In My Beginning

By Xlibris US

From the opening tale of this volume of novellas and short stories to its final work, the reader is given adventure, tragedy, and humor that tell us in effect that their origin can be found not only in the shaping imagination of the author but in events experienced by everyone in their own lives. From the tragic murder of a young man the narrator had come to admire, to love experienced in a wholly unconscious way, and the cruel manipulation of the narrator himself that leads him to commit a terrible crime he will never have to admit or make reparations for, the reader is permitted to participate in events far from his or her own life, events nevertheless which either echo or adumbrate what lurks in our own past or future. Each tale takes us to an intriguing location: a wild and scenic river somewhere in the still-primitive wilderness of the South; a long-forgotten age of radical innocence no longer possible or perhaps even imaginable in todays so wise, so jaded world; the laboratory of a scientist whose powerful mind moves with a degree of precision and speed that invites and causes catastrophe; the simple soul of an endearing man whose sensitivity drives him to actions few of us would ever consider; the mind of a man so deformed by self-satisfied egotism that he cannot see beyond the physical deformity of a man maimed, but somehow ennobled, by terrible war injuries; the impossible, but beautifully innocent, yearning of a boy for imagined perfection.
IN MY BEGINNING shows the force of imagination that has given to its owner, as imagination does to all of us, a vision, one we can shape and reshape exclusively for ourselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499007633

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Copyright © 2014 by Lewis E. Birdseye.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Rev. date: 05/05/2014

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Contents

Introduction

Part One: The Novellas

In My Beginning

Alfaloua

The Fell Of Dark

Part Two: The Stories

Lilly The Lovely

The Pierian Spring

The Distinguished Thing

Poietike

ALSO BY LEWIS E. BIRDSEYE

Vastation

The Unsubdued Forest

IN MY BEGINNING

In my beginning is my end.

An inversion of the words embroidered by Mary Stewart on her cloth of estate while awaiting her death at Fotheringhay Castle:

En ma fin git mon commencement.

This motto was employed by T.S. Eliot in East Coker,

the second of his Four Quartets.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot FOUR QUARTETS, LITTLE GIDDING

Introduction

Dendochronology is the scientific name for a method of determining the age of trees based on the analysis of patterns of tree rings, also known as growth rings. It can date the time at which the tree rings formed, in many cases to an exact calendar year. The science is precise, though often the results are open to question, but in the matter of trees, a give-or-take-a-few-years answer is perfectly satisfactory. Certainly from the tree we hear no complaints if a few years have been added or subtracted from the proper sum. Vanity is of no concern to a tree.

Among humans, however, age is a different matter. Though we know with certainty, not scientific but reasonable, that any human we might encounter anywhere on Earth is somewhere between one and one hundred years old, frequently we must approach the matter of age with a certain delicacy. Applause for the scientist who determines within a dozen to as many as 100 years the age of the tree he is studying. Woe betide the unfortunate human who misses the age of the man or woman who is more concerned with the number that registers the sum of years spent functioning successfully on this vale of tears than the integer (often mere double digits) that hints at mental proficiency. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas. Age is a tricky matter, for reasons scientific and those that are all too human.

For me, in this slim volume, the matter of age is in some ways the central theme of the three novellas and four short stories it contains. The span of time separating the writing of the first work from the last is over thirty years, and it is quite clear to me that each work is different in ways that reflect growth of some sort during that time. But each nevertheless is made from the same fibers, is encased in the same bark, rooted in the same material that fed them all. Plus ça change, plus de la même chose. Is this what I am saying? I think not. Things do indeed change and those changes in turn change everything. But to what degree and in what fashion? The answer to that question, at least as it concerns me, is in this volume, but it is an answer, I admit and understand, that is of no real interest to anyone else. Then why bother with this little exposition I hear you saying, thinking at least. Because it gives me the opportunity to say something about the creative process that I didn’t understand when I first felt the magic that the written or spoken tale exercises upon us, the reader, the listener. Anyone who has ever had to explain an absence or a tardiness, an action done or not done, a word said or unsaid, knows the meaning of embellishment, the necessity of revision, the delicate act of alteration. For reasons ranging from exculpation, to the proper exercise of our greatest gift, imagination, and beyond that to the simple fact that from the moment something occurs, whatever it might be, to the time of the telling of that something we have changed, are in some ways, cellularly as well as intellectually and imaginatively, a different person and must avail ourselves of a different story to match our new persona, we all exercise, if not understand, the transformative power of the mind and the difference changes in ourselves—frequently we alone can see them and understand them and feel their power—require us to act. This process, along with innate brain chemistry, is what shapes art, and makes it for all of us, the writer and the reader, a delightful mystery.

Each of the works in this volumes is strictly autobiographical and totally fictional, as most of what comes from us humans is. An aside: if you want truth, both to dispense it and receive it in turn, grow roots and leaves and get used to standing around in one place. Even animals practice deception. And stop worrying about your age. The first work, IN MY BEGINNING, deals with events I was involved in during the summer of my sophomore year in college. ALFALOUA recounts incidents that happened to me when I was a river guide on the Chatooga River in my mid thirties. THE FELL OF DARK was shaped by an experiment I was drawn to (for the money) at the Watson Laboratory of Columbia University while I was studying for my doctorate. I actually met Lilly the Lovely in circumstances not unlike those in her eponymous story. I knew Herbert Fineman. He and I were hired at the same time, he in Science, I in English, by the same academic dean. For both of us it was our first teaching job. I presented a paper at the MLA in Washington D.C. after having spent hours observing the Viet Nam War Memorial and those sad souls standing mutely in front of it, shivering hopelessly in the snow. And my father flew for a retired business magnate in Florida and knew Earl White and met Lindbergh. All those stories are true and made at the same time of whimsy and doubt and excitement and fear, and whole cloth full of the most fantastically-shaped holes. They, all of them, are the history of my growth, even though the whole of my life I’ve remained the same person. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed living them. Even if I didn’t. Didn’t what? you ask. Go figure.

Part One

The Novellas

In My Beginning

Prologue

Among those who study the stars and the earth in its relation to them, there are many schools of thought about origins. There are the steady-state theorists who believe that things as they are have always been that way and always will be. There are also catastrophists, who believe that change occurs dynamically and frequently—in geologic time, that is—and the changes are always dramatic. As far as my own origins are concerned, I suppose the steady-state people could use me as evidence to support their ideas, for not much happened to me after I was born. I was delivered into this world at the beginning of the last great war, but then who in this century—or any other, for that matter—hasn’t been born during, at the end, or at the commencement of war? And since that time on one occasion or another most parts of the world have been wracked by conflict, millions of people have died or been made miserable by these absurdities, and life goes on. What is it that has been said, Plus ça change, plus de la meme chose? Exactly.

I have few recollections of childhood; each day was essentially a mirror of the one before. Consecutive memory for me begins with seasons, not particular days, because seasons at least were different. I don’t think I even noticed weather changes—only that in some seasons I wore more and in some less clothes. I don’t think I was dull witted; there just wasn’t much going on in my life. And I really do think that this is the way it is for most children, and I suspect that they grow up to be identical as adults, moving through life like small boats in a crowded harbor—shifting course to avoid collisions, rolling a bit with the waves, occasionally getting overturned, but usually making it safely to the other side. Of what, and for what purpose, who knows? I guess I could have become the pilot of my own little craft and thought about my life—and life in general—as little as most people do, but something happened to me that made such a route impossible. A minor event as things go in this life, barely a ripple in the waters at the edge of the harbor, but for me it was the end process of a fitful labor that had early in my life begun to push me slowly yet inexorably away from what others found so satisfying in life. I’ll explain.

Initially, like the first barely perceptible twinge of the first barely perceptible labor pain, there were moments in my life that I recognized as different, in some unmeasurable and unknowable way, from the otherwise seamless, perdurable moment that made up my life. For example, I remember an incident that made a considerable impression on me while I was still quite young. It had to do with something I hadn’t known, or rather hadn’t known could be known.

I was still in short pants, I remember, and thinking that soon I would be wearing long ones. The summer between the third and fourth grade was the rite of passage. In the fourth grade I would be permitted to wear long pants, perhaps even blue jeans. I was anxiously looking forward to this, as I had been doing for several months, as innocently I made my way to P.S.106, a moderately progressive grammar school in the East Bronx on the periphery of the citadel I lived in, a little community called Parkchester. Little did I suspect what trap literally lay before me several hundred yards further down the path.

A few days before, workmen had arrived in front of the school and set up some barricades to block traffic. That fact had barely registered on my consciousness. But on this day those barricades perhaps in some way saved my life. They may have prevented me from falling off the earth; or, more properly speaking, into it.

When I turned the last corner before entering the schoolyard, I perceived the barricades directly in front of me and saw behind them something which filled me with an unaccountable sense of foreboding. The pavement had been ripped open, and where the gleaming asphalt should have been was a gaping hole. Nothing to fear here—but the hole was lined with dirt, with earth. The other kids I had walked to school with darted into the school yard to get in a few quick moments of punch-ball, but I stood at the edge of that hole for minutes, literally, staring down at different colored layers of earth receding into an emptiness the depth of which was too great for me to fathom. I’ve joked about this incident with friends I’ve made through the years to illustrate the special ignorance of the city bred. They’ve always thought it amusing that a child should think that asphalt and concrete grow, naturally, the way in some places grass and trees grow, that pavement is as much a part of nature and the proper scheme of things as anything else that grows—like light posts or telephone poles. That day, for the first time in my life, the ground felt less solid beneath my feet. I understood in some childish fashion that strange things might exist beneath the surface of other things, perhaps all things. It wasn’t something I could talk about: Hey, look guys, there’s dirt in the hole. I was not that stupid. But neither was it something I could ignore. Something was fundamentally different, in some unknowable fashion wrong, but of course I couldn’t say what it was.

Additionally, there were things about myself I learned as I grew, things I didn’t particularly want to know nor had believed I could know. One such revelation occurred when I was hurtling through the air about to break the surface of a mirror-like pond. I had stood on a rock some thirty feet above the pond, staring down at it for at least fifteen minutes. It was several miles back in the woods behind my parents’ home in Connecticut. By this time I was about thirteen, and my folks had built a weekend-summer house for us to escape to from the city. I’d heard about the pond from local kids who boasted that they had dived from the same rock I was standing on. I had been afraid to go with them to try my first dive, afraid I would be too frightened to jump and then they would have seen my fear, and I couldn’t have tolerated that.

As I peered over the edge of the rock, clinging to a tree, which grew to one side of it, I could dimly see myself mirrored in the brownish-green stillness of the pond. At that height I could only make out the shape of my head and neck and one arm as I waved at my reflection. And then I jumped. I seemed to move through the air much more slowly than I had imagined I would. My dive had been an awkward version of a swan dive, and I remember flailing my arms desperately to keep from flipping over on to my back. All the time I could see myself—it seemed so slowly—coming closer to my own reflection; and then, in the instant before I met myself head on, I knew, in the same pre-cognitive way I had known standing on the edge of the broken asphalt years before, that something was dreadfully wrong. Even the terrific impact of the water failed to drive away the impression (what had transpired in my brain could hardly be called thought) and as I sank deep into the dark coolness of the water a single thought slowly distilled itself out of it. I had, as it were, met myself, merged into my own shadow, and what I had discovered I was unwilling to accept. Even though I had jumped, to all intents proved myself, demonstrated my courage, I knew I had been afraid, afraid every minute, including the one when I had penetrated the surface and legitimately had nothing any longer to fear. I would boast to the other boys of my accomplishment, would probably duplicate the feat in front of them, but I would be afraid. And I knew I would always be afraid, always. I had found a flaw in myself as years before I had found a flaw in the very configuration of the earth. In the days that followed, before I could put the event not out of my mind but rather into some part of it where like the seed of some noxious but slowly germinating plant it would take its time to germinate, I wondered what else about me there was to learn.

But youth is resilient, and I soon put the event behind me, bragging to my friends about my leap and repeating it in front of them many times that summer. Besides, I had more immediately pressing problems to deal with.

I was at the age when self-consciousness is like an insidious disease for which the only cure is total anonymity. More than anything I wanted to be totally indistinguishable from anyone else. My name began with a letter that many children have trouble pronouncing, L. In my earliest attempts at pronunciation my name invariably came out Woowis. To my parents, sympathetic in most matters concerning me, this was cause for gentle laughter. But as the impediment persisted, and it became increasingly necessary for me to state my name, as in school, to strangers, I began to dread what I alone perceived as howls of derisory laughter initiated by my stumbling attempts at pronunciation. The defense I developed was to create another name for myself. I had a middle initial, E, which stood for Edward. By the time I was in the sixth grade, and had done a bit of reading, I told everyone that my first name didn’t matter, was a total irrelevance and that my real name was my middle one, Euphrates. I said that my grandfather had been a world traveler and had brought back from one of his voyages a bottle of Euphrates River water to baptize his first grandson with. He had been a great believer in mankind, I told them, and wished to start me off right by laving me in the waters that had nurtured the earliest civilization. I liked the story so much I wished it were true and began almost to believe it. The name served a curious dual function, however; by sparing me the need to pronounce, and hence stumble over, that impossible first syllable it granted me the anonymity I sought; but at the same time the patent absurdity of the name brought me notoriety of a different sort. I remained, in spite of my ploy, the weird kid, though now I suspected that this judgment, because it was at least in part the consequence of my own actions, was deserved.

One thing my grandfather did for me, though, was see to it that I was baptized an Episcopalian. I don’t believe he himself had any serious religious beliefs, but he was sure that I would have a better opportunity to become president of the United States if I were an Episcopalian. That was the best start, he felt, he could give me.

As for myself and religion, I drifted quite easily into a rather unreflective kind of atheism as a youth. My parents sent me to a Sunday School for a couple of weekends when I was about nine years old, but the smiling Jesus I had to color on large sheets of paper we were given, on the bottoms of which were written little homilies, like Suffer the little ones to come unto me, left me feeling vaguely disquieted. Jesus was so good looking, so healthy, so sympathetic, so understanding. And so clearly Caucasian, blond, blue-eyed, the Aryan dream. And this just after a war fought by mad Aryan Supremacists. He couldn’t become real to me. If he’d had a hole in his shirt, or if his sandals had been scuffed, if there had been a hair out of place on his head or in his beard, if he’d merely looked Mid-Eastern—then I might have been able to get a bearing on him. It wasn’t merely that I couldn’t understand perfection; of course I couldn’t, nor can I now. But more important, I couldn’t relate to it, and that was that. Also, I’d never seen anyone smiling all the time. It rather frightened me.

Another thing that bothered me was that all the other kids who attended the Sunday School—it was not, by the way, an Episcopalian school; already my possibilities were being limited—were so remarkably clean and neat and polite. Their pants and shirts were pressed, there were no apparent darns in their socks, their shirts and blouses were dazzling white. The boys wore ties (I didn’t even own one) and they all said, Yes, sir. Yes m’am; No, sir. No, m’am.

In my unpressed corduroy pants and polo shirt I simply didn’t fit in. Everyone was wonderfully polite to me, which made me feel even less like I belonged. And Jesus didn’t bother them in the least. He always came out appropriately blond and blue eyed on their sheets, whereas on mine he usually had black hair and brown eyes and wore a red or blue robe, my favorite colors then. And his skin was either brown or yellow or red; not for the reason that I had a finely developed sense of racial consciousness—I couldn’t have defined race then if my life had depended on it—but because white seemed such a washed-out color, such a vapid, uninteresting and uninspiring one. I was told politely that he always wore white and more pointedly that HE was white! I broke with formal religion at that point. I was obviously beyond redemption, and besides what time would Jesus have for me, when there were so many of those neat, clean kids who knew how to say Yes, sir and No, sir, and hold doors and who would recognize him when they saw him for they obviously knew better than I what he looked like and how he dressed. Curiously my ideas haven’t changed too much as I’ve become an adult. People who go to church still seem awfully clean to me—really a bit too clean to be quite healthy. And Jesus hasn’t gotten any darker as far as I can tell.

Chapter One

To say with certainty that at a particular point something begins or at another something ends is a satisfying and altogether very human kind of folly. The continuum of life is an unbroken line—as straight and unyielding as the horizon viewed at the edge of the sea. My own story begins properly I suppose in the prehistory of prehistory, when quite by chance one primal atom exploded into another and shaped thereby all the events in all the time that ever will be. We choose to see history, however, particularly our own, in much less than these, shall we say, cosmic terms. Every beginning, we like to think, implies an end; and the end in turn another beginning. In this belief is born and nurtured our idea of hope, for always we seek an escape from where we are or what we are doing, hoping either for an end to the old or a beginning of the new. My own story I choose to tell in very simple, very human terms.

I was the second of two children, my sister being older than me by almost three years. She was clearly the favorite of my parents, especially my father who regarded me as a rather awkward and clumsy fellow. And with good cause. Though I was later to become a fairly competent athlete, as a young child I was very poorly coordinated. My sister learned to roller skate and ice skate before she was two, but I was still crawling at a year and a half. My father had been very independent and headstrong as a boy. When he was sixteen he had run away from home, become a merchant sailor, and for two years had sailed all over the world. For six months his parents had had no idea where he was, or even if he were still alive, until one day they received a casual letter from him telling them he was in Bombay and would be home within the next year and a half. I guess he unthinkingly expected similar behavior from me—a challenge to his authority—and hence he watched my growth with some suspicion and concern. By permitting me to feel as awkward and uncoordinated as I really was as a child, perhaps he was quashing my rebelliousness in the bud. I don’t know. In any case, he frequently derided my few halting efforts to be bold or daring or even moderately normal in my activities. I was convinced at times that I would be a mere observer of life, for full participation seemed quite beyond me, especially when I broke my left arm playing a game of catch with my father. I was almost seven when the accident occurred.

I had been trying to get my father’s attention and approval by making great leaping catches of the ball he was hitting to me. My greatest leap ended with me all in a tangle on the grass with an arm bent at a dismal angle. It was what is called a green-stick break. The bone had bent more than it had fractured, and the growth tip had been damaged. In his office the doctor told my parents that my arm would probably never grow any longer and that I would go through life with a withered arm. I was in the adjacent room, my arm having been set in the doctor’s office, wondering dully whether my arm was really still there under the pounds of gleaming plaster and gauze that covered it. My fingers stuck out at one end where they should have, but from my shoulder to my wrist I was locked into a cast. My arm no longer felt a part of me, and even my fingers seemed detached, no longer mine. I kept wiggling them to be sure I still had some control over them. And then I heard the words of the doctor, withered arm. I had no idea what the word withered meant, but it certainly didn’t sound good. In some curious context I had heard the word wither, as in whither thou goest… and associated it with departure, with leaving. Since I couldn’t see my arm, it was reasonable to believe, I assumed, that it was gone. My fingers had simply been glued in some clever manner to the cast. And that’s the way I would go through life. I felt sick. Of course I never told my parents my fears, and the only time I spoke of what I had heard, to a friend of mine a week or so later, when I was permitted to go outside again, he gravely assured me that what I had understood was probably so and that it might be contagious and he wasn’t going to play with me anymore. I then worried that my other arm might mysteriously drop off, or that I might spread what I had to my whole family and one morning we’d all gather at the breakfast table with no arms and none of us would be able to eat.

Eight weeks later, when the cast was removed and my arm was restored to me, my fears seemed to me to have been rather foolish; but it had been a genuinely frightening time for me. The incident made me feel completely cut off from everyone, different and isolated because of my difference. It was for me a glimpse, though I couldn’t have known it at the time, of the adult world.

Less than a year later I broke my other arm jumping off a park bench. I had been standing on the top of the back rail of the bench, pretending I was a paratrooper about to parachute into enemy territory—growing up during World War II, we made all our activities into war games. I was imagining all sorts of glorious adventures, but my thoughts were delaying the game so my friend, the one who had given me such comfort when I had broken my arm, anxious for his turn at the game, gave me a little push. I fell in a great heap, aware at the moment of impact that something was amiss. I stood up not quite sure what the problem was, but when my friend, who was poised to jump, looked at me with a face of terror and screamed, I didn’t do it, I knew indeed that something was dreadfully wrong. I felt no pain at all, but when I looked at my right arm, I was horrified to discover that I now seemed to have two elbows, except that the second one turned my hand in a direction it had never before faced. I remember being very brave about the whole thing, but this time I knew my arm had no chance; I was to be maimed for life. My parents were very kind and gentle with me while I convalesced, but I had little doubt that my bone-breaking propensities convinced my father even more that I was not likely to amount to much.

I recovered from that fracture too, and though I suspected I carried the seeds of my own destruction within me, I thought about it very little. If I were in some fashion different from other boys my age, there was little I could do to change things. My attitude had little about it of despair, but even then it had even less about it of hope.

When I was about fourteen, and starting to feel a little more sure of myself, an incident occurred which fixed for me forever the dominant image I have of my father. It served as well an interesting dual function; it nudged my attitude about life more toward serious thought, and permitted me a mild act of vengeance at the same time. The house in Connecticut we lived in weekends and summers was tucked away nicely in the woods, which meant that when my father decided it would be good to have a garden, we had a lot of clearing to do. We cut down trees and tore out stumps and heaved boulders out of the earth. We worked like pioneers—all of us, my sister and mother included, and we all felt close to one another and good about what we were doing. It was hard work, and I can’t say I enjoyed it, but during that time we functioned better as a family than we ever had before or did at any other time after the garden was completed.

The land we worked was strewn with large boulders, the glacier which had once covered New England having deposited fragments of the Laurentians liberally throughout the area. They were hard enough to cart off, but the rocks that remained buried below the surface of the ground, like demonically-impacted molars, were almost impossible to remove. We had shovels, pick-axes, crow-bars—all the right hand tools; but, with the exception of my father, we simply lacked sufficient strength to use them effectively. Even collectively we weren’t a match for some of the two and three-ton boulders we were trying to unearth. That’s when my father began using the family car, a 1947 Ford four-door sedan, and a heavy hemp rope to help pull the rocks out. We would dig until we had uncovered most of the rock, and then we would pry until we had loosened it in its hole. While I or my father held one corner of the rock up by using the crow-bar, the rest of the family would pile rocks under it, leaving one area exposed so we could pass an end of the rope under it from one side to the other. Once the rope had been passed under the rock we’d knot it tightly, and tie the loose end to the bumper of the car. My father would then start the old Ford, put it into first gear, and slowly, the clutch chattering, all of us cheering lustily, ease the car forward. Slowly, yielding an inch at a time, the rock would come forth from where it had sheltered since the last ice age. The primitive masons at Stonehenge couldn’t have felt more proud!

The image I have of my father, and what attended to it, is the result of one of these extractions. Our house was located on the top of a considerable hill and was reached by a long, winding driveway about 400 yards long. There was a small parking area at the top and in order to widen it so that more than one car could be accommodated it was necessary to remove several large rocks. We had by then perfected our strategy and thus anticipated no difficulty at all in the job that lay before us one late fall afternoon, the sun bright as it can only be on those days before autumn yields entirely to winter. We went about our work in an almost professional manner, each of us well rehearsed in the task that lay before us. The rock we chose first was the largest one we’d ever tried to move.

No problem, my father said, kicking at the dirt in front of it.

I had my doubts, but to have voiced them would have been tantamount to treason. Shedding our jackets and sweaters as the work warmed us, we dug and pried and dug some more and pried a bit more, groaned and sweated—and then the rock was ready to be wedged up and the rope was around it and we were set for the car to pull. As always the car, the better for leverage and mechanical advantage and other terms my father used, none of which I suspected he understood properly, was pointed down the driveway, which had a very gradual slope at the top but which dropped away very rapidly after the first fifty yards to a pitch of about thirty degrees. As the car strained against the weight, the rope stretched thinner than I’d ever seen it get, and the clutch chattered like a host of angry squirrels.

Fried Christ, expostulated my father, whose epithets, always a bit bizarre, never failed to amuse me.

Laughing to myself, I watched in delight as the rock slowly began to move and then, as all the others had, roll slowly out of its hole. We all let out a cheer, and my father jumped out of the car to join the celebration. In his haste to join us, however, he had forgotten to set the emergency brake. With shouts of delight we pulled the loop of rope off the rock, barely noticing the unusual strain on it. No sooner had the rope slipped off the last protuberance of the rock, with a whizzing sound it had never made before, than the car began to roll—headed straight down the driveway. Halfway down the hill the drive turned sharply to the right. Though the drop to the left was at least thirty feet, we had never considered putting up a guardrail. Before any of us had a chance to realize what was happening, the car had begun to roll at a pretty good rate of speed, trailing the rope behind it, and was aimed straight for that thirty foot drop. My father, ever a man of action, grabbed the rope and tried to dig in his heels. As we stared uncomprehendingly at the scene unfolding before us, the smiles of success still wreathing our faces, my father started down the driveway, letting out all sorts of noises, grunts and barely articulated words, which seemed to suggest that we grab hold of him.

There he was, sliding down the driveway at about ten miles an hour, gaining speed every second, and looking for all the world like an ill-shod water skier terribly out of his element. It was a moment to savor! My mother screamed something like Oh my God; my sister started giggling; and I… I knew, as long as I might live, there would probably never again be a moment like this.

I ran, of course, for the car, but not so quickly that I hadn’t time to hear my father, as I passed him, muttering under his breath, Jesus Christ, as he strained against the rope. Time in fact to hear clearly five distinct imprecations, each a bit more desperate than the one preceding it, as the car continued to gain speed. By the time I was even with the driver’s seat, the car was indeed moving quite quickly. Fortunately my father had left the door open so it was possible for me to swing myself into the seat fairly easily. I glanced at the rear view mirror, and I swear my father’s shoes were literally smoking.

Are there sweeter moments than those when all is in chaos about us, when everyone else has given up hope, but we alone know that the solution is at hand, is in our hands in fact, and that with a simple action of ours all will be well? If there are, I can’t imagine what they might entail. Suffice it to say there were a good seventy-five feet of straight driveway ahead of me when I slid behind the wheel, and there were only fifteen or so when I hit the brake and brought the car to a shuddering halt.

I was the unquestioned hero of that day. Even my father’s praise was unequivocal, which pleased me as much as knowing how much more quickly I could have moved had I so chosen. But over the years what has pleased me even more is the image that day gave to me of my father, and how it helped to give form to a notion that had been growing in me about life. I see him before me now, being pulled down the driveway, cursing and hollering, shoes smoking, hanging on for all he was worth and not about to give up. Some people are forced to turn to Greek and Roman mythology to find images—like Tantalus and Sisyphus—of courage and absurdity. I have my own, home