. “Will they have no memory of meeting a childhood hero in the flesh? Can the real world become so dull, so lacking in opportunities for adventure, so bereft of dash and color, that they must reach into the dark mists of the future, and even into other galaxies and solar systems, to find someone to admire, someone to imitate, someone to want to be?”
As we sped free of Dublin and my Gene Autry memory into the empty countryside, I and the boy beside me withdrew into our own thoughts and fantasies. For many miles, we were as remote from each other as Julius Caesar and Darth Vader. But finally I had to know. “Son, who are your heroes?” I asked.
“Superman and you,” he said.
I gave him a hug.
January, 1980
A Fable or Parable or Something
AS TREES GO, it was nothing special. It wasn’t a spreading chestnut under which a village smithy might have stood, or a mighty oak that from a little acorn grew. It wasn’t a redwood, and the most fanatical environmentalist wouldn’t have enlisted in its cause. A charitable critic would have called it nondescript.
But my lady and I grew up in towns different from each other in every way but one: their dearth of trees. The few trees we knew were there because someone had planted and nurtured them, somehow encouraging them to take root and survive in spots that wise seeds and seedlings would never have chosen for themselves. The part of Dallas in which we now live is no primeval forest, either. This tree was our only one, and we loved it.
We loved it not only for its uniqueness in our landscape, but also because its being there was its own doing. In a neighborhood where no blade of grass dares be taller than any other and bushes seem to grow in square-cornered, symmetrical shapes, our tree grew free, unintimidated by the blocks and acres and square miles of pampered conformity that surrounded it. It didn’t participate in that landscape anyway, having chosen a place for itself that even weeds shunned.
It took root in a strip of dirt about two feet wide between the concrete of the carport and the concrete of the patio—a spot never nourished by mulch or fertilizer, a spot blocked from the morning sun by the high wooden fence that separates the patio from the carport and blocked from the afternoon sun by the carport roof.
It settled there as a seed, I suspect, nine or ten years ago, five or six years after the patio and the carport and the fence were built. And it survived on whatever nutrients the native earth contained and whatever rain dripped from the carport roof. It not only survived, it flourished, growing straight as a sequoia toward the narrow slit of sky between fence and roof.
By the time my lady and I moved into the place, the tree had sprung free of its dark confinement. We saw it first in winter, and its tangle of bare, skinny branches clad in smooth, humdrum gray didn’t merit sighs of ecstasy, but we valued it even then.
The patio, the fence, the ugly carport roof—even the utility pole beyond—were preferable to the parking lots that dominated the views from the apartments we had looked at, but the tree was what made this place really different from the others. Though no masterpiece of nature, it was something alive to look at through a window that otherwise provided a vista of straight, man-made lines and deadly earnest utilitarianism. In the spring, we hoped, it would also turn green.
The reality exceeded our expectation. The weight of its new leaves and twigs bent the tree’s branches just enough to arch them over the fence and form a shady bower over one end of the patio.
We hung flower pots and wind bells from the lower limbs. We set a table and two chairs in the shade and ate our meals there, and worked there sometimes. The cat crept along the fence and played leopard in the miniature jungle of leaves. The local mockingbird came there to sing.
On most summer afternoons the weather was more pleasant under the tree than in the air-conditioned house. And when the sun was low and hot and no breeze came to help the shade and we were forced to retreat indoors, the shadows of the leaves still made pleasing patterns through the window.
When we sent photographs of our surroundings to relatives who had never seen them, it was the tree and the bower it made that they praised for the peace and beauty they formed on an otherwise ordinary slab of concrete.
Because the tree wasn’t visible from the street or even the alley, my lady and I regarded its presence as a secret. Like children who had sneaked a puppy into their bed, we were pleased with ourselves. Amongst the crew-cut lawns and sculptured hedges of North Dallas, we had adopted a shaggy arboreal foundling of questionable pedigree. We had harbored a renegade and found reward in his company. We had kissed a frog, and he had turned into a prince—a spindly prince, but the only one in the yard.
But our tree wasn’t a secret, of course. The landlord knew about it. And one day, while nobody but the cat was at home, a gardener came and chopped it down and cut it into pieces and stacked it beside the garbage cans in the alley. My lady wept, and I cursed, and the landlord said he was sorry, but he was worried about what the roots might do someday to his concrete slab.
And he’s raising the rent to pay for the gardener.
January, 1980
Then Along Came Dick Cockrell
JUST WHEN YOU START thinking everybody has gone soft, that nobody gives a damn about anybody else, that the world’s supply of heroes has dried up, somebody like Dick Cockrell comes along.
Cockrell is the Irving truck driver who pulled into a roadside park between Tyler and Canton the other day and saw three men trying to force a screaming woman and her two young daughters into a car. Cockrell wasn’t the only bystander in the park. Eight or ten travelers were standing around watching the woman’s struggle, but they weren’t inclined to interfere. Cockrell, however, was. When the woman screamed, “Please, help!” he commenced to.
First, he commenced to break the jaw of the guy with the knife, the one who told him to get back in his truck and mind his own business. Then he commenced to break the arm of the guy who hit him in the face. Then he proce
eded to disarm the guy with the knife and the broken jaw, who had stabbed Cockrell in the leg while was breaking the other guy’s arm. Then he broke the blade off the knife. Then he kicked the third guy in the groin. Then he calmed the mother and the children, who had been threatened with rape. Then, when one of the attackers tried to make a getaway in their car, he reached in, popped him another one, cut the engine, and broke the key off in the ignition.
Then he told his three victims, who were rolling on the ground and screaming, that he drives by the park three times a week, and if they desired more of what he had given them, they could hang around. Then he loaded the mother and children into their car and told them to follow his rig until he overtook their husband and father, who was farther down the highway in a U-Haul truck, unaware that his family had stopped at the park. Then Cockrell reunited the family and told them to follow him and he would see them safely through Dallas, which he did, then drove off into the sunset to arrive at his truck yard only a half-hour late. Then, not bothering to tell his boss what had happened, he went home to Irving and cleaned his wound. He had received his reward, he said, “when those two little girls hugged and kissed me. That made my day.”
Besides the basic heroics, Cockrell’s story is full of nice little human-interest touches. Cockrell is white, and the family he saved is black. Cockrell is an ex-Marine, and the family he helped is a Marine family being transferred from North Carolina to California. Before he joined the Corps, Cockrell was a three-hundred-pound fatso who dropped out of high school because he could no longer endure the bullying he got from his classmates.
The story also hints at several of the sicknesses in our society. While Cockrell was comforting the woman and the girls, the attacker whose arm he broke was threatening to sue him—and might have, if a lawyer had been among the onlookers. A woman who read his story in the newspaper approached Cockrell at a Burger King and asked him what he could do about wife-beaters. A man called him up and told him the Ku Klux Klan was going to get him for helping a black woman. And if Cockrell hadn’t happened by, the woman and the little girls would have been abducted, raped, and very likely murdered because nobody else at the roadside park lifted a finger.
Granted, there were three attackers, and one of them had a knife (although, according to Cockrell, it wasn’t a big knife), and there probably weren’t any 245-pound ex-Marines among the eight or ten spectators until Cockrell arrived. It’s possible that a smaller man, less adept than Cockrell at breaking jaws and arms and knife blades, might have been bunged up a bit had he tried to intervene.
But surely there were several men among the spectators, or a few husky women. Three or four of them, had they banded together, might not have been able to wreak the soul-satisfying havoc that Cockrell did, but surely they could have distracted the attackers from their dirty work long enough to allow their prey to escape.
They didn’t, though.
It’s easy to sit back and criticize those who out of fear or weakness fail to help the fellow human in danger. It’s easy to condemn those who refuse to get involved even when little girls are screaming. It’s nice to believe that if we had been there, we would have done what Cockrell did, within the limits of our physical strength and combat skills.
But would we?
If we’re lucky, we will never have to find out. It’s people like most of us who make it necessary for people like Dick Cockrell to become heroes.
January, 1980
Hollywood and the Two Thomases
ONCE UPON A TIME there was a football player named Thomas Henderson. He was a very good football player. He tackled bad guys who would try to run past him with the ball, and when one of the bad guys would try to throw the ball to another bad guy, sometimes Thomas would pluck the ball out of the air and run in the other direction, which would make the bad guys feel bad and hang their heads.
Thomas played for a team called the Dallas Cowboys, and so did several other very good players. Some of these good players were called “stars.” There were so many stars on the team that people watching them were reminded of the American flag and started calling the Cowboys “America’s team.” They even had stars on their helmets and their cheerleaders.
Thomas knew that he was a good player, but he wasn’t sure he was a star. He wanted to be one very much. Whenever he would look at his helmet and think of the word star, he would also think of the place in California where the famous movie actors and actresses live, and he decided to stop calling himself Thomas and call himself “Hollywood” instead.
Now a man whose name is Hollywood can’t behave as if he were still a mere Thomas. He must dress differently, drive a fancier car, make entertaining gestures in front of TV cameras during football games, and say lots of witty things to sportscasters and sports-writers. Hollywood did all this, and soon he was as well known as any player on America’s team. Indeed, sometimes he was so busy being a star that he didn’t have time to tackle the bad guys who ran past him or pluck the ball out of the air when a bad guy would throw it to his part of the field.
After a time, Hollywood’s new behavior began to bother another man named Thomas, who had decided not to change his name to Hollywood. This man, also called Landry, didn’t look like a star, but he was one nonetheless. Indeed, he was praised far and wide as the greatest star of all, even though he didn’t wear a helmet with a star on it.
This Thomas was the king of the stars, you see. He was a sort of magician who could take young men just out of college and make them into stars. His method of doing this was to make the young men into a football team that could win a lot of games, and those who did the most to help the team win seemed to become stars automatically. And it distressed the magician that Hollywood was too busy being a star to help the team win games anymore.
One day he took Hollywood aside and said to him, “Obviously, it has become irksome to you to go out on the field every Sunday and tackle bad guys and pluck their passes out of the air, when you would rather be doing funny things in front of the TV cameras. I realize now that it was presumptuous of me to expect a star like you to perform such tedious tasks. Therefore, I’ve decided to relieve you of your football duties so you may devote all your time to being a star. Don’t thank me, Hollywood. I would do the same for any star like you.”
Hollywood went back and told the rest of America’s team what Landry had said. “Bye, bye, Hollywood,” they replied, and Hollywood went off to be a star by himself.
Time passed.
By and by, Hollywood noticed that he wasn’t getting interviewed on TV anymore. He noticed that nobody was calling up and offering him money to do movies or commercials. Sportswriters seemed less and less interested in what he had to say about America’s team or the bad guys or the other Thomas or any other topic. He missed his old helmet with the star on it. “Hey,” he said. “Being a star by myself isn’t easy. I think I’ll call up some of the bad guys whose passes I used to pluck out of the air and tell them I’m willing to play football for one of their teams.”
He called and called, but the bad guys told him that they already had all the stars they needed. Now Hollywood was worried. He sat down and thought and thought. “There’s only one thing left to do,” he thought. “I’ll change my name to Thomas and go and talk to the other Thomas. I’ll tell him I’m tired of being a star by myself and want to be a football player again. I’ll tell him that if he will let me wear the helmet with the star on it, I won’t even act like a star anymore. I’ll just tackle the bad guys and pluck their passes out of the air as I did before I was so famous. I won’t insist that the other Thomas make up his mind immediately. I’ll give him some time to think it over.”
So Thomas Henderson, a very humble football player, went to the other Thomas and told him these things. But, alas, the Thomas who had never called himself Hollywood needed no time to think it over.
Moral: ’Tis easier for a star to fall out of its constellation than to get back in.
February, 1980
&
nbsp; National Letter Writing Week
DEAR READER,
How are you? I am fine. My lady and Pussycat also are fine, and I saw Mockingbird sitting on his utility pole the other day, even though the landlord hired a man to chop down the tree where he used to sit and sing. The weather where I am has been fine lately. I hope the weather is fine where you are, too.
I take pen in hand because today is the first day of National Letter Writing Week, which is a special week thought up by the U.S. Postal Service. Why does the Postal Service want us to write more letters? you may ask. Doesn’t it have enough trouble delivering the letters that we’ve already written?
Well, the stack of stuff that somebody left on my desk says the objectives of National Letter Writing Week are “to focus attention on the power of the written word and letter writing to shape opinion, preserve memories, lift spirits and link people and to encourage more personal correspondence.”
Delving deeper, though, I find that the Postal Service has an ulterior motive. A letter in the pile from Postmaster General William F. Bolger to postmasters everywhere (which may have been delivered to me by mistake, since I’m not a postmaster) states: “In recent months, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the phone company has been saying they do it better. They’ve been urging people to ‘reach out and touch someone’—and also to kick the letter habit!”
Aha! I thought when I read that. Ma Bell is giving the post office fits. Postage stamp sales are falling off, so now we have this National Letter Writing Week!
The Time of My Life Page 12
