—
As mentioned, I am vast, unlimited in the range and delicacy of my voice, unrestrained in love, rapid in apprehension, skillful in motion, capable, equally, of traversing, within a few seconds’ time, a mile or ten thousand miles.
So it was no effort at all for me to attain great height and speed east by northeast through the remainder of Texas, then through Oklahoma, Missouri, and Illinois, arriving, in the span of a single breath, at the border of lovely Indiana, commencing, then, to sail out along and above the familiar Wabash, veering eastward where it narrowed and met the Patoka, then following the Patoka (thin, brown, laced with fishing sheds, choppy and white with night-swells) to the village of Stanley.
Gosh, I barely recognized the place.
I hung there above it, taking stock of the many ways in which it had changed.
Hat factory: gone.
River: dammed at its westernmost end.
New mall (Chesterfield Commons): vanished entirely.
The hill down which Lloyd and pals had mud-sledded was still a hill but the Sinclairs’ rental was gone and that whole area over there was now this ugly new subdivision where three floorplans just repeated and repeated and repeated (Cape Cod/ranch/larger Cape Cod), the whole god-awful mess running out west as far as Union and as far east as Brewer’s Launch Lane.
At that wide bend in Sherwood Ave., among that row of scrawny pines was: no Jardine’s.
Sherwood Ave. itself: thrice-widened.
That row of scrawny pines: sacrificed in the widening.
It might have been a different town altogether. If not for the baseball field at St. Thomas Aquinas and the alley behind it, which ran (as always) due west, past Turner Park, I never would have been able to find Crowne Street, where our dear little duplex was.
Inside of which Lloyd and I had been a total love match.
So hot to trot.
All that summer.
Summer of ’76.
That bicentennial summer.
The summer before my untimely—
Wait.
What?
Where was “duplex”? The entire length of “Crowne Street,” including “laundromat,” was now an ugly, block-long “Regional Data Center.”
Whatever that was!
Lloyd, Lloyd, I thought, where are you, dear? Young, beautiful, tan, broad-shouldered, lifting up the couch with one hand when drunk, just to show me that you could? Dancing around the kitchen, in “cop pants,” no shirt, to “Heartsfield” or “Allman Brothers,” sitting patiently beside me as we colored in,with those big honker marker-pens, “Fantasy Forest,” the paint-by-number your mother gave us the day we got engaged.
Speaking of Shirley, Lloyd’s mother, Iwhiskedat once to “Shirley’s house,” i.e., the home of my “mom-in-law,” i.e., Lloyd’s mother, Shirley.
Butwhiskingthoroughly around inside, found: no Shirley, and all the furniture new and different, kind of huge, rather “mod,” and a young couple was in there and some new kind of music was blaring, all wonks and whistles like “robot” might make, in a kitchen that was missing one wall and had gained another, and they were happy, with no memory of any Shirley whatsoever, as they had bought the house not from her, but from the Verhagens, Tom and Kate.
Up in the attic, behind a concealing rafter, I found the one and only item in the place that had the slightest thing to do with me: a box, and inside it, my wedding dress, wrapped in tissue paper, and written on the box, in my handwriting (!), were the words: “J&L wedding, 1975,” plus a cartoon I’d drawn of two smiling hearts holding hands.
That had been such a great day.
Everyone so happy for us and all.
There in “clearing” in “Yankee Woods.”
