Boys Life

baseball cards scattered over the seat. These days there might be a fortune back there, who knows? The radio-pardon me, the stereo cassette player-is on, with Tears For Fears coming out of the speakers. I think Roland Orzabal is a fantastic singer.
    It’s 1991. Can you believe it? We’re poised on the edge of a new century, for better or worse. I guess we’ll all make up our own minds which. The year 1964 seems like ancient history now. The Polaroids taken in that year have turned yellow. No one wears their hair like that anymore, and the clothes have changed. People have changed, too, I think. Not just in the South, but everywhere. For better or worse? You can decide for yourself.
    And what we and the world have been through since 1964! Think of it! It’s been a faster, more brain-busting ride than ever could be devised by the Brandywine Carnival. We’ve lived through Vietnam-if we’ve been fortunate-and the era of Flower Power, Watergate and the fall of Nixon, the Ayatollah, Ronnie and Nancy, the cracking of the Wall and the beginning of the end of Communist Russia. We truly are living in the time of whirlwinds and comets. And like rivers that flow to the sea, time must flow into the future. It boggles the mind to think what might be ahead. But, as the Lady once said, you can’t know where you’re going until you figure out where you’ve been. Sometimes I think we have a lot of figuring out to do.
    “It’s such a lovely day,” Sandy says, and she leans back in her seat to watch the countryside glide past. I glance at her and my eyes are blessed. She wears sunlight in her blond hair like a spill of golden flowers. There’s some silver in there, too, and I like it though she frets some. Her eyes are pale gray and her gaze is calm and steady. She is a rock when I need strength, and a pillow when I need comfort. We’re a good team. Our child has her eyes and her calm, the dark brown of my hair and my curiosity about the world. Our child has my father’s sharp-bridged nose and the slim-fingered “artist’s hands” of my mother. I think it’s a fine combination.
    “Hey, Dad!” The baseball cards have been forgotten for the moment.
    “Yeah?”
    “Are you nervous?”
    “No,” I say. Better be honest, I think. “Well… maybe a little bit.”
    “What’s it gonna be like?”
    “I don’t know. It’s been… oh… let’s see, we left Zephyr in 1966. So it’s been… you tell me how many years.”
    A few seconds’ pause. “Twenty-five.”
    “Right as rain,” I say. Our child gets an aptitude in math strictly from Sandy’s side of the family, believe me.
    “How come you never came back here? I mean, if you liked it so much?”
    “I started to, more than a few times. I got as far as the turnoff from I-65. But Zephyr’s not like it was. I guess I know things can’t stay the same, and that’s all right but… Zephyr was my home, and it hurts to think it’s changed so much.”
    “So how’s it changed? It’s still a town, isn’t it?” I hear the baseball cards being flipped through again, being sorted by team and alphabetized.
    “Not like it was,” I say. “The air force base near here closed down in 1974, and the paper mill up on the Tecumseh shut down two years later. Union Town grew. It’s about four or five times the size it was when I was a boy. But Zephyr… just got smaller.”
    “Um.” The attention is drifting now.
    I glance at Sandy, and we smile at each other. Her hand finds mine. They were meant to be clasped together, just like this. Before us, the hills rise around Adams Valley. They are covered by trees that blaze with the yellow and purple of new buds. Some green is appearing, too, though April’s not here yet. The air outside the car is still cool, but the sun is a glorious promise of summer.
    My folks and I indeed did leave Zephyr, in August of 1966. Dad, who had found a job working at Mr. Vandercamp’s hardware store, sensed the changing winds and decided to search for greener pastures. He found a job in Birmingham, as the assistant manager on the night shift at the Coca-Cola bottling plant. He was making twice as much money as he’d ever made when he was a milkman. By 1970, he’d moved up to be the night-shift manager, and he thought we were in high cotton. That was the year I started college, at the University of Alabama. Dad saw me graduate, with a degree in journalism, before he died of cancer in 1978. It was, thankfully, a quick passing. Mom grieved