"What I most remember about my grandmother were those slow summer days when she and I would walk for miles on a country road. She was a one room school teacher and a devout member of the Audubon Society and when we would see a bird she would stop and tell me every little thing about it. She could never know just how much birds would play a role throughout my life."
A true dream as best as I could recall it.
By No Sweat - November 23, 1963
The thirteen year old Kentucky boy in the eighth grade that lived in the droll apartment by the Kentucky River and flew racing pigeons and played starting forward on his graded school basketball team called "THE GOLDEN EAGLES" was having a quite a strange dream.
And then he suddenly awoke to wipe those tears that he had been crying.
Its wonderful to be awake and know you are awake, or is it?.
The dream that the boy was having was strangely wrapped in the color of green; it was a dream involving a green river that was so very verdant and so were the trees along her banks; those trees seemed sad, leaning out and trying to shake hands with the other trees on the other side; they were all shades of green with gold highlights.
Can it be August in Kentucky, July in Georgia, November in Texas and October in the Argonne forest at the same time?
Can it be 1963 in 1918?
What roamed in the soul of that boy's sleep?
Could the boy somehow be on the Kentucky River and on the sixth floor of a Texas school depository book building and in a ravine in the Argonne forest and in a Macon, Georgia peach orchard and playing basketball against his rivals, the Ravenna Blue Devils, all at the same time?
The dream was who he was.
In his dream everything was possible.
Inside and outside the boy's dream he was simply there.
It wasn't understandable.
But then.
Midnight.
Tick tock.
A Dallas, Texas window sill.
Thursday then Friday.
What was so special about another day?
For the pair of November 22-23, 1963 common pigeons that were roosting so still on the sixth floor window sill of the Dallas school depository book building there was no Thursday or Friday. Why humans divided the days of the week was beyond those two pigeons, one was a sooty black velvet cock and the other, a dull blue bar hen with orange eyes. Humans could look in a mirror and recognize themselves. And these pigeons, well, they were one of the very few other creatures that could do the same. Somehow knowing you existed was more important to them than knowing when or why.
In the boy's dream, he was releasing a homing pigeon along the Kentucky River, watching it fly upwards beyond the haphazard platforms made of sticks, twigs and reeds, writhing and dancing in the light wind, patterned splotched images, unkempt great blue heron nests protruding so grey from the highest and most exposed limbs of three sycamores. In this strange dream the boy's Robert Mitchum looking father told him to climb up in the back of his big fruit truck and count the wood crates full of peaches that the sweating, black pickers were lined up and bringing in from the vast orchard field. The boy itched from the peach fuzz and began stacking the crates. At the same time, somehow, the boy was running and guarding another forward that was on the basketball floor; it was an important game against his arch rivals and the new Converse tennis shoes that he was wearing were squeaking at every cut; that other eighth grader that he was assigned to guard was stronger than him but not as fast. The boy in his new shoes felt faster than his best racing pigeon. Oddly, the other boy had been born on the same day as him. Actually, on the same minute and almost in the same room. Because of that there had always been war.
In this dream there was this blue bar owning the most desperate of expression that suddenly appeared and flew upward towards the grey sky and then three shots signaled. The pigeon fluttered back down. This bird was his last of three pigeons; it was the boy's very best Heitzman Sion. The WW! German snipers now in the dream had managed to shoot the other two pigeons The blue bar was the boy's last hope to save his lost patrol that happened to be his school classmates as he along with his comrades in arms were surrounded by the Germans and the boy's own artillery was unknowingly killing everyone around him; The boy picked up his old blue bar with its heavy wattle and eye ceres. The bird gazed outward struggling in his hands not to be held; that poor pigeon owned such a pair of brilliant red and orange and yellow colored encircled eyes with those black spider-webbed veins coming to the pupil; lighting bolts from from a black heaven. One of the pigeon's wings showed destroyed feathers and the pigeon's sharp keel was much bare, you could see a bruised crease; a bare path over its tight, pink skin where the bullet had followed. One of the bird's legs was completely gone and the blood coming from it was hot and deep a purplish red color. And there was that blood smell of iron. The boy knew that pigeons owned the reddest blood in the world because they were the most innocent of all creatures. The boy threw the bird back up through the branches and could see its aluminum tube that was harnessed across its back; inside that tube there was a desperate message from Col. Whitlesey: "WE ARE ALONG ROAD PARALLEL TO 276.4 OUR ARTILLERY IS DROPPING A BARRAGE DIRECTLY ON US. FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE, STOP IT!" For a few moments the blue bar seemed to go nowhere. and then, finding resolve and all that one wing could afford, it neared the great blue heron nests up in the top of the great sycamore tree and disappeared.
One of the heron nests suddenly exploded from the force of one of the bullets and two other bullets " zinged" by so close but missed. By the time more shots were fired the blue bar was gone. It was nearly dark and for a moment everything was hauntingly still. The boy looked onto the river and along the calm surface there were groups of riffles, schools of minnows coming to the surface the way they always did before sunset. Then a heron began to make a sound.that was beyond the boy's imagination; a din of uncivilized noises: skrawking, ex-traneous, ardeid, primordial. There was something vital in the sounds and the boy was spellbound by the way they broke the silence of the universe; To hear the herons converse at roost was to hear the first birds in the world; their sounds were were the coo of a pigeon but made with rocks.
The dream then concentrated on the boy with his father in that hot peach orchard outside Dalton, Georgia. After the the truck was full of crates of peaches the boy told the man who owned the farm, "There's two hundred and thirty seven crates on the truck." The man walked over to the boy's father and got his quarter for each of the crates of peaches. After the back doors on the truck were closed and the vent doors up front were locked open on the trailer the boy climbed up to be inside the cab of the truck to be with the man he adored, his father; Both of them knew there were three hundred crates. They stopped at small place on the side of the road and in the grey light they took a shower, ridding themselves of the horrible peach fuzz. The boy's green and blue eyes looked down at his father's large and scarred hands shifting gears. That stick the boy's father was shifting with became the stick of a heron nest and down the river up in the sky the moon was nearly pink and orange and yellow, all but a ripe peach with no smell.
Danny, the boy's eighth grade classmate and sweet friend, burr hair cutted and blond, so freckled that you could see those million freckles on his scalp, hugged the boy and so did Bill, another of the boy's close friends; Bill had different freckles, fewer and so much larger; Both Danny and Bill thanked the boy for what he had done, saving the entire class. Yes, the blue bar must have made it with the note.
Those freckles were somehow heron nests not up and against the sky but rather on Danny and Bill's faces.
The great blue herons smacked their long beaks together and the beaks turned into hands.
The crowd was clapping and cheering.
The basketball game was so close.
David, the forward that the boy was guarding in the basketball game had the ball and if David made this shot The Ravenna Blue Devils would beat The Irvine Golden Eagles.
The ball hit close but rimmed out.
On the walk back from Ravenna to Irvine the boy's basketball team heard that president Kennedy had been shot. They started running along the sidewalk under the sporadic and spindly shade of so many water maples, some still holding a few stained and golden jagged leaves.
