Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Why do we seek out connections? And when I say “connections” I mean connections of all sorts: physical, mental, and emotional. What is it about that moment of connecting with something or someone that we, as humans, are simply drawn to like moths to light? I wrote the following short story some time back. And I believe it attempts to make a connection to connecting. Why we seek these links to the past; to the dead; to the living; to the present. And why, more often than not, do we fail to understand why we’re even searching?
Requiem for an Early Morning
Et lux perpetuam luceat eis
It’s six a.m. and I am awake. For the last hour I have been in a twilight sleep dreaming about reasons I shouldn’t be getting up this early this morning. The light’s better this time of morning, I told myself – the light’s better. I get up. I get dressed. And I get out onto the highway.
The highway is surprisingly well lighted and, for a Saturday morning, there are many cars. Behind me the sun breaks the horizon. Why is the sunset so different than the sun rise?.
The light has grown broader, and the sky, once pink, now, turning a bright red-orange. I answer my own question: the sun is as lazy as we are in the morning.
I know where I am going. But I don’t.
I’m going to a black cemetery. I’ve been told it’s down this and that road, make a right here and a left there and you’ll find it. I’m lost save for the crudely drawn three inch square map I drew from the oral directions. I make a right off the highway and across the train tracks.
Now I’m on a two-lane road. On either side of me are thickets of trees; the road forcing me to focus on the miles of lonely country road ahead of me. I remember that I was told to keep going straight. I come to the four-way that was mentioned.
I go on.
The roads in the country appear longer in the dawn’s light than they do at any other time of day. The small amount of light forces us to see the truth.
I go on.
On my left I can see the mist rising from the lakes and ponds like smoke from a smoldering fire. It hovers above the lake. And you know it came from the lake. But it doesn’t touch the lake. And the lake is still.
It’s supposed to be about four miles from the four-way I tell myself. I look at the odometer – but why? I didn’t reset it at the intersection. I try to guess and say that I’ve gone about four.
I see it. Up around the bend. The turn-off to the one lane dirt road hides mischievously amongst the trees. It’s a hard road, summer rains having eroded miniature canyons. The dust behind me kicks up slowly in the moist morning air.
The cemetery gate is rusted shut. I pull on it. I pull harder and the sharp metallic squeaks of iron on iron permeate the air. Have I awakened anyone? Some of the stones are turned over, fallen like ancient monuments long forgotten. In the summer, the grass would be thick. It’s fall. And the grass? Merely a mirror of that which rests underneath its soil.
Why did I come here? I am not black.
A live oak stands in the middle of the cemetery. Majestic with its branches, the years have let it grow. And the soil, which worked hard on the fields of cotton, now works in the leaves. I look around me and see a battlefield of life. There are no flowers and there haven’t been for some time.
I bend down and look at a stone:
Er John n
Die Agus 4
People forget; Time forgets not,
And has left its mark. Vandal and thief,
Time cares naught
save
the progression
of the years.
I step back; I take a picture – the only flower I have to give. And head back to town.
* * *
I’ve taken pictures in downtown before. It’s in a historic district, which in Texas, usually means it’s poor. Downtown Carlson is one of those districts. I spend some time walking the streets gazing at the amount of potential there is for a thriving town and wondering, what happened? They say the town was built because of the railroad tracks. Given that the tracks slice through downtown, I’d say they were right.
Now I’ve heard about towns built on the railroads. They die quick deaths once the trains stop coming. But the trains pass through Carlson four or five times a day.
I read in a history book one time that when the Americans dropped the bomb on Japan, they only thing left of some of the Japanese was their shadow that the light of a billion suns cast upon the wall as they walked to work.
I can’t help but wonder what blinding economic catastrophe made Carlson but a sleepy shadow of its former self.
I walk down Main Street.
In what I guess to be a burst of self-realization, the town is redoing its street. Putting in a green median and making the street wider. It’s a band aid for a hemorrhage. And as I look into a storefront that seems like a perfectly usable and prime space near the center of the street, the eons of abandonment have left a think layer of dust and grime on the glass. I peer through the cake, and understand.
I understand why no one wants to own the location.
There is no roof and the walls are cracked and decaying. From the inside.
I walk on.
I return to Jim Bowie Elementary school. A few weeks ago, I had found some items around the school that seemed like good pictures. As I walk, a young girl in a blue hooded sweatshirt walks by me. I nod, she says hi.
I walk around to the back of the school and find the places that I had taken pictures of before. This time I decide to manipulate the shot. I move a ladder a few feet this way so part of it is in the light. I set up for the shot, check the light meter.
Snap.
I see the girl I passed earlier out of the corner of my eye. She’s obviously walking towards me now.
“You take pictures?” She asks me.
“Um, well –“I stutter and stumble over my words. Well obviously you do take pictures, you’re doing it now. But she means am I a photographer. Well aren’t you? You’re taking pictures – that’s what photographers do. But I’m not a professional. I just do this when I have time. She just asked if you take pictures, just tell the truth.
“– Um, yeah, I mean I guess so. I like this building.” I manage to successfully tell the truth and not feel like I’m misleading her.
“The kids in the neighborhood hang out here all the time,” she says.
I look around. The playground consists of a slide, a large oak, a small wooden contraption. I look at the building again. Most of the windows are broken but the plywood in each frame seems to keep people out. So I’m left to wonder, why this is such an attractive place.
“Really?” I ask.
“Yeah my best friend and I come here all the time. She’s in Juvi right now. Her dad beats her. He’s was a cop, you know, so he knows how to hit her and not leave any bruises. So now she’s in Juvi for trying to press false charges or something.”
I try to filter the load of information. What I am supposed to say or ask next?
“He’s hit me too, I’m thinking about pressing charges. Her family is thinking about moving to North Carolina in a few months. I figure if I press charges, then he can’t leave. Is that true? In Texas can I do that?”
Now I used to want to be a lawyer and I worked in a law office for four hellacious months. But that was a while ago, and I didn’t learn much about the law anyway. I tell her what I know.
“I don’t know if he could leave the state but it would look suspicious.”
She agrees.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Schyler.” She says.
I tell her mine. Schyler is a pretty girl. Her hair is cut short, slightly boyish but a style that a lot of girls like. She walks with a distinctive limp. From he knee to her foot on right leg kicks out as she walks, making her movement almost border on a hobble. She does not use crutches and there is no apparent brace.
I can sense there is a loneliness and isolation behind her greenish brown eyes. She’s in the 11th grade and she keeps her hands in her pockets.
“So the kids hang out here, huh?” I ask looking at the building some more.
“Yeah, mostly druggies go inside. My cousin’s in a gang and he goes in there. I’ve gone in a few times. But if the cops catch you, you get arrested.”
I wonder why she is telling me all of this. And then I think about how it can’t be any later than 9 in the morning and I’m talking to a high school girl who should be asleep but instead is walking around her neighborhood. She wants to talk. Why me?
“I can’t sleep or eat thinking about my friend in Juvi. We come here all the time to talk. We’ve been best friends for, I guess about a year now. We tell each other everything. Stuff I’d never tell anyone else.”
Stop telling me this. I don’t know you. How can I help you? Abandonment behind her eyes. But I know she wants to talk – about anything. So I try to steer the subject from the harsh burden of reality choking this 11th grade girl to something happier.
“Would you like me to take your picture?”
She hesitates. Shakes her head and says, “Naw, I don’t really like taking pictures.”
Neither do I.
“So when did they close it?” I ask.
“A few years ago. My mom went to school here. She tells me stories about her growing up. And she’ll point to things in town that have changed like, ‘That used to be this place or that.’ I act like I don’t care but afterward I’m like, ‘that’s cool.’”
“Do you know why it closed?”
“The inside walls started cracking, the vibration of the train. They said it wasn’t safe anymore so they built a new school about a mile away.”
“So how do you get in?” I ask knowing that there is no obvious entrance but like every abandoned building – there’s at least one way in.
“I can show you one way.”
Suddenly the crippling kinetic sound of steel and diesel horsepower breaks the morning silence in the neighborhood as the train goes by. I understand now why the school was closed down.
“That too,” she says.
We walk around to the side. She tears away a piece of plywood covering a window at ground level. It leads to the basement.
“See its pretty easy. And you can see all the stuff they left. They have games that my parents used to play.”
I peer into the blackness and see various toys scattered, a wheelchair, and a typewriter. I wonder why there is so much left. I immediately think of the public school system and am ready to blame the bureaucrats for, again, wasting money. Sure the typewriter is worthless but the wheel chair could be donated to a needy kid and the toys could have been used as well.
“No one cares around here –”
Somehow I don’t find that hard to believe.
Only the forgotten remember the forgotten.
“ – You know? Like, right now we’re trespassing. We’re not supposed to even be in the back of the school. But cops come by. They don’t care until you go in the building. We have a neighborhood watch. But no one really cares.”
No one cares about the building. I wonder how many people actually care about Schyler.
I decided to take some pictures of the building. Schyler tells me about how one time she and some friends got stung by bees while trying to get in. “We hated Andrew after that,” she says.
I am hiding behind my camera because I don’t know what I should say to this girl. I want to comfort her and tell her things will be ok. But I’m honest. I don’t know if things will be ok.
“Well I guess I’ll let you get back to your pictures.”
I’m finished taking the shots I wanted so I walk back around to the front of the school with her. I ask her where some other places to take pictures might be. She thinks for a moment.
“There’s the Carlson cemetery. I used to take pictures there. But I’ll tell you if you don’t believe in spirits, go there at night and you will. You know those orb things they have in ghosts pictures, well I got ’em too. I even got a picture of a spirit trying to get through the fence.”
She tells me how the cemetery is old and some graves go back to the 1700s. She tells me how in the back they have a fenced off section for the Jews. And that I should go to the left when I drive in to get to the oldest graves.
I nod my head as if understanding and think that the 1700s would be odd; we’re not that far south.
“I went a few times and started to get headaches. My mom, she’s a spiritual person, and she said that’s the spirits warning me. It’s ok to go there a few times she said. She told me that the spirit chasers can go there all the time because they are professionals and they know what to do.”
Why should I tell this girl that the orbs were probably just reflections of light on the lens? Why should I tell Schyler that her spirit trying to break out of the fence was more a product of her imaginative mind and less of the supernatural? And that her headaches are more of a coincidence than spiritual foreboding. Does it really matter?
I walk towards the car. She’s going the same way. And I think about offering to take her picture again. But decide against it. It’s not as if she would see the picture anyway.
As we part I ask her about going to the cemetery on Halloween. She laughs and says she’d never do it “but you can.”
I tell her to take it easy. She says it was nice to meet me. As she walks away, hood flapping, hands in her pocket. I take her picture.
Someone should remember her.
* * *
I return to my apartment. The ticking clock reveals its 6 pm. Where did the day go?
I reach into the refrigerator and grab a beer. It’s cold in my hand and, as I take a sip, the bottle begins to sweat. I walk into the bathroom.
Putting the beer down, I turn on the water. It’s good and cold as I cup my hands underneath its stream and bend down. What did I see today? I splash the water over my face and look at the man who stands before me. I stare as if seeing him for the first time. I reach out and touch the figure and the glass is cold.
In my bedroom, the oak desk is lacquered with a finish of old mail and photographs. I pick up some of it and then quickly put it back down. I turn the light on and then off again. Then I walk into the living area.
I pace around for a few moments: turn on the fan and open the blinds slightly. The light creates crisp shadows on the floor. And I lay down, lying on the floor looking up. The fan swirls softly above me. The room is silent and at first I hear only my breathing. However, slowly even that sounds slips away into the loneliness of the room.
I look outside.
The light, the shadows waltz up my leg as the setting sun glides past the window. They creep past my belt: the shadow chasing the light. And as I look at the blue sky coyly hiding behind the blinds, the shadows falling on my face now, the only sound I hear in the room is the echoing ticks of the clock.
Requiem for an Early Morning
Et lux perpetuam luceat eis
It’s six a.m. and I am awake. For the last hour I have been in a twilight sleep dreaming about reasons I shouldn’t be getting up this early this morning. The light’s better this time of morning, I told myself – the light’s better. I get up. I get dressed. And I get out onto the highway.
The highway is surprisingly well lighted and, for a Saturday morning, there are many cars. Behind me the sun breaks the horizon. Why is the sunset so different than the sun rise?.
The light has grown broader, and the sky, once pink, now, turning a bright red-orange. I answer my own question: the sun is as lazy as we are in the morning.
I know where I am going. But I don’t.
I’m going to a black cemetery. I’ve been told it’s down this and that road, make a right here and a left there and you’ll find it. I’m lost save for the crudely drawn three inch square map I drew from the oral directions. I make a right off the highway and across the train tracks.
Now I’m on a two-lane road. On either side of me are thickets of trees; the road forcing me to focus on the miles of lonely country road ahead of me. I remember that I was told to keep going straight. I come to the four-way that was mentioned.
I go on.
The roads in the country appear longer in the dawn’s light than they do at any other time of day. The small amount of light forces us to see the truth.
I go on.
On my left I can see the mist rising from the lakes and ponds like smoke from a smoldering fire. It hovers above the lake. And you know it came from the lake. But it doesn’t touch the lake. And the lake is still.
It’s supposed to be about four miles from the four-way I tell myself. I look at the odometer – but why? I didn’t reset it at the intersection. I try to guess and say that I’ve gone about four.
I see it. Up around the bend. The turn-off to the one lane dirt road hides mischievously amongst the trees. It’s a hard road, summer rains having eroded miniature canyons. The dust behind me kicks up slowly in the moist morning air.
The cemetery gate is rusted shut. I pull on it. I pull harder and the sharp metallic squeaks of iron on iron permeate the air. Have I awakened anyone? Some of the stones are turned over, fallen like ancient monuments long forgotten. In the summer, the grass would be thick. It’s fall. And the grass? Merely a mirror of that which rests underneath its soil.
Why did I come here? I am not black.
A live oak stands in the middle of the cemetery. Majestic with its branches, the years have let it grow. And the soil, which worked hard on the fields of cotton, now works in the leaves. I look around me and see a battlefield of life. There are no flowers and there haven’t been for some time.
I bend down and look at a stone:
Er John n
Die Agus 4
People forget; Time forgets not,
And has left its mark. Vandal and thief,
Time cares naught
save
the progression
of the years.
I step back; I take a picture – the only flower I have to give. And head back to town.
* * *
I’ve taken pictures in downtown before. It’s in a historic district, which in Texas, usually means it’s poor. Downtown Carlson is one of those districts. I spend some time walking the streets gazing at the amount of potential there is for a thriving town and wondering, what happened? They say the town was built because of the railroad tracks. Given that the tracks slice through downtown, I’d say they were right.
Now I’ve heard about towns built on the railroads. They die quick deaths once the trains stop coming. But the trains pass through Carlson four or five times a day.
I read in a history book one time that when the Americans dropped the bomb on Japan, they only thing left of some of the Japanese was their shadow that the light of a billion suns cast upon the wall as they walked to work.
I can’t help but wonder what blinding economic catastrophe made Carlson but a sleepy shadow of its former self.
I walk down Main Street.
In what I guess to be a burst of self-realization, the town is redoing its street. Putting in a green median and making the street wider. It’s a band aid for a hemorrhage. And as I look into a storefront that seems like a perfectly usable and prime space near the center of the street, the eons of abandonment have left a think layer of dust and grime on the glass. I peer through the cake, and understand.
I understand why no one wants to own the location.
There is no roof and the walls are cracked and decaying. From the inside.
I walk on.
I return to Jim Bowie Elementary school. A few weeks ago, I had found some items around the school that seemed like good pictures. As I walk, a young girl in a blue hooded sweatshirt walks by me. I nod, she says hi.
I walk around to the back of the school and find the places that I had taken pictures of before. This time I decide to manipulate the shot. I move a ladder a few feet this way so part of it is in the light. I set up for the shot, check the light meter.
Snap.
I see the girl I passed earlier out of the corner of my eye. She’s obviously walking towards me now.
“You take pictures?” She asks me.
“Um, well –“I stutter and stumble over my words. Well obviously you do take pictures, you’re doing it now. But she means am I a photographer. Well aren’t you? You’re taking pictures – that’s what photographers do. But I’m not a professional. I just do this when I have time. She just asked if you take pictures, just tell the truth.
“– Um, yeah, I mean I guess so. I like this building.” I manage to successfully tell the truth and not feel like I’m misleading her.
“The kids in the neighborhood hang out here all the time,” she says.
I look around. The playground consists of a slide, a large oak, a small wooden contraption. I look at the building again. Most of the windows are broken but the plywood in each frame seems to keep people out. So I’m left to wonder, why this is such an attractive place.
“Really?” I ask.
“Yeah my best friend and I come here all the time. She’s in Juvi right now. Her dad beats her. He’s was a cop, you know, so he knows how to hit her and not leave any bruises. So now she’s in Juvi for trying to press false charges or something.”
I try to filter the load of information. What I am supposed to say or ask next?
“He’s hit me too, I’m thinking about pressing charges. Her family is thinking about moving to North Carolina in a few months. I figure if I press charges, then he can’t leave. Is that true? In Texas can I do that?”
Now I used to want to be a lawyer and I worked in a law office for four hellacious months. But that was a while ago, and I didn’t learn much about the law anyway. I tell her what I know.
“I don’t know if he could leave the state but it would look suspicious.”
She agrees.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Schyler.” She says.
I tell her mine. Schyler is a pretty girl. Her hair is cut short, slightly boyish but a style that a lot of girls like. She walks with a distinctive limp. From he knee to her foot on right leg kicks out as she walks, making her movement almost border on a hobble. She does not use crutches and there is no apparent brace.
I can sense there is a loneliness and isolation behind her greenish brown eyes. She’s in the 11th grade and she keeps her hands in her pockets.
“So the kids hang out here, huh?” I ask looking at the building some more.
“Yeah, mostly druggies go inside. My cousin’s in a gang and he goes in there. I’ve gone in a few times. But if the cops catch you, you get arrested.”
I wonder why she is telling me all of this. And then I think about how it can’t be any later than 9 in the morning and I’m talking to a high school girl who should be asleep but instead is walking around her neighborhood. She wants to talk. Why me?
“I can’t sleep or eat thinking about my friend in Juvi. We come here all the time to talk. We’ve been best friends for, I guess about a year now. We tell each other everything. Stuff I’d never tell anyone else.”
Stop telling me this. I don’t know you. How can I help you? Abandonment behind her eyes. But I know she wants to talk – about anything. So I try to steer the subject from the harsh burden of reality choking this 11th grade girl to something happier.
“Would you like me to take your picture?”
She hesitates. Shakes her head and says, “Naw, I don’t really like taking pictures.”
Neither do I.
“So when did they close it?” I ask.
“A few years ago. My mom went to school here. She tells me stories about her growing up. And she’ll point to things in town that have changed like, ‘That used to be this place or that.’ I act like I don’t care but afterward I’m like, ‘that’s cool.’”
“Do you know why it closed?”
“The inside walls started cracking, the vibration of the train. They said it wasn’t safe anymore so they built a new school about a mile away.”
“So how do you get in?” I ask knowing that there is no obvious entrance but like every abandoned building – there’s at least one way in.
“I can show you one way.”
Suddenly the crippling kinetic sound of steel and diesel horsepower breaks the morning silence in the neighborhood as the train goes by. I understand now why the school was closed down.
“That too,” she says.
We walk around to the side. She tears away a piece of plywood covering a window at ground level. It leads to the basement.
“See its pretty easy. And you can see all the stuff they left. They have games that my parents used to play.”
I peer into the blackness and see various toys scattered, a wheelchair, and a typewriter. I wonder why there is so much left. I immediately think of the public school system and am ready to blame the bureaucrats for, again, wasting money. Sure the typewriter is worthless but the wheel chair could be donated to a needy kid and the toys could have been used as well.
“No one cares around here –”
Somehow I don’t find that hard to believe.
Only the forgotten remember the forgotten.
“ – You know? Like, right now we’re trespassing. We’re not supposed to even be in the back of the school. But cops come by. They don’t care until you go in the building. We have a neighborhood watch. But no one really cares.”
No one cares about the building. I wonder how many people actually care about Schyler.
I decided to take some pictures of the building. Schyler tells me about how one time she and some friends got stung by bees while trying to get in. “We hated Andrew after that,” she says.
I am hiding behind my camera because I don’t know what I should say to this girl. I want to comfort her and tell her things will be ok. But I’m honest. I don’t know if things will be ok.
“Well I guess I’ll let you get back to your pictures.”
I’m finished taking the shots I wanted so I walk back around to the front of the school with her. I ask her where some other places to take pictures might be. She thinks for a moment.
“There’s the Carlson cemetery. I used to take pictures there. But I’ll tell you if you don’t believe in spirits, go there at night and you will. You know those orb things they have in ghosts pictures, well I got ’em too. I even got a picture of a spirit trying to get through the fence.”
She tells me how the cemetery is old and some graves go back to the 1700s. She tells me how in the back they have a fenced off section for the Jews. And that I should go to the left when I drive in to get to the oldest graves.
I nod my head as if understanding and think that the 1700s would be odd; we’re not that far south.
“I went a few times and started to get headaches. My mom, she’s a spiritual person, and she said that’s the spirits warning me. It’s ok to go there a few times she said. She told me that the spirit chasers can go there all the time because they are professionals and they know what to do.”
Why should I tell this girl that the orbs were probably just reflections of light on the lens? Why should I tell Schyler that her spirit trying to break out of the fence was more a product of her imaginative mind and less of the supernatural? And that her headaches are more of a coincidence than spiritual foreboding. Does it really matter?
I walk towards the car. She’s going the same way. And I think about offering to take her picture again. But decide against it. It’s not as if she would see the picture anyway.
As we part I ask her about going to the cemetery on Halloween. She laughs and says she’d never do it “but you can.”
I tell her to take it easy. She says it was nice to meet me. As she walks away, hood flapping, hands in her pocket. I take her picture.
Someone should remember her.
* * *
I return to my apartment. The ticking clock reveals its 6 pm. Where did the day go?
I reach into the refrigerator and grab a beer. It’s cold in my hand and, as I take a sip, the bottle begins to sweat. I walk into the bathroom.
Putting the beer down, I turn on the water. It’s good and cold as I cup my hands underneath its stream and bend down. What did I see today? I splash the water over my face and look at the man who stands before me. I stare as if seeing him for the first time. I reach out and touch the figure and the glass is cold.
In my bedroom, the oak desk is lacquered with a finish of old mail and photographs. I pick up some of it and then quickly put it back down. I turn the light on and then off again. Then I walk into the living area.
I pace around for a few moments: turn on the fan and open the blinds slightly. The light creates crisp shadows on the floor. And I lay down, lying on the floor looking up. The fan swirls softly above me. The room is silent and at first I hear only my breathing. However, slowly even that sounds slips away into the loneliness of the room.
I look outside.
The light, the shadows waltz up my leg as the setting sun glides past the window. They creep past my belt: the shadow chasing the light. And as I look at the blue sky coyly hiding behind the blinds, the shadows falling on my face now, the only sound I hear in the room is the echoing ticks of the clock.
