| 1. The bare plot | 2. The longer story | |
| When I was a boy | A Saturday summer night in Pike Run Township, | |
| we read science fiction, | Pennsylvania, near the Monongahela: | |
| I and my father; | my father; my uncle Ollie, a coal miner | |
| we lived on two spaceships, | (dying of black lung--nobody knows yet); | |
| two different planets: | a boy, ten years old. Talking science fiction | |
| dangerous aliens. | on the porch, in two swings. The husbands smoke | |
| Mother read mysteries. | Lucky Strikes, which Mean Fine Tobacco, | |
| which smell of raisins. The boy's time machine | ||
| is powered by cellophane, only big enough | ||
| to send small messages out on the tide of time | ||
| from his desert planet. My father, empassioned, | ||
| explains that when you read you must see, | ||
| feel, and taste, "taste the chocolate ice cream" | ||
| the author described. What's threatening in this | ||
| first lesson in literature, from a smart man | ||
| thwarted? Small messages. LS/MFT. Save me. | ||
| I went to college, | Where is my mother in this picture? It is her | |
| became a detective | house: that is, she was born in it, suffered | |
| story fanatic, | typhoid fever in it ("my belly was black-and-blue | |
| I read them by series | and I lost all my hair"), fought in it with her | |
| where anyone can die | mother and her sister, and left them in it | |
| but the detective. | to go to college, study chemistry, get work | |
| Then my father died. | at American Steel & Wire during the war, and now | |
| the three of them, in the kitchen, wash the dishes, | ||
| and my grandfather, the retired machinist | ||
| with no spittoon next to his basement lathe | ||
| though machinists (and chemists) all chew tobacco, | ||
| is dying in bed upstairs, his larynx missing. | ||
| The Cleveland Clinic taught him to croak some words | ||
| the summer before. He writes on a Magic Slate. | ||
| My father and I are visiting, with my mother, | ||
| from Cleveland, where we live. A thwarted woman. | ||
| Freed, my mother | My mother does not read science fiction. She read | |
| escaped to Samoa, | Horatio Alger, Billy Whiskers, Five Little Peppers, | |
| Pakistan, China. | in her sickbed. When her father was too ill to read | |
| When she's home she reads | he gave me his Scientific Americans. | |
| autobiographies. | I found his Home Study Guides: to Logarithms, | |
| I read mathematics | Use of the Slide Rule, Reinforced Concrete. | |
| and Erle Stanley Gardner. | He is an inventor, but he holds no patents, | |
| cannot make a time machine; and I have lost mine, | ||
| I cannot reach back, or answer the small message | ||
| unless time is a closed curve (knot untying itself | ||
| in the fourth dimension) and this flashlight I wave | ||
| at the night sky of winter (which swallows it) | ||
| is the miner's headlamp, is the cobalt treatment, | ||
| is the sun through the blue square of cobalt glass | ||
| the day of the eclipse--too bright to look at | ||
| long, too bright not to see with my eyes closed. |