| Fly Away Rick Van Weelden My wife and I both grew up in working class neighborhoods on the South side of Milwaukee. I spent my summers with my grandmother on Logan Avenue, within walking distance of Lake Michigan. My wife lived with her parents much further west, in a more affluent, but still working-class, neighborhood. From our discussions on the relative merits of each setting, I think both provided excellent environment for childhood adventure and discovery. I do admit, my old neighborhood could sometimes be a little less than pleasant, especially if you went out after dark. So, my grandmother and I seldom went out after dark. In fact, we usually got up before the summer sun to enjoy the cool mornings, especially if we were going to take a walk down to the lake together. By getting up at that time, we had already experienced a beauty and excitement that many people seldom bother to take note of throughout their lives—dawn in the city. In the morning the world is fresh. Even if the sun will soon be harsh, it is not yet so; the dew is still on the grass and those creatures that share the city with we humans are often very active. There is food and water to be had and light and, as long as we humans are still sleeping, relative safety to pursue it--all in the way their natural instincts instruct them to pursue it. So, the creatures of the city scurry about the business of surviving another day. There is chirping and chattering and barking and hopping and climbing and running. Dogs chase cats, cats stalk birds, birds pull on worms and worms wiggle around in the morning dew or in the bliss of sidewalk puddles-remnants of an overnight shower.. For us, there is serenity in the scene; although not so for the participants. The robin, for example, is not serene. He is hungry; there may even be young mouths to feed. He is after the worm, his head turns and his eyes dart all about forever searching and ready to fly away from the predator that would have him for breakfast. A thousand times a day a robin turns his head seemingly for nothing; a hundred times he flies away just in case. But, it is all well worth the trouble when one day he turns and instead of nothing, he sees the stalking cat and flies to safety before the cat can pounce. For the human soul, watching this ongoing drama, there is a new experience and a beauty that we enjoy in relative safety. And, before you feel too sorry for the bird, remember he is well equipped to protect himself and can fly away anytime he feels threatened. That’s a gift our human soul often wishes it could duplicate when we go out into the human world to work for our breakfast. Most of us do find ways to fly away. One of the best ways is to read a poem or a book. I was very lucky. I had a grandmother that knew having an experience does not have to be the end of the enjoyment derived from the experience. It’s always in our mind to be seen with our “mind’s eye” whenever we need or want to repeat it. Moreover, we can use it to create knew experiences. So, my grandmother would take me places and tell me what to look for and why things were happening and then later treat me to reading poems or books that contained written descriptions of some of the things we saw. After telling me to watch a robin one morning, my grandmother read me Emily Dickenson’s poem “A Bird” the next day. I could see it in my mind’s eye and enjoy the poem so much because of the things she had shown me the day before. Here’s the poem: A BIRD FROM A BIRD Emily Dickenson A bird came down the walk: He did not know I saw; He bit an angle worm in halves And, ate the fellow, raw. He drank a dew From a convenient grass, And then hopped sidewise to the wall To let a beetle pass. Even now, as I have typed Emily Dickenson’s poem onto this space, I can see that same robin, fifty years ago, and I can hear my grandmother whispering to me to watch his eyes and head and see how long it is before he decides something may be unsafe and he flies away. I can also smell her “Ivory” soap and her clean, crisp cotton dress. It makes me smile inside. I wish that experience for every child, so that fifty years later, that person can see it all again and know how much joy and wonder there is in everything around us and feel it again in a poem or a story. My grandmother was widowed early and lived on a small pension my grandfather got from the factory he worked for and her social security. She had very little money, but she did do many things to help her and I make the most out of life. We did a lot of “free” stuff that still was a lot of fun and today is deeper in my consciousness than many much more costly pursuits. We often walked to, and then along, the shores of Lake Michigan. There was always a mission-- gathering interesting drift wood or a collecting a variety of stones or examining interesting plants. I was especially good at collecting sand in my shoes. The sand we gathered was, of course, unplanned, and shaken from our socks and shoes when we returned home, but the rocks and wood were treasures to be polished or sanded and sometimes placed as art throughout the house. My grandmother knew that the mission was subordinate to the experience. Our real objective was that experience. But, I was too young to know the value of the time we spent together then, so I bounded ahead and down to the shore and brought her back a piece of drift wood or a special stone or anything we thought was interesting. “Is this green crystal?” I would ask. “No, I’m afraid that’s a piece of glass someone thoughtlessly discarded--some time ago by the looks of it.” “Oh,” I said. “But, it would make a nice addition to our collection of polished glass. It’s translucent so I bet it will be interesting to look at the lamp light through it. “It’s what?” “Translucent,” she would always repeat the word, and then define it. “That means that light can pass through it. Sometimes it distorts the light, but it still can pass. And, as you know, if light can pass through it, then you can see through it.” I sort of understood and I quickly asserted, “the lake has rounded the edges so it won’t be dangerous.” I always contributed my knowledge of any safety issues that we had talked about before. I knew safety was always a good bet for approval and a smile.. “Why don’t we save it so we can have fun with it later,” she might suggest. And in it would go amongst the multicolored and many shaped rocks in our cloth flour sack. Later the best of them would join our treasure trove of items strewn throughout her home alongside the hundreds of plants and rocks and books. Books everywhere—on shelves, on tables, window sills or even stacked on the floor with a board run between two stacks to hold more books or plants or any of the things we found, things far to numerous and varied for me to mention here; there were things like a mouse’s scull, an Indian arrowhead—the arrowhead was said to have come from the “Battle of Bad Axe” site north of Prarie du Chien, Wisconsin—certainly the agates and shale (we found a big piece of shale in a bag of insulation during one of our endless home improvement projects.) and coal and granite and crystal we gathered were there, along with great chunks of iron ore that had come from Minnesota when we visited my aunt in Duluth. There was the driftwood and the square nails we had found as we dug flower gardens along side the house, as well as the ceramic beer bottles with their little iron clasp on the top and we collected interesting old nineteenth century bottles of every shape, size and color. On one window sill there was an old milk jug with a little blue-stained water mark on it. I remember the day she was showing me that cold water sunk to the bottom of a body of water. She put hot water in the jug. Then she and I watched as she set an ice cube she had made with blue food dye to float on top of the warm water. As the ice cube melts, the cold, blue water goes down instead of outward. She used the same jug to show me fog. She filled the jug with hot water, let it sit, dumped two thirds of it out, and then set a regular ice cube on top of the bottle. It was not long before the hot moist air rose and met the cold air from the ice cube, condensed and turned to mist inside the bottle. If you try this, put it against a dark background and it is more visible that way. Here too, she did so many of these little experiments that it would take a book to list just those I can recall. One easy one I always liked is to demonstrate air pressure. You take a ruler or a yard stick and lay two thirds of it on a table leaving the last third off. Place a large sheet of paper on the part on the table, and then whack the other with your finger. The paper has so much surface area that air pressure will keep it from coming off the table. Try it. It really drives home the point that air applies pressure. I recall one summer, after her telling my cousin, Tom, and I about the Alaskan gold rush, we wanted to dig for gold. So she found a spot out back and we began digging. At some point, she salted our backyard dig with some iron pyrite or “fools gold,” that she had previously warned us would be all we were likely to find around there. “Although, anything is possible,” she would say. We were thrilled when we found it and I remember our excitement as we waited anxiously for my grandmother to declare whether it was real gold or if we had been duped like so many other gold miners before us. Of course we were hoping that we had actually struck a here-to-fore undiscovered vein right here in Milwaukee so we could buy my grandmother all the things she needed so badly, but we were still excited as hell to have found “fools gold.” When we told her we were a little disappointed that we couldn’t buy her the things she needed—replace her wooden ice box with a refrigerator so she wouldn’ t have to buy ice from the ice man or real carpet instead of the countless rag rugs under everything or a TV that worked. Her black and white had sound but no picture. Over the years we had replaced many tubes by using the tube testing machine at the hardware store, but now it was a picture tube, and a picture tube was just too expensive. So, for years, it just never got fixed. She told us not to worry about it, that when we came to visit her, she had everything she needed. You can add that knowledge to the treasures she gave me. As I say, the list of treasures is too long to do a complete inventory here, but it did include hundreds of tomatoes ripening on the window sills waiting for anyone who wanted one to pick one up and eat it. I would pick a big ripe tomato out, slice it as she taught me. “Never use your hand as a cutting board; keep your fingers out of the cut line and let the knife do the work; saw, don’t push,” she would say as she made us lunch. So, anytime I wanted, I would cut a tomato and a few slices of homemade, whole wheat bread the same way, pop the bread in the toaster and in a few minutes have myself a salty, sloppy, crunchy tomato sandwich—thick slices of tomato on whole grain bread or toast covered with salt and pepper. I can taste it now. In fact, I think I saw a few tomatoes in the fridge. I’m going to go make myself a big, fat tomato sandwich. The End |