towers in air
“Nothing has a lasting name, not even memory. I can be sitting thinking of nothing at all and suddenly see a hillside in Amana, Iowa as clearly as if it were yesterday. Crisp as a color slide. Brown swiss cows with auburn cocoa flanks and scaly black hooves; a trestle bridge of pea-green steel dotted with rivets in a diamond pattern, the caps of the rivets feathered with rust; white houses nestled in shade trees and an evergreen wind row in the green, smooth hills in clear light; even the oatmeal grain of the asphalt at the shoulder of the road has its own texture in recollection. Another time waiting in a 7-11 line, I hear someone’s child ask her why the sky is blue and I cannot for the life of me recall why exactly it is or if I ever knew or what it was to be a child with questions; and, what’s worse, realize with a chill that I will never know the answer to the child's question unless I make a point of relearning this now. Though the truth is I would rather be able to recall the brown freckle of a lover’s shoulder than to know why the blue.”
“Your life flashes by,” he says to her, “or so they say...”
“I will never forget,” he says, “once in the city walking down Fifth Avenue at dusk with Obie, we were coming from a birthday trip to see the armor at the Metropolitan and then look for toys at FAO Schwartz. He was eleven then, I’m certain of that, one year into double digits, lost in the twilight between childhood and pre-teen; there wasn’t one thing in the toy store which really caught his eye. He was wise enough to know not to squander his birthright on an uncertain gift, yet still melancholy and a little pissy because there was nothing there for him. As we walked he scanned the stereo stores and gift shops, insisting we should have a look for something in each one; it was maddening, really, he was hungry for acquisition and would have taken anything at that point: a CD player, an Apple Newton or a fig newton, a Keith Haring teeshirt, an umbrella.
“Even so we had had a good day and it was a spectacular autumn evening, the sky shading from periwinkle to violet and twenty blocks away the illuminated tower of the Empire State Building was veering up at us like one of the jeweled sceptres at the Metropolitan and, beyond it, the newly precarious towers of the World Trade Center, not a year after the bombing, blocked off the disappearing point of the horizon. A magic city, the softly gelled image of a color slide.
“I pointed out the Empire State building to Obie but he kept insisting, maddeningly, that he didn’t see why they ever thought it was the tallest building in the world. ‘That one over there is bigger,’ he claimed over and over again, ‘That one over there is bigger,’ pointing to some square glass generic office building, a publisher’s headquarters or euro bank highrise, ‘That one over there is bigger,’ he said again, as I tried to explain how it was a matter of perspective, an optical illusion, feeling myself get more and more annoyed at a boy on his birthday. It was a litany, the way kids do: ‘That one over there is bigger,’ he replied to each explanation. The truth was, like your blue sky, I had no satisfactory explanation, even for me... The truth, of course, is that he was right. It was bigger in any way that counts. It still is..."
(Fathers and sons she thinks conflicting about the size of the apparent world.)
Your life flashes by, she thinks, or so they say...