Clear as a Lightning Strike

The Tennessee night is still and nearly cool. The leftover rain drips from trees, sounds lonely on the heels of such a well-received storm. The nightsounds are there but hesitant, not quite sure what to do with themselves. (Los Lobos plays somewhere inside the house). Spiders and slugs sneak from the wet onto my porch. It is as if they know my small reserve of loathing is held for them and they feel the need to challenge it. I can see my grass grow in the faint light of the street lamp across the way. It slow dances in the shadows. Seems to stretch taller by fractions. (Van Morrison plays from somewhere in the house).

A guy I knew from high school was killed in a military helicopter accident this week. We graduated together. We were friendly but not friends. Oddly, we had connected well at our ten-year reunion. His death unsettles me. He was forty years old. He’ll never be forty-one. The day he died I had thought about him and members of our class building our homecoming float in front of his parents’ house. Clear as a lightning strike I saw him standing on his front porch with a beer in his hand. We were all forever seventeen. I hadn’t thought of the guy in twelve years and there he was. Two days later, on Thursday, my mother e-mailed me the news. For no discernable reason, I wonder if he ever saw a Tennessee thunderstorm. The way the sky turns blue and black and still; is itself brilliant over brilliant green hills. I wonder if he ever saw that. (From somewhere in the house Johnny Cash plays).

It is late. Fog that would inspire Sandburg rolls in. Through it my neighbors’ porch lights look like tiny lighthouses. Close enough to touch and never. Always slow on the uptake, it occurs to me that I love Tennessee. After eight years it is becoming a thing like home. You never relinquish that from which you came. But eventually a man needs to re-hang his hat. It is a big step hanging one’s hat. What is left of the romantic in me yearns for the coast—Gulf or West. I doubt though that my whiskey, my cigars would taste better there than they do here. So for now, my hat sits firmly on my restless head or on my dresser. (From somewhere in my house Jack Johnson plays).

In a few short hours, when my body is near ready to let me sleep, my perfect Boy will rise ready for the day. This is the only home he has known. And it suits him. But he too likes to travel. Has a need to see things. He talks lately of going to see Grandma in Augusta. I sense, like me, he also is antsy. Wants that road trip. If for nothing else the comfort he feels upon returning home afterward. He begins school in a few months. About to enter that first real place of retained memory. At some point I will go inside and look at him. It is difficult not to. His night breathing is often so shallow that my own catches in my throat as I wait for him to exhale. Sometimes I am terrified that he won’t. But he always does. It is a wonderful and curious thing being a father. Being. He has two games scheduled for tomorrow. The forecast calls for scattered thundershowers. So we will have either baseball or rain. It’s a no-lose situation.

And such is springtime in Tennessee. It just feels right.

For now.