morethanenoughtruth

As a pre-teen, I visited for two weeks every summer with my Dad’s parents in the farm country west of Ft. Worth.  In the pasture beyond the fenced front yard there was a giant oak tree with several generations of farm detritus strewn about its roots.  There were wagon wheels, rims, chain, wire, lanterns, gears, pails, and innumerable miscellany.  Most were rusty, but all were full of imaginative possibility.  It was my special place.

With these junk components I assembled many marvels of invention.  I constructed a bicycle with wheels that turned.  There was a rocket ship, a loom, and an escalator.  There was even a horse and buggy, but you had to imagine the horse.  I filled the hours in between Grandma’s meals with my serious work.  A scrawny child but growing aggressively, I never lost track of the possibilities of breakfast, (eggs, sausage, steaming buttermilk biscuits with fresh churned butter, pear preserves and red-eye gravy).  That was soon followed by high noon farm hand dinners spread on the dining room table, the old oilcloth clean but sticky, and quiet evening suppers, retrospective warm-ups of the noontide feast.  Those meals must have been inspired by her memories of men, strong, hot and dripping sweat, just in from the hayfield and powerful hungry.  The hours under my tree were peopled with those laborers’ ghosts and empowered by their implements laid aside just in case someday they might prove useful to the work at hand.  Fortified with Grandma’s cooking, I toiled.  Grasshoppers buzzed.  Dragonflies chased and caught each other, then lit all-coupled on the quiet creek skim, celebrating the marvels of surface tension.  Cicadas shrilled a solid wall of scream.  With all that company it never occurred to me to feel lonely.  I had all I needed to do my work.

Every object had a right place where it fit; each necessary to the whole.  All the parts went together, mechanisms incarnate.  They lived.  Wheels turned.  Bearings screeched.  Rims rolled.  Chains pulled.  Pails frothed with warm buttery milk.   Old harness became pliant and slick with horse and sweat.  Square nails and rusty rings coupled dreams, as once they had bonded boards and leather strapping.  Time shrank into the single moment of now as I embodied pure happiness.

One evening Grandpa came to visit me under my tree.  I showed him my wondrous creations, demonstrating how each one worked.  We spoke of future projects.  I confided my worry that since everything had already been thought of there would be nothing left for me to invent.  He assured me there were marvels yet to come, and said to keep an open mind for wild hares passing.  As light faded to the west and early stars blinked on, we walked together toward the house and rest.  I slipped my hand into his.  “Grandpa,” I asked, “you know, don’t you, that I don’t really believe my machines are real?  They are just pretend like the mud-pies Grandma and I made when I was little.”  He looked down at me, eyes twinkling but with a face full of serious. “Sure,” he said.  “I know. But you can never tell with those jackrabbits.”