Blue Moon
by JEFF BARTON
A change of season in Kyle;
an aleph on a Friday night
Considering it was a Friday night in Kyle, it was a big crowd, good enough that we spilled outside the small meeting space onto the porch and into the yard, seated in cheap but cozy plastic lawn chairs, waiting.
Tim O’Brien, the Vietnam vet and Pulitzer-finalist-author of The Things They Carried, was late, but the evening felt almost like true fall despite the drought, and once O’Brien arrived he was charming enough for any civilized soul to overlook the tardiness.
He told how his boys loved Tigger, from Winnie The Pooh, and had taken to pretending they had bouncy tails of their own. This led O’Brien and his wife sometimes to wear tails themselves, and, perhaps inevitably, to O’Brien once answering the door for a delivery man having forgotten a slinky-toy hanging down from the back of his trousers.
The pretend-tails became such an issue -- encumbering ballgames and intruding on other middle class conventions of homo erectus -- that finally O’Brien made up a story to illustrate the dangers of make-believe to his children. In the conversation that followed, one of his young sons told him he thought he understood the concept of pretend but was troubled. Sometimes, he told his father, when the dad was away on trips, the boy would pretend the father was still with him, playing and making faces, protecting him. Was that bad?
Not so long afterward, O’Brien said he woke up early one morning to write. He was in his kitchen waiting on coffee to brew when he began imagining his own father, recently lost, was still with him. He imagined him throwing a baseball, pretended – my word, not his -- to hear him sing.
O’Brien spoke also of an acclaimed short story from the ‘40s by the Argentinean Jorge Louis Borges, titled The Aleph. In the story a character in a basement finds this thing -- the aleph -- that contains within one point of space all the other points of the universe: every corner, every army, every ant, every face, every secret, every truth, even hidden and obscene love letters.
And O’Brien talked about how great stories and, he seemed to imply, great lives, are made as much of imagination as of fact. How boring it would be to talk of even a superhero, even a Batman, if all we knew of him were the crisp numbers of existence, the neatly squared building blocks of his life, his address, the make of his shoes, the dates of his exploits.
In fiction, as in fact, details lend heft but they do not grab our throats unless there is some compelling story to strengthen their grip, unless we are inspired -- convinced -- by imagination. Though he did not say it in so many words, I thought he said that to have imagination is to live richly but also full of uncertainty.
When he was finished, and the crowd at the Katherine Ann Porter House began sifting toward cookies or cars, I found myself looking a row up and over at my own parents, and I imagined that maybe they were thinking in turn of my grandparents, long gone from Kyle and Buda and from this universe, at least, long gone but hardly forgotten.
There seemed to open up before me my own private aleph, and there in real space were Kate and Bill Johnson, whose foundation helped sponsor the series, and Edward Sledge, who came by to say hello and whose father decades ago was the only Rhodes Scholar I know of from Kyle and whose mother taught piano and violin from her stately, decaying home for lifetimes; but also I could see my children at the Texas-OU game in Dallas, and dear friends near and far.
And there, too, in that one moment, in that one point in space, I could see myself the night before at the LBJ lecture hall in Austin listening to an editor from the New York Times talk of striving and uncertainty, of the myths we tell ourselves and of stories (and details) that matter. And I thought of Steve Jobs having died this week. A television clip played over and over, showed him -- a dropout -- talking at a Stanford commencement about death being so unwelcome and yet also the best of life because it clears away the old and makes room for new growth, about how the certainty of death and the uncertainty of its timing is our best hope to steel ourselves against seductive complacency and stale dogma, a challenge to exchange convention for conviction.
Walking to my car I fell in with two classmates of my high school daughter, there for extra credit but full of enthusiasm for the evening. I was parked on scorched earth, all dead grass and wounded dirt, in front of a dilapidated and abandoned house from older days, just a few blocks off Center, in one of the fastest growing suburban towns in Texas. And still the aleph was with me, and I could see Loyce Clarke, the long-dead city secretary with the smoke-encrusted voice who thought she ruled Kyle once, and perhaps did; and the fight over whether to allow bingo in town; elections won and lost; and the Bon Ton on fire; and new subdivisions spreading out where cattle once grazed.
Then my thoughts turned to the line from Ecclesiastes: And the rivers run into the sea but the sea is not full.
I thought of Billy Beane and the Oakland As. There is a movie out now about how he gave up tens of millions to stay by his daughter and the small-market baseball job he loved, hoping to win a Series there, never (yet) to do so. I thought of all the lovers I have known, and those I have imagined. I thought of the woman I married and was on my way to pick up and to take home; and of my old boss, a one-time congressman named Jake Pickle, famous in his day, long buried to some, not to me: his birthday this week.
I thought about the distance between Washington and Austin, between the LBJ campus in Austin and the Porter House in Kyle, between the Kyle that was and the Kyle will be -- both how close and how far. The wind seemed cooler than it has in months. It felt refreshing, bespeaking a rain at last, and I thought -- I imagined at least -- that when my own time comes to be cleared away, if it would only come on a night such as this, with the breeze just so, with so many memories of what I choose to imagine as truth, with an aleph open before me, if the end would come as the tail on a story of commitments kept and dares met and hope for a Series win yet, then maybe, just maybe, I will not object too much.
Jeff Barton has almost recuperated from his time as an editor of the Hays Free Press 20 years ago. He is a former county commissioner, an urban planner, and a (mostly) silent shareholder in this newspaper. He lives with two dogs, one family, open doors and thirsting trees on the remnants of a seventh-generation family farm between Buda and Kyle.
