Tall Summer Girls

 

               Delta Morning Empty Swing, Milly L. Moorhead

Here’s what it’s like to be on the cusp of life. It’s a Louisiana summer evening, suspended between twilight and night, suspended between 6th and 7th grades. Your hands are touching the shoulder blades of a tall girl who’s sitting on the swing in front of you. The swing must have been moving before, but now is still. You were talking before, you must have been, but now there is silence, not even insects buzzing, empty and full of meaning at the same time.

Is the swing part of a swing set, in a playground? Sounds logical, but you don’t remember. This is an intimate, close-up shot. There is only the swing, held up by the chains she has her hands wrapped around. They stretch forever into the sky.

For you, there’s only the shoulder blades of a tall girl, the swing, the curve of her neck, tantalizingly close to your lips. Her hair is cut violently short, and she’s wearing a scoop-neck blouse, so that the entire length of her nape is exposed. You feel a kind of sweet, liquid lethargy running like mercury through your marrow. You have no name for it, but you’ll recognize it years later as languor.

You’re sure, surer than you’ve ever been of anything in your life, that she wants you to kiss her neck. You don’t dare. She’s too tall.

(A lot of girls that age are taller than boys. They walk like giraffes stalking the African veldt. They are breathtakingly beautiful in their awkwardness. They’re waiting for boys to catch up—in oh so many ways.)

Why hold back? God knows. The furthest you’ve ever gotten with a girl is holding hands at the class picnic on the last day of school. You’d wandered off into the trees at the edge of the park. She’d slipped her hand in yours. That was only a month ago. You hadn’t even considered kissing her. In the late 60s, at that age, holding hands was practically considered going all the way. You anticipated all that summer rekindling that brief flame once 7th grade started.

When you see her again, on the first day of school, she greets two of your best friends joyfully. Then she notices you and says:

“Oh. You’re here, too?”

And you die.

You should have kissed the tall girl’s neck.

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." —Karl Marx

A summer night in Lincoln, Nebraska in the early 80s. The kind of scene that can be called bucolic without a hint of irony. I was with a close friend and his wild-child wife, and the 6’1” half-Indian stage manager of the show I was working lights for (The Marriage of Figaro). The stage manager happens to be very female, the absolute queen of tall summer girls. I had vastly more experience with women then, but they were still a book I’d only skimmed. Whether the hill above the reservoir was a simple college hangout or a designated makeout spot was unclear to me.

I was sitting next to her, our flanks touching. She wanted me to kiss her, I was sure of that. The midnight breezes were playing Voi, che sapete. I wanted to kiss her. I was desperately trying to work out the logistics.

(Were my buddy and his wife kissing? I don’t remember and it didn’t matter. A married couple is a different species entirely from two singles on the make. They could have been juggling flaming batons for all I knew. It wouldn’t have been out of character.)

Anyway, I was playing the kiss over and over in my mind, trying to imagine the mechanics of the thing. There was no swing.

Normally the man will swoop down on the woman, gathering her in his arms. But she was a good two inches taller than I was (fed on that sweet Nebraska corn). Even seated as we were, she towered over me. There’s no such thing as swooping up in the playbook. If she had lain down in the grass, it might have leveled the playing field. I think I laid back on my elbows a couple of times, but she didn’t take the hint. I came away with grass-stained elbows.

Surely she was aware of the problem? A girl as tall as she was must have faced the problem before, and conquered Everest—herself being Everest. The only thing for it, as far as I could see, was for her to swoop down on me and gather me in her arms. Some men might have felt emasculated by the maneuver, but I was game.

She did not swoop.

Some of my readers will no doubt say that neither girl wanted a kiss. If they had, they would have found a way, you’ll say. I can accept that possibility. But it doesn’t change the way I felt at the time, nor the languor that approaches whenever my mind flits like a dragon-fly back to those days of tall summer girls.

The Boss knows what I’m talking about:

Well the street lights shine
Down on Blessing Avenue
Lovers they walk by
Holdin’ hands two by two

A breeze crosses the porch
Bicycle spokes spin ‘round
Jacket’s on, I’m out the door
Tonight I’m gonna burn this town down

And the girls in their summer clothes
In the cool of the evening light
The girls in their summer clothes
Pass me by

From the Springsteen video for Girls in Their Summer Clothes

You’d think with my record for tall summer girls, I’d be none too fond of them. I keep approaching the unapproachable; it keeps receding into the distance. But each one I meet still fills me with the crackling hum of anticipation, anticipation that is meat and drink for the soul, the one companion that accompanies me till the end of time.

It’s a mitzvah, a benediction. I’m eternally grateful.

Review: The Samurai's Octopus

 

What if … Charles Dickens were not a name synonymous with Victorian London, but were transplanted instead to 18^th century Edo (Tokyo)? You might wind up with something like Jonelle Patrick’s triumphant new novel, The Samurai’s Octopus.

It’s not written in Dickens’s style of course. Patrick’s style is all her own, lucid and sharp-edged as Japanese calligraphy. But it’s Dickensian in subject matter, and in two of its central elements: the scope of character and passion, and the way each character’s fate is ruled by the dead hand of the past.

The past is centered upon one event: murder. The opening presents us with the four classic elements of the murder mystery: the murderer, the victim, the motive for which the murder committed—and the witness. We see the crime through the eyes of the witness, Takahisa Takeda, the impecunious samurai of the title. But he doesn’t know the murderer, the victim, or the motivation. He’ll spend the next sixteen years of his life trying to fill in the blanks. His fortune depends upon the answers.

Hive Mind

 I’ve been bingeing on Hercule Poirot on PBS lately.

Poirot, if anyone in the English-speaking world is unaware, is Agatha Christie’s funny little Belgian detective, the most celebrated fictional detective this side of Sherlock Holmes. I’ve read all the books and seen all the shows already, more than once. So now I suppose you could say I’m luxuriating in nostalgia. Poirot is always talking about the necessity of order and method in detection. One fact leads to another, forging a chain of causation.

(I don’t know whether Mrs. Christie wrote with order and method. Perhaps Poirot forced her to adopt method, or perhaps she looked to him for these qualities, which she lacked. I myself have written three Sherlock Holmes novels. I wrote them because questions arose in my mind ((Why did van Gogh cut off his ear and give it to a prostitute? If he wanted to make a real sacrifice, why not cut out an eye?)), so I chose Holmes to find the solutions I could never have discovered on my own. True story.)

As you may have glommed* onto if you’ve read a few of my posts here, there’s no order or method in the way I think or write. Jeez, I don’t even have my books organized on the shelves. And since I’ve shed books every time I’ve moved to a different city (eight, so far) I’m not even sure which books I actually own. Some books I treasure may be in the Phantom Zone. like lost children.

When I think, it’s more like working on a jigsaw puzzle, picking out the brightest, most colorful pieces, the most interesting shapes, to put together first. I’m aware of edges, but comfortable not seeing the forest for the trees until I’m lost in the heart of it.

And when I write, I’m blowing up a balloon. I’ve joked before that when I start a novel, I write the first sentence and follow it with—

The End

—and the rest is just filling out the middle part. Only it’s not really a joke.

So—in my mystery in progress, The Detectives Downstairs, there is no order and method. On purpose.

Gravity and Me

 There are a few years in your childhood when you can positively fly. It’s a natural progression, when you think about it. We’re born nailed to the earth. Then we learn to sit up, to crawl, to stand, to run, to dance. I know this program intimately. When I had my stroke seven years ago, I had to repeat the program, every step of the way. And every night in my bed I dreamed of running.

After you learn to run, you know you can fly. You just need to learn the trick of it. Build up momentum. Flap your arms. Fly. You’re small and light. Gravity might take its eyes off you for just a second. That’s all the time you need to break free.

Or maybe you need an equalizer.

When I was in third grade, my sister’s high school put on a production of Peter Pan. She smuggled home the Peter Pan hat. Mind you, it was made of folded-up newspaper, painted green. But it had obviously been sprayed with pixie dust. 

That was the edge we needed. We’d take turns mounting the porch railing with the hat on, myself, my brother, and the Burns boys. There was an oleander bush standing guard in the yard between our apartment and the neighbor’s. We figured if we could clear the oleander bush, we could officially fly.

That bush took a lot of punishment. We’d fling ourselves toward it, hoping to catch an updraft. Gravity usually grabbed us by the ankle just before we took off. None of us actually flew, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.