The Tree Grows Bigger

Yesterday I met the buyer and the seller of a little house I know. They’d never met before. This house, the one we’re talking about here, had been the first family’s home for many decades, both parents now gone, to heaven I’d bet, their town, no fault of these folks, now as terminal as any Stage 4 patient nearing their bitter quiet end.

The woman, the seller, kind, a daughter to their family told of her mom and dad. I’m not sure how the talk began, began to roll. But it did, it started, as it does, between people of good hearts, this buyer and this seller of this house in this place on this day I didn’t see coming. Her parents had owned and run a store, back when this place was a proper town.

Back when success could be seen out my office window.

The man, the buyer now, a boy in the story from way on back, remembered eating lunch, called Dinner in these parts, at her family’s store. Lunch there cost 35 cents. A drink was a dime. Her dad was a nice man, this then-boy recalled. Nice to the boy, this man recalled today.

I smiled as their memories met, circled, shook hands. Though these two people had never met, I meant. I mean.

I’m quite sure of that.

This woman had cared for her father near the end – he couldn’t be left alone. She remembered sitting at their kitchen table, looking out with him at the huge tree in their back yard.

I’ve seen that tree. See it now. Sun hits it from the far off western sky.

Her dad would look up at the tree. “That tree’s getting pretty big,” he’d tell her.

And it was. He knew.

And it was.

She loved her dad. Loves him still. But you knew that, already.

I had to hear the story.

They’d talk a little longer, the little girl now grown and her dad, about this and then about that. Five minutes or so later he’d say to her, as if for the first time, “That tree’s getting pretty big.”

And it was.

And it is.

Still, behind this house, getting bigger, like he said. Filling her memory and the thread of a life lived inside this hallowed place. Their home. The room where we three stood grew silent, listening to her words, one sip. 

Then another.

Her words.

Her life.

The woman’s parents took care of her, as parents do sometimes. Raised her. Gave her what she needed. Loved her. She smiled, her little girl eyes glistening brightly at their gift.

Today in this bittersweet time of finally selling the family home, she remembered.

I’d told her several weeks ago that this buyer was a good man, that he would take care of this house in a way that most in this town would not.

I believe that. Know that, really, as people know things without being taught.

He then told her the story of his mom. This buyer, this man, talking to this seller, this woman. It seemed the most natural thing. I think his mom passed away a year or so ago, but I’m not sure.

She too could not live alone, his mom, near the end, so he took care of her. He wouldn’t dream of putting his mother in a nursing home.

It strikes me hard this cold May morning, writing this down, telling you this, the phrase putting someone in a rest home. Like taking a dog to the vet to have them put down.

This man and his mom watched old John Wayne movies together, talked together, though at the end she couldn’t talk, his mom, except with her eyes. I bet they were beautiful, her eyes. Her son and his momma.

He remembered, this man telling his story, two regrets, which yesterday I heard – nothings, slips that his mom didn’t even hear. She’s in heaven now.

Write that down, I tell myself.

He loved her. Did the right thing for her. A hero, this man to me, certainly to his mom, may she rest in peace. The house, he the new owner, is lucky, again, good people, one family to another.

The tree alive, getting bigger.

The daughter, this woman, placing her family’s home into new hands. “Yesterday, I went over to the house,” she said. “So empty it was. So much harder than I thought it would be.”

So much harder than I thought it would be.

They shook hands at the end. She gave him a set of house keys, two garage door openers. “The openers need batteries, but should work just fine.”

I could tell you more, the stories they exchanged, two families forty years before, living inside a house inside a town whose heartbeat was steady, back then.

I thought about it later that night. My pen so unsure.

The words stopped. As they did. As they do.

As they always do.

The busy lives, the slowing as we age, then the end – the days, the years, the rambling adventures – the people we leave behind. That we are left behind by.

Remember the Alamo.

Thank God for His blessings, the majesty of folks doing what they do each day. May He forgive life’s mistakes, or at least let them come into a softer focus, be handed on as lessons, or dare we ask, disappear.

God’s word is there to see, ironically, if we but listen. 3.

Quit Working

Dinner.

It’s Lunch where I come from.

Dinner there’s named Supper here.

She didn’t understand.

The meal at noon. They call it Dinner out here, darlin’. Trust me on this one.

           

I remember Bridget Mann, Dr. Bridget Mann, my college French professor, a native of Germany before the time of Hitler, a BBC broadcaster from London during the Battle of Britain.

            

That’s World War II.

       

German speaking English teaching French.

Madame Mann used to confide that students seeking to speak a foreign language well must stop translating – from English thoughts in your mind into French spoken words from your lips in this case.

You must think in French.

Think like the French, without that troubling need to surrender.

The French think different thoughts than Americans – different shadings, different back stories.

It takes some getting used to. Listening deeply, one discerns cultural differences. Divergences in history.

            

My companion nodded, like she understood.

A beautiful, freshly-minted penny.

I pointed to the café we’d just left, an hour and a little west of Fort Worth. “You heard a better example,” I told her, “French versus German, right back inside that restaurant before the chicken-fried hit our table.”

            

“Do tell, monsieur.” She was getting into it.

           

“Remember that cute waitress? When you wanted a cup of coffee?”

            

“Yeah!” Her soft brown eyes lit up in recognition. “The waitress said the coffee pot had quit that morning!”

 No coffee for you.

            

“And if that same coffee pot failed to produce back in your big city Dallas hometown?”

            

“Then I’d tell you the coffee pot stopped working!”

            

C’est vrai?

Sure ‘nuff.

Dr. Mann must be smiling.

Don’t get so hung up on the words themselves, she says across three decades of silence. “Listen to the thought patterns those words betray.”

            Listen.

            Understand.

            Act.

           

            

Lake Leon, the Emerald Lake

Reading and writing, looking out on a Sunday afternoon at Lake Leon, emerald lake, the dammed up waters above the Leon River, the raging rapids or dusty dry bipolar ghost river that crosses the footprints of Peneteka, Spaniards and oil rush character actors.

A cacophony reaches my ear – birds, hundreds, gulls white and gray screaming calling diving toward fish brought to the surface by this first sunny February day in awhile. Majestic loons, stark, move in a row across the rippling surface water like a fleet of battleships, their pointed beaks and erect vertical necks like the bridge masts of Trafalgar frigates gone to war.

Lake Leon’s blue green surface sparkles boils from below with small silver light fishlings chased to the surface by mean menacing streaks below.

The loons dive, disappear, all in a line, nabbing tiny fins inside their sharp chiseled beaks. The white gray gulls dive bomb, The Battle of Britain, joining the feast, their calls beckoning the country around the cove to come observe the slaughter, the springlike feast after so many days of ice blue gloom.

Plenty for all.

Pull up a chair.

It lasts ten minutes. The loon posse moves left, then back right, like a prairie wildfire driving rabbits with clubs, like lemmings toward their fateful date with Dover White Cliff zero gravity greatness.

Lake Leon presents a curtains-up ecodrama as compelling as anything found in more famous deep adventure Klondike venues, projected on dark walls, by cable TV, late at night.

There’s no one here to see it, no bass boat. Neighbors aren’t home. Everybody’s in church, but are they really? I can’t imagine a benediction more graphically I AM than the symphony swirling thirty yards from the sanctuary of this veranda porch.

Clock ticks later, it’s over. Father, Son, Holy Ghost – the gulls fly off. The loons dive, disappear. I’m not sure how they left the stage.

Or why.

But they’re damn sure gone now.

We know this.

Lake Leon’s waves are quiet again, expectant – waiting to see What’s Next.

The wind turns chill.

The pen ceases to move.

Three

I'm in the bookstore, near the center, near the back. What's New. Trade paperback. A song comes on the intercom, the radio softly in the background, the one Say Something, I'm Giving Up on You. We hate the song. Me. And her. We change the channel unless we're on the long ever-darkening road back west toward the desert. I'm sorry that I couldn't get to you. I try to block it out, picking up another $20 book that will be $7 three months from now. I breathe hum not quite sing I don't know the low tone almost silently escapes my throat when I hear it... ...the same sound, words, the same funereal rift from one row over, Fiction. And Literature. Hardbacks. A tear at one eye's corner, another soul broken irrevocably apart ten feet away behind the next stack. And I'll, I'll swallow my pride. You're the one that I love. And I'm saying Goodbye. I don't dare look up. Behind me, to the left, the music section, Classical if memory serves, Say something, I'm giving up on you. A female keen so Gregorian in its haunted lift toward heaven, or upward from darkest hell, its plaintive clawing despair grabbing. Growing. I wonder if their daytime minds are locked wide open to a parade of happy images from deep within the vault - joyous roadtrips, embraces and Brookshire's and churches and walks and talks and looking at our emerald lake together and that still, sad unpredictable moon. I wonder if they, are broken. If repair, seems unthinkable. I wonder if they have a reason to live, beyond saving their children the despair that ending their sadness and confusion would bring them. I hope to myself that they do have children out there somewhere. Say something, I'm giving up on you. I hear their voices, three together, three alone, within forty feet in a store in southwest Fort Worth. A primitive, cloying nighttime Celtic fugue. Giving up on a love who abandoned a creative life, or maybe, I catch sight of the hardback young woman, maybe giving up on life itself. Not moving on, as I'd first heard her lyric, but checking out. All or nothing. I had all I needed, before. I'm giving up on YOU. But they aren't. The song's a lie, at least in this bookstore before the cold icy storm sets in. It's not time to move on, and that door behind us, with sunshine leaking around its edges, is nailed shut. From the outside. How could they have felt it all so completely? How could their Other have not? "Thanks for being nice to me." An almost palpable sob, silent, sharp, a punch to the gut washes over that corner of the brightly-lit store. I'm not going to make it, it says. The lyrics end. The book I'm holding, $16.95 plus tax, is ruined. I'll have to buy it now. Ruined. Readable, every word. A story I can't seem to put down. A best seller, it turns out. Fiction. A lie. Three.