37
We pull into the small parking lot of Johnston Park and there’s something faintly romantic about the crooked skinny streetlamps along the dark edges of the grounds under starlight. The air is full of promise. I can’t help but grin. Who would have imagined it? All these years have passed, and the place still carries the allure that drew me to it as a kid. I hadn’t thought I’d ever bring someone out here again, not like this. Rose closes the door of her Jeep behind her and says, “What are you all giggling about?”
“Nothing, nothing.”
I’m walking up a tiny hill that rises to the playground with Rose matching stride. “Under that pavilion over there we must have had a hundred picnics, this town. People still get together there all the time.” A hundred times, a hundred years and onward. We wander over to the purple swing set which is rusting over the metal and look out over the baseball diamond below. All the games of my youth flash before me in one ancient cloud of dust. I can still feel those sunburnt summer days. I can still hear my mother in the crowd cheering loudly as I crack the bat against that ball and it sails out of sight.
Rose sits down on a swing.
“When’s the last time you actually used one of these things?” she asks.
“I couldn’t tell ya.”
“I used to love these things, man. I’d go for hours.”
And she starts swinging. Her legs begin slowly pushing and pumping through the air to gain speed and for a moment, I just watch her. What an image of momentum. I finally sit down on the cracked black rubber seat to her left and follow suit. It’s funny what comes back to us, like all the innocent, limitless times I just enjoyed an afternoon on a swing. Doing it now, at twenty-nine, guides me back. Back to a time where I was rid of all burdens, any fears or worries that could sit heavy on my shoulders. Suddenly, all my anchors are gone. I let them fall and they are lost in the wood chips below. I feel magnificent now. Rose is laughing.
“I told you!” she says. “It’s the best. Tell me it doesn’t feel like you’re flying, Cash if you close your eyes.”
And my God, it does. Seeing her on the swing next to me, soaring and weightless, makes me recognize the children in us both.
“Close them, Cash. Are you closing them?”
“I am.”
“You’ll be flying in no time, do you feel it?”
“I do.”
“I used to do this all the time when I was a girl. We had a park about a mile from my mom’s. Whenever I was upset, I used to wander out to the swing set and just close my eyes. I would rock there and fly.”
So, we’re flying. We are all born into this big mess with a purity, with a goodness. No hate, no anger. It’s only over time, with the pain that comes through the course of life that we get strapped with all the unfortunate things that happen to us. What a shame. We grow older and more careful, hardened and quieter. But every once in a while, you’ll catch a glimpse of yourself in another and maybe you’ll feel like you’re flying. You’ll find a good swing and be reminded that when we strip ourselves down, away from all those things we carry, we are free. We are free as we were at the start. As I watch Rose fly beside me, I think this is about as close as we come to that feeling. Where we are infinite on the Earth, light and soaring. We are born to move through the sky with our wings, laughing and swinging beneath stars.
The baseball diamond in front of us was the host of young dreams. It was the arena of so many battles, the remains of which lie hardened in dirt, immortalized. I think back to my sun-soaked days baking to a crisp out there looking up to the bleachers at all the people of Johnston. Family, friends, and the like, younger siblings playing in the park and caring nothing about the game. My mother in the stands, watching intently and me wanting nothing more in the world than to make her proud. I’d wonder where my dad was, and if he’d ever see me take a nice cut with the bat. I’d pull the brim of my hat back further down my brow and look out to the field and swear all sorts of prophetic things to myself. That I’d hit a home run one day and be lifted to Heaven like a king. I would be a hero right there on the Johnston diamond.
“I must have played a thousand baseball games down there. My ma would sit right on the far end of those bleachers.”
And we swing, back and forth, back and forth.
“Alright,” she says. “You have to jump off. Deal?”
“Deal.”
“Count of three. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“One… two. three.”
And we jump through the air, nearly stumbling down. We catch each other’s arms after our feet hit the grass and we’re laughing like wild, like kids.
“God, I haven’t done that in forever.”
“Come on, let me show you something,” I say.
We walk along the fence of the diamond, and I let my fingers drag across the sharp metal. Rose picks up a small rock and studies it in her hand before tossing it into the grass.
“I had a boyfriend, way back, who was convinced he was gonna make it all the way up to the majors.” She laughs.
“How’d that work out for him?”
“He didn’t quite make it.”
“I think many of us guys in these little towns spend a decent amount of time believing we could end up in the majors.”
“Yeah, there’s something really American about the sport, and that dream.
Don’t you think?”
“That’s exactly what I think.”
“I remember my grandpa was obsessed with the Cubs. Every afternoon he’d watch. Never miss a game.”
“Oh yeah, mine were the same, but they loved the Twins. My dad said my grandpa would sit in his living room, same old rocking chair, and sip a pack of Pabst every day while my grandma was off somewhere helping in political causes or teaching at the middle school.”
My Grandpa Darrell had this big old beer belly in his later years and was a heavy smoker. He would eventually die from cancer in a hospital waiting room, his least favorite place, where there was never any baseball being played. Whenever I thought about the sport, like Rose, I often thought of my grandfather and how he loved America and the game of baseball more than most things. She found his story sort of sad, but I just shrugged my shoulders and didn’t let it sit for too long.
At last, we begin our descent into the valley beneath Johnston Hill. The grass under our feet has taken on the dropping temperatures of the burgeoning evening, thick as ever on the brink of fall. The valley lawn is lush with well-watered grass from the hill’s many runoffs. Rose takes her heels off.
“I want to feel it.”
It’s like she read my mind, and I do the same. Boots in hand, the valley envelops our feet as we begin to make our way up the hillside. It’s the kind of grass you should sleep on at least once in your life.
At the top of Johnston Hill, I stood by her side. We are ambassadors for those before us and those coming soon.
“Beautiful,” she says, and I couldn’t agree more. The blanket of night gets heavier above, the black is speckled only by the tumbling planets way out in the universe. There’s a long never-ending corn field to our left and the valley below. From this hilltop it’s always so clear, the air swirls and the tiny homes of the city go to bed, one by one. It’s the best view of Johnston by a mile.
And I think of all the times I stood on this very ground as a young man and saw the same things, just differently. That says a lot about life, don’t you think? The whole circle of growing up and changing perspectives. I take a deep breath of the cleanest air in the world and can’t help but dance back in memory. All the promising nights on this hill, looking as far out as I could, pretending it was my kingdom. I had no conception of things to come.
Rose stares out over my hometown, covered in nightfall. She looks peaceful and pleased. This will all be hers now. Johnston will fall to its knees if she lets it. We take a seat and lie down on the bed of the Earth. We don’t speak for what feels like an hour. On our backs looking up to space we are one with the immeasurable moment. The sun now hidden in the evening and the moon in its place. And what is that noise that I hear in the wind? What is this moon song? It floats down in a gentle amble, born from these constellations and stories, the patterns we trace with our fingers. And when we look into each other’s eyes after staring at planets, it’s only one moment we need. I see the same design in Rose’s freckles, the same orchestration I saw when she first walked through the door to the bar. Her eyes mirror my own. There’s a feeling in them that I recognize. A feeling I couldn’t miss if I tried. Rose, you will come to love Johnston just fine. You have it, you know it, the blues.
It’s more subtle than crying. It’s a quiet longing etched deep in the soul. It’s a permanent thing, non-lethal. I’ve always believed that the blues is a sort of power. I believe it’s a gift. A sensitivity. An attachment to a faraway dream worth holding. A feeling that you were living on the other side of the veil, just enough, so you understood something mysterious, this truth manifesting in your life. An ongoing, just-off sadness that arrives with a feeling of knowledge, through pain, through struggle and loss. It’s the real heartbeat in the caverns of living.
I’ve never seen the blues in the eyes of a child because I don’t believe we are born of it. The blues is a feeling so deep and so settled that you could forget it was there, but it is an essential element in your blood. It’s a recognition that things are fleeting and fragile and changing, and they’ll never stop being that way. People will come and go and the highs are never long stretching roads but more often peaks off the valleys. It’s an admission that God hasn’t made the walk easy or kind all the time, and life is a journey, full of harsh nights, cold mornings and scattered stretches of yellow sun. To have the blues is to know that it’s all more worth it that way, together, it is. There’s no fighting, no swimming against the current. It is a friend with ocean eyes and arms as wide and engulfing as the very space above our heads. The blues fills you up and hugs you tightly. It’s a forever feeling.
I can’t tell you how many people in Johnston have the blues, but most of us do, and it makes all the sense in the world to me that Rose has it too. Maybe we aren’t so different, you and me. Her voice floats through my mind in a whisper. No, I don’t think we are. In the surety of the moment, of this very realization, I decide to tell her my secret. A truth that I keep hidden most days, best I can.
“My mother died too.” I say quietly. “And my father hasn’t been here in years.” And I confess the whole heartbreak. Her eyes water. She nods, calmly. In her silence I can see she understands. She has the blues in her soul, after all. I don’t have to explain.
“Think they’re up there now, looking down?” she asks me, softly.
“I do.”
“Me too.”
And I think about all the people we’ve seen come and go. The names of the folks who would fade into history with the same recognition as a daisy on the side of the road unless someone kept them alive somehow. And I think Johnston is so complete, so thoroughly made up by the lives of such people. People you’d never hear about. People that didn’t line the tops of your newspapers in Chicago, or New York, or Los Angeles. Just people who loved their families, planted their feet in the soil, and nourished it with their sweat, with their loyalty, with their families, with their faith in God, in one another and in beautiful things to come.
These people, I love. These people are pieces of myself, fragments of my past that I now recognize as my lifeblood. Johnston is a mirror. Johnston, is a long line of edge walkers. Quiet, simple talkers who get up early hours and do their jobs. They get their hands filthy and calloused and make just enough money. They take care of their homes, try their best and get little rest. The clock, hung on the wall by a rusted nail, ticks on and on, and yet up they go again, as they always will. These are the people of God’s Earth that won’t detail your history books. They won’t make all that much noise.
What a shame it would be if nobody knew their stories, if nobody remembered their names. Saul and Prince and Leon and Deangelo and Tommy and Rose. So, on evenings like this, looking out to the universe and searching for answers, I always write their names in the sky. I write the names of my parents, of every person I’ve ever loved. Every person I’ve ever longed to know, or understand. Every single beating heart in the streets of my hometown. There is no way to go through the world and not have our name in the Heavens, written by someone who knew us. I tell Rose this and she says, “If you write mine, then I’ll write yours.”
“Okay.”
She points her finger about an inch from the moon and traces my name near its light. She whispers to herself as she does it
“Cash.”
And I’ve never been so moved in my life. With her hand silhouetted by thousands of stars, I join her in that painting, and I write her name as she did mine.
“Rose,” I say softly.
She touches my finger with hers, for only a moment, and smiles.
“Now, we live forever.”
And she’s right.
We are just like those tales of old. We are ants of Johnston making a run of it in the middle of nowhere America. Getting up day after day and still going, in the face of our cosmic smallness, chasing all that’s infinite. I feel close to it now, on this hill with my hand next to hers and can see we are as big as the epics and bigger. For there is nothing greater, there is nothing on Earth that is Heaven but love. And lying on the grass, saying nothing, seeing Rose and the blues in her eyes with God’s midnight canvas above, I feel like one of those heroes I heard about in stories all my life.
I take Rose’s hand. And the light wind that dances around us fills up my chest. I believe I will one day fly from this feeling alone. All past erased, all future possible. The electricity pulses through me, flashing lights, emanating from my eyes. My pulse hammers softly through my wrist and moves through the bones of my hand. We search one another as her fingers curl around mine, and I could die, here and now. Right here on the hill I could die. For this is the feeling of God. The feeling of angels and harmony. There are echelons and this is the golden pyramid.
Her hand is soft. Her thumb makes the slowest, most gentle circles in my palm and it’s true that the hand is the soul. And we are all of ourselves, from the heart through the blood, from the feeling to thought. To know that Rose made her thumb move and so she was her touch, do you see?
Rose’s sandy blonde hair is woven into the ground, and the moonlight paints her face around my shadow. The way that she softens, her hand drifting to my cheek, I can’t help but believe. I believe that we’re one burning flame then we’re gone. I believe that we’re put on this planet for this, to be lost in the world with one another. I know I don’t know much. I will know more in time. But tonight, we are endless. We are spirits in Johnston and on the road right to Heaven. We are the story. I lean myself down. My hand, hers. A green kaleidoscope, the entire universe in the sea of her eyes. And that smile. It will be with me forever. Hearts in rhythm, her fingers brushing the line of my jaw. I have her, and she has me. We breathe together, warm and magnetic. Hovering for a moment, the scent captures my life. I fall all the way down. We kiss. Soft, and then passionate, like we’ve waited a thousand years. Together on the hill, on a blanket of grass. We kiss. We kiss. We are stars in the sky, like far away lamps, in a blues dipped, infinite world.