(Blogger's
note: This is the original version of what the FW Weekly
published last week.)
When
I was a child back in the sixties, summer in Houston's suburbs was
endless and sometimes dangerous. Boredom, you see, had not yet been
invented. We did not have the ability then to store thousands of
songs or have inventions that regurgitated those songs with all the
clarity of a gramophone. We did not yet have at our fingertips
hundreds of TV stations playing nonstop reruns. And we did not
possess cellphones that took really, really bad pictures. Yet our
lives were still worth living, believe it or not.
One
languid summer afternoon, when my father was at work and my mother
had taken to bed for the duration, as we used to say, with strict
instructions that we not wake her unless we were pretty damn sure St.
John of Patmos' Revelation was being fulfilled and Jesus
Christ himself was returning robed in clouds of glory to separate
the sheep from the goats, I got an idea.
I
made up my mind to wire some old radios together. We had a pile of
them, rectangular, Bauhaus-like, boxy white, black, or brown clock
radios with knobs and clock hands, total anachronisms now. Today's
high-tech whizzes wouldn't be able to turn one on, let alone tell
time.
Being
an “imaginative” child, which meant that I had already spun a
huge number of tall tales to get me out or, more often, into of all
sorts of jams, I thought maybe if I could wire all the radios
together I could listen in on a conversation between some of
Houston's Finest chasing beer-bellied robbers with raccoon masks and
stripped tees or perhaps the Secret Service with their cool
sunglasses and pockets brimming with Man from U.N.C.L.E. gadgets
was even now eying balconies for hidden assassins nearby, or maybe
some Martians were orbiting right above sprawling Houston, searching
in vain for leaders to be taken to who would not be nonplussed by
their green skin, multiple antennae, and oddly-shaped heads.
I
found the requisite number of old radios, took out the backs of them,
and after finding some spare wire and wire cutters, I wired them all
together. Then came the moment of truth. I plugged one in, and
immediately all the electricity in the house went out.
Now
you need to remember that this was summer in Texas, well, in Houston,
Texas, where life as we know it was impossible before freon was
invented. Before freon made air-conditioned life possible only a few
could survive Houston's subtropical sauna-bath-like annual summer
meltdowns.
As
far as I knew, the whole city had gone dark and all that wonderful
life-giving cool air had stopped, too.
At
the Astrodome, the Eighth Wonder of the World, the National League's
perennial doormats, the (Dis)Astros, playing a day game with no
natural light, were totally blacked out right after Don Wilson threw
a strikeout and radio announcer Loel Passe had only time to say, “He
breeeeezed him, one more . . .”
At the Medical Center, Michael
DeBakey was stopped in mid-cut, his sharpened scalpel frozen above
someone's sternum; Mission Control, just a few miles to the south,
was going dark just as a Gemini astronaut was floating into space;
and all over the city technicolor movies were stopped in mid-scenes.
For all I knew, all because of my foolishness, riots in cinemas were
now occurring, angry patrons with slick backed hair and tight Levis
were throwing spare Milk Duds, popcorn, and Goobers at ducking ushers
while white screens were being ripped apart by a colorful fusillade
of Dots as hard as rocks.
Since
I had been raised the right way, incredible spasms of guilt began to
shoot through my very soul. But suddenly all my guilt disappeared to
be replaced by my second most common emotion, fear. I heard my
father's footsteps outside my door. I knew it was his steps. His
heavy patent leather footfalls of his Florshiem wingtips were by then
etched into my young brain.
I
also knew that I was or soon would be dead because his belt and I
would become one. But something truly amazing happened before I was
read my last rites. My dad came in my room still dressed for work,
though his tie now was loose and his suit rumpled. He didn't say
anything. He didn't need to. He just looked at me askance, his thick
eyebrows making two question marks, my signal that I needed to answer
and PDQ.
I'm ashamed to say it, but I hadn't the time for an elaborate lie, so
I was forced against my usual practice to stick with the truth. I
told him everything, and the truly weird thing was that he thought it
was just hilarious. He kept asking me over and over to tell him why I
wanted to wire the radios together. He loved the part about the
Martians.
I
looked at my dad's face turning red from laughter and wondered if the
scorching Houston sun had baked his brains or maybe being stuck in
the endless traffic of the Gulf Freeway had made any diversion funny,
even his only son causing a massive blackout.
Whatever
the reason was for his unusual forbearance, he escorted me out to the
backyard to show me the fuse box. He then educated me on the ins and
out of fuses, an important lesson, but more importantly I learned
that day a bit about patience and compassion.
At
56, I am all-too aware of my own failings – that I have not always
measured up to my father's example. Even so, that day he left me an
important standard. That though I had done something potentially
dangerous and certainly dumb as a box of rocks, my father took pity
on my young self as I confessed to him the honest truth. Truly it's
a wonder he could hear me; my knees were knocking so much.
