Autumn

Try. You try to remember why trees forsake their leaves in the winter, for the sake of your son who asked you, and you wonder why you don't know the answer. You try to remember what it was like when you didn't know anything, before you knew everything. Remember when you knew everything, and the world was simply a great unexplored mystery, there for you to dissect and rule?

You remember seeing a picture of your own father at fourteen, white T-shirt and a pack of smokes rolled into his sleeve, just before the car he and sixteen-year-old Uncle Steve were driving broke down near the Nevada border. Your father told you the two of them had purchased a whole bushel of corn-on-the-cob that day, back when they were flush and before the $10 repair cost for the car erased their food budget. They ate the corn for the rest of the trip, until they ran flat out of money and got bailed out with a bus ticket by an old family friend in San Francisco.

Now you sit back and examine your thirty-year-old reaction today, parenting your own father: "How could Grandma Vi and Grandpa Don let those two teenagers drive a broke down car across several state lines--by themselves?" Ten years ago, your reaction would be different, you realize; the image of your father squinting out from over-exposed black and white, the whole desert at his feet, would have stirred dreams of swirling dust and sleepy two-lane towns with bell-ringing gas pumps.

Now you have an easy chair.

Ten years ago, you were the boy with the desert at his feet, standing in swirls of dust, filtered by a setting sun, a child of the nameless heart-yearning of open roads and wind in your hair. You were Possibility, your notebooks were filled with prose, and she fell in love with you then. Her poet husband.

Now you are Law and you are Order, and the scurrious scribbles of your pen--that used to melt the heart of that black-haired love of yours--that pen now scribbles out dollars and cents onto checks at the kitchen table, evenings, after the kids are upstairs. Now you think to yourself, "I Could Never."

Here's a picture of you, younger then, in soft afternoon light, and you are driving her old Ford pickup truck with the windows down; she took the picture on a disposable camera, and you are looking at her without looking at her, laughing in the corners of your mouth, freshly in love and not yet aware of the import those small smiles, in those old pictures, will have ten years hence.

Once and again now, you sit down with a notebook again, you put on music--the good music that makes you feel young and old at once--you scribble out a few pages, you wonder if it's any good, if she'll think it's any good still.

And even if she doesn't... Even if she doesn't, you thank God that He gave you a clutch of chipper sons in the back seat of the minivan, who ask you questions about the world that you have forgotten to ask anymore; for a baby who is all feet-pajamas and lopsided smiles; and you thank God that whether she thinks your prose is any good anymore or no, you still are crazy in love with that black-haired beauty from all those years ago.