| |
Page 51.01
In a Special Light
by Elroy Bode
Oct 2006
Trade Cloth
$24.95 US
($32.50 CAN)
978-1-59534-026-9 | 9781595340269
1-59534-026-2 | 1595340262
160 pp
20 per carton
Memoir
NATURE
Essays
Fall 2006
Imprint Rights: W
Title Rights: W
Product Safety: Mfgr warrants no warnings apply
Published by
Trinity University Press
Description:
Elroy Bode’s books on nature and life have made him a favorite of readers and critics. Here he explores his home city of El Paso, the land and people of Central Texas, and his roles as teacher, father, and writer. These sharply observed, beautifully written pieces find the universal in the particular — a young boy in a barbershop, plaza life, a young couple in Smokey’s Barbecue. In a Special Light discovers pleasure in the lives of ordinary people, and joy in the worlds in which they live.
Excerpt:
Below are four pieces from "El Paso," the first part of the book
EARTH-LIFE
I need the earth-life, the ordinary countryside moment, but I cannot make this deep affection seem important to others. On occasion friends look indulgently with me toward the trees or fields that I am showing them, my arm thrown out expansively as we take in the view. They nod, they make affirming comments—try to seem tolerant of my preoccupation with “nature,” as they tend to call it—but clearly what is there before us does not mean very much to them, will never count as anything fundamental to their lives.
I need the El Paso countryside. I need to hear the call of redwing blackbirds from salt cedars along an Upper Valley canal. I need to stand in a pecan grove and feel the breeze that moves through it—a breeze that reminds me of other breezes in other trees in other, almost forgotten times. I need to see stretches of plowed land where, in the distance, humans are reduced in scale and become of no greater importance to the eye than a rooster in a yard, a tractor in a field.
I walk about on farmland roads and I have an urge to say: We are together, these, my silent friends under the sun: the yellow jackets investigating the fenceline grasses, lightly touching—almost kissing, it would seem—the stems and seeds; the leisured, midafternoon drifting about of white fluff from the cottonwood trees; the green June corn and the yellow squash in an old man’s back yard garden; the flock of pigeons wheeling upward, coasting, settling again in their smooth formation to sit together in their pigeon community on a telephone wire; the rows of early-summer cotton spread across a field like green spokes of a gigantic wheel.
I look, too, at distant trees bordering the fields and they seem to be offering quiet respirations to the countryside. Their tree-shapes lift, flow, move about, shimmer in the ocean-swells of warm summer air, then settle back within the contours of their passive greenery.
The earth: it is as though I were born to be next to it, to see what is growing there: to feel friendly toward the grass on the ground, limbs on a tree.
I walk, I smile, I am rewarded. This valley land—these fields within their mountain borders—is my sun-blazed heaven. I need no other.
RABBITING
We had two dogs in our shady back yard, but we had a rabbit there too, in her pen, in a corner of the yard. We got her, a just-born little thing, and cared for her, gave her more than adequate space in a pen that we built. The rabbit—female, we thought—dug a hole for herself underneath the rock wall between us and the neighbors and she went down into it—properly rabbit-like—at night or when it rained. We fed her rabbit food, and slices of apple and carrot, and had a rabbit-crap pan she agreed to use, and we emptied it daily. In short, we gave the rabbit a good life and a safe one.
Every day the two dogs went up to the screen wire of the pen and sniffed the rabbit and renewed their acquaintance with her. They seemed satisfied with their properly divided territories: rabbit secure on the inside of her pen, dogs still in possession of their large-enough back yard.
One day—I can’t remember how it came about—we decided that the rabbit might enjoy some extra freedom and the dogs might actually leave her alone—might not corner her and turn her into a lifeless bundle of fur. So we let the rabbit out, and the rest is history.
We stood nearby, of course, and severely cautioned the dogs, who at first quivered and couldn’t quite believe their eyes as the rabbit moved blithely among the rose bushes and lantana and bougainvillea. We stood and watched; we were poised to intervene.
Each afternoon we tested the backyard dynamics before going into the house and watching through the screen door, ready to dash outside at the first sign of the dogs saying Enough of Niceness and bolting over to chew the rabbit raw. We kept stretching the time period that the rabbit was out of her pen. We turned our backs on the yard—sort of—and then looked quickly to see what was happening. Nothing was. The dogs were on the cement porch, dozing, and the rabbit was either chewing at the trunk of the almond tree or lying full-length among the geraniums.
And so it went.
As a family ritual, so to speak, we began letting the rabbit out of her pen just before dark. The dogs paid her no mind and went on sleeping. The rabbit first cavorted a bit, glad to get the kinks out of her legs, and then went about her business in the yard—eating a rose leaf here, an elm twig there. The only time we had to open the back door was when the rabbit started annoying the dogs. She sniffed them—irritating them enough to make them get to their feet—then stayed at their heels and chased them around the yard in continuous circles. They really didn’t like that so I finally had to yell: “Leave the dogs alone!” The rabbit usually minded me although there seemed to be an in-your-face twist to her hop as she turned away. She would scratch hard at grass roots beneath the almond tree and then, rather luxuriously, stretch out on her belly in a damp cool spot.
The dogs were always glad—and so were we—when she finally settled down.
UPPER VALLEY NIGHT
I stopped my car and began walking beneath roadside trees. The sun was down; night was coming. From inside the houses lamps shone dimly through the curtains out into the yards. The long day of summer heat was past now, and a coolness was in the air along with the smell of honeysuckle, faint and moist.
I liked to come here near the fields and canals, near the Rio Grande—liked to look across into one of the narrow lots and see the silhouettes of horses, the graceful arc of their necks as they bent down to the grass. I liked the sense of an almost rural community— the blending of houses and yards and porch lights and greenery and twilight. I felt I could always renew myself here. I could breathe in the air and get back to a kind of innocence.
Night came, yet it was not just specifically night in the Upper Valley. It was the night of any place after dark at the edge of any town. The pale nighttime sky had its first scattering of stars. Doors shut in the distance; dogs barked; children’s voices drifted in from nearby streets. Somewhere a peacock screamed, and then screamed again. And as I listened I became aware of the steady, hypnotic sound of tree frogs. Soon crickets added their own rhythmic chorus from the surrounding fields, and it was as if the night, the land, the world had begun to pulse serenely around me.
A car went along a road beyond an alfalfa field. I watched the slow movement of the taillights, and they could have been the taillights of a car I had seen fifty years before on a night miles away—a night of childhood, a night in college....In the darkness time had seemed to fade, become unimportannt, simply disappear. This night, this specific Upper Valley night, was the all-enveloping, changeless every-night of the earth.
I slowed my walk as I came to a familiar neighborhood, and it was here that I began to notice the altered nature of the trees.
I stood beneath them, and it was as if they had somehow taken on more weight—as if they had undergone a nightly metamorphosis, had lost their bright, leafy, daytime simplicity and had joined with brooding nighttime forces, belonged now to another world. It was as if imperceptibly, after the sun had gone down, the placid elms and cottonwoods and sycamores had shed their familiar daytime identities as stolid harmless givers of shade and were now their other looming after-dark selves: not hostile, not threatening, just more mysterious, more secretive and profound.
They seemed now to be like links between the known and the unknown, the safe and the dangerous; between a poodle in the living room and the wolf in the wild. Their somber masses along the canals and in the quiet yards were the connective element that joined su
http://www.pgw.com/home/titlesearch.aspx?ISBN=9781595340269
|