(I am so sorry it has taken me so long to publish this final chapter of ...Azalea Heights! We have been moving, and I have been scattered, to put it mildly. Thanks so much to all of you who have persevered in checking and waiting. I love and appreciate you all. Jan)The firecrackers Coy and Babette had used on me were leftovers from our latest holiday, Independence Day, July 4, 1961. But the day before our country celebrated its birthday every year, I celebrated mine. On non-leap years, my birthday falls on day 183 of our 365-day year, which means that my birthday is one day more than exactly midyear. But even more significant than being midyear is that my birthday is pretty close to midway through summer vacation. It seems like every summer somewhere around daddy’s birthday, the 14th, which is two weeks before Julie’s which is the 28th, we all start talking about school starting back up again. The past year is officially over, and the present is quickly becoming the future.
Until my birthday came marking that gearing-back-up time, the next school year seemed a far away and unimaginable thing to grab onto. Until that time, my identity was bound up in being a ten-year-old fifth-grader in Mrs. Gravitt’s room since I was a first-year band student. Now that I was eleven, I was looking back on that fifth-grade year; it was no longer my present reality. Somehow, I had made it out of Mrs. Gravitts’ room, and what was most shocking about this was that I had not shot my way out of there like an outlaw at a bank robbery or thrown off the cowboy and stomped him in the dirt like a bucking bronco fresh out of the chute. Somewhere along the way, I had been tamed enough to be able to think about some things.
I realized that Mrs. Gravitts, one of my main riders, although a little grouchy and persistent in her rules of fifth-grade behavior, really sorta wanted to like us. I got to noticing that on those days when she managed to make it all the way to 3:30 without whipping any of us, she looked sorta happy, like she had just won something, not mad, like she hadn’t gotten to have what she came for that day. I had always thought she lived to beat us, but that wasn’t true. She was just as relieved as we were when she could leave her board right there in the closet beside her purse.
I realized that when I was with Betsy and Babette, I might have acted like a good sport and entered into some of their shady activities, but secretly I was a little bit glad and relieved when I could just crawl between the covers and lie there in the peaceful darkness and say my prayers without having to wonder if God was sticking His fingers in His ears due to the way I had pretended He didn’t exist that day. I kinda liked the idea that He was up there inclining His big ear in my direction, being the Great Listener and the Great Advisor, not just the Great Whisperer. I kinda liked the idea that the Great Whisperer wasn’t just whispering to hear Himself talk, like I usually was, but because He knew that by myself, I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going. Shoot, I didn’t even know how to stop and think. Everything I did was from the seat of my pants. Somehow, though, He had gotten my attention, and there were a few things He thought I needed to know.
All my life I had seen my parents as perfectly composed, mature authority figures in their public, daytime lives who ripped off their masquerades at night. But somewhere, miraculously, in the throes of all my fifth-grade hoodlumism at the end of this first decade of life, I began to see my parents in a different light. I began to think of them as people just like me only a little bigger and further down the road — people tempted by selfishness and jealousy; by weakness when they should have been strong, and by boldness when they should have been humble; by impulsive words when they should have been silent a little longer, and by weary, silent tongues when they should have taken more time and energy to communicate and explain. Selfish kids go out and steal pens, and shoot ink on somebody’s new coat; impulsive kids call a fight in the woods, and when the fighting escalates beyond their expertise, scared kids look around for a pipe to go tightrope instead.
But I began to see that grown-ups couldn’t do stuff like playing hooky and hiding out in a ravine when they got fed up with their real world, and they wouldn’t’ find the mercy of the judge if they went crazy and shot out all the lights at the courthouse. When their duties were difficult and complicated, like math was for me, they couldn’t just tell all their clients and employees to go jump in the lake and then take off and explore the cotton gin at ten-thirty in the morning. And when boredom breathed down their necks or they felt their lives getting into a rut, they couldn’t just throw off their high heels and white shirt in the middle of the stream and go build a trolley in a pine tree…or at least they didn’t think they could.
Really and truly, they might have been better off if they had just hauled off and smoked a cigarette in a ravine or climbed up a pine tree and slid recklessly down a rope, but they really didn’t think they could; they needed to act like adults, not kids. I guess Daddy sometimes resorted to this sort of thing with his out-of-the-blue motor scooter and freakish fighting rooster, but not even he,with his high level of innovative thinking and unpredictable shenanigans, could manage in the end to scale the high walls of complicated adulthood. And never having a trial run at being adults, just as I had never had one at being a ten-year-old, they were handling life in the way that seemed right to them at the time.
They, probably much like Mrs. Gravitts, got up every morning and went into their day knowing it was brand new and offered all kinds of new possibilities. They didn’t set out to be jealous or angry or selfish or weak or any of those other ways that caused them to unravel with each other at night. They washed their faces every morning, looked in the mirror, and told themselves today would be better than yesterday, and that they would do something different today from yesterday to cause that to be the case. They probably heard the Great Whisperer telling them, “Yes, this is the right path,” or “No, don’t head off in that direction; you may become lost.” And just like me, sometimes they’d listen, and sometimes they wouldn’t.
I wondered what eleven would bring. Would I keep on trying to look beneath the surface of people, or would I become distracted from all this deep thinking by some new, irresistible adventure somewhere around the next bend? Would I learn to stop and listen closely every time God, my Great Whisperer, spoke to me on a boring Saturday with nothing to do or in the pages of the Bible that Julie and Mr. Pete read to me, or would I outrun Him in an effort to learn to play stupid human games like “hard to get”?
I’ll bet if I had been paying more attention when Julie read about the heroic rescues of Daniel and his buddies in Babylon and Isaac and Abraham in Israel, it might have dawned on me a lot earlier that their Great Rescuer was one and the same as my Great Whisperer, and was probably still around, even right here in Azalea Heights, showing up in ways sometimes more audible than visible—maybe whispering messages on the wind at the playground at the elementary school or through an old aunt’s voice late at night at Flat Fork.
And so even without a map, I showed up somewhere. Anyone would have sworn at the beginning of fifth grade that it would have been the Shelby County jailhouse or six feet under in a Crocker plot at the Tenaha Cemetery, but instead where I showed up was at eleven years old still alive and outside in the free world. Sixth grade and Band 2 awaited me just around the corner.
Maybe this year I would read “The Courtship of Miles Standish” by Mr. Longfellow, about both our relatives, John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, who came over on the Mayflower. Maybe this year I would learn how to subtract a little better so that I could take a whole dollar to the Rio. Maybe I would ask Julie to explain some of what Rudyard Kipling was trying to say in that poem “If” that Daddy was always trying to make me memorize to show off to his friends. Maybe I would even let him make me a memory magician using his Balls and Bats system that he had used to learn all the presidents and vice presidents in order. I might start praying at odd times of the day like Janie, and maybe in those prayers I might mention poor Mr. Gravitts and his wife who had to get up every morning and go corral a bunch of rowdy hooligans who shot spit wads at her every time she turned around to write on the blackboard. Maybe I’d go confess to Tina Farnsworth that every girl in the whole sixth grade wished their eyes were just like hers because she was a lot prettier than Jacqueline Kennedy whose eyes were so far apart it’s a wonder she could make both of them focus on the same thing at the same time.
And maybe if I started trying tomorrow, in about twelve years I might be able to smile at Travis Wayne. And maybe, just maybe, if I started listening to Mr. Pete instead of daydreaming about my b-b gun and back flips off the diving board, Janie Simon’s mother would change her mind about letting me be friends with her daughter.
It looked like I would more than likely stay out of the Shelby County jail and probably make it to high school. I could even imagine marching across the stage at graduation and possibly making it intact all the way to adulthood.
And there was an outside chance that one day — way out there in the 1970’s — I might even bolster myself up, brave the deadly minefields of matrimony, and have a couple of kids that I could teach how to pole vault and tell stories to about when I was “a little boy” in Azalea Heights.
From Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights, chapter 20 (final chapter)
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