The Story Garden 5.0
Nonfiction
I Am Brown and Green and Golden
A dragonfly rests on the back porch railing. He is brown and green and golden. He is a quick thought mistaken for memory. The weather has warmed from 50 degrees Fahrenheit this morning. I rolled the garbage to the end of the driveway wearing my wife's pajama bottoms and her slippers. I haven't shaved in three weeks. Home-bound dads need not do so.
I don't smoke and I'm on the back porch smoking. I do a lot of things I don't do lately.
The dragonfly's wings have that oiled shimmer: it's the highway that stretches out of Odessa, Texas and runs into the flat nothingness in the direction of more nothingness. The wings are beautiful.
What's the formula for memory? What triggers the dreamscape of yesterday? I remember we walked around the sugar cane field backroads, just to the side of the woods and along trenches used for drainage. We walked armed with 22's and 410's. Squirrels be damned! Wild boar lookout!
The problem with nostalgia is the lie of time is compounded by the lie of the mind. This is the equation of never forgetting.
We hunted a peacock. Some yahoo in the neighborhood had one for a pet and it had broken loose. The construction paper flyers were taped to lightpoles all up and down the subdivided streets. There was no reward for the bird: the reward was our own. Its death meant its silence and every 5:30 AM the bird wailed and wailed. If we caught up with it, time would catch up with it also.
That was the race for that day, and we walked around the fields and chewed on gum from the pop-weeds. The sugarcane's syrup left my mouth sticky.
Synchronicity? Multiplicity? Scott got a bead on the bird, sitting in plain sight. As he raised his 410 I raised my 22 because I knew he would miss. And then two dragonflies landed on my barrel. One kept still while the other fluttered over to Scott's elbow, poised for the shot. For that second we looked at them, and then at each other. When we looked back for the obnoxious peacock, it was gone.
Fuck! We yelled. Fuck. But that's what I don't understand about memory. The yellowed links of the synapse sonata: why? My first thought when I saw the dragonfly today wasn't about the peacock getting away, or about the peacock. It was about the wallet we found two steps later. A wallet loaded with nearly a grand. We buried the wallet deep in the mud near a canal. We walked up to the corner store and became sick off of Slurpees and candy. We never told the kids in the neighborhood to make sure our share didn't diminish with bullied return. Everybody in my family got Christmas presents that year, which set a bad precedent: next year I would have to start working.
If I never picked up the wallet I would have never noticed the dragonfly today.
This is my God:
the dying leaf; the laughter of women
the brown, the green and the golden
--Kenneth L. Clark
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