Promise at the end of rain

20Feb08

“We’re probably the only Starbucks in the United States,” she started to tell the customer with unusual emphasis on our country’s name, “that doesn’t have wireless….”  She continued to explain what they were doing to deal with that, but I tuned out.

Last summer I learned that this Starbucks, in Kerrville, Texas, heart of the Hill Country, didn’t have wireless because of Starbucks’ exclusive arrangement to provide same through t-mobile, which doesn’t have towers here.  I read recently, though, since Howard Schultz came back on board that Starbucks is going to offer wireless now also through AT&T.  This may bring relief to the customer in the first sentence.  As for me, I purchased a wireless card (Verizon) last summer and I have no problems getting signals throughout the Hill Country.

I must say also, as a momentary digression, that Starbucks’ CEO has finally brought nominy (opposite of “ignominy”) to the name Howard, which has sat on the front of my surname for almost 45 years like a mustard stain on the lapel of a blue blazer.  Howard Cosell, Howard Stern, Howard the Duck (which my future brother-in-law invoked when he first heard the Lovely K was dating a man with this name).  It’s not like any of them are axe-murderers, but I wasn’t convinced it was a name that I wanted to pass along to my progeny.  My father went by Frank, his and my middle name.  So did his father, I believe.  The madness had to stop with my first born son, Carter, whom my mother wanted K and me to name Howard Frank F—– the fifth (V), and nickname him Quint.

“No, mom, I think we’re going with Carter.”

“Well I’m calling him Quint anyway.”

OK.

Mom was born during the Depression, lived through a hurricane that almost killed her mother and younger sister when a brick wall collapsed on their car while it was parked in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, killing another passenger; saw her father try to kill himself; saw her husband succeed in doing so; and she damn well would do what she wanted thank you very much.

She didn’t call him Quint; she called him Carter, but that was by choice, I’m sure.  Carter, at age 14 months, nicknamed her “Mina.”  How he got that, we don’t know.  How do any kids come up with the names and words that they do.  They derive them from some magical database of fantastical and lyrical letter-patterns, the same imaginary place from which Adam drew out words like “hippopotamus,” “tulip,” and “banana.”  K taught him sign language when he was less than a year.  He knew how to say, “more,” “up,” “food,” and “video/TV”.  What more could a one-year-old need?

Bennett was around 11 months old when we visited Mina in her New York City apartment; we were living in Massachusetts at the time.  He crawled on her bed as she lay there with less than three months before the brain cancer killed her.  She seemed a little put out with the infant’s behavior, but that was probably half the disease talking and half her Brahmin sensibilities.  Teak never met her, neither of course did he meet my father.  Now, he spends time around Grandaddy and Memaw and knows them and can laugh and dance in their house here in Kerrville.  My parents are photos to him and to Bennett, and increasingly to Carter, whose memories of them will never be refreshed with new ones to underscore the older ones.  Mom’s and Dad’s personalities are static, two-dimensional and fading like the color on the photos themselves.  I find myself not telling stories about those years to the boys.  It has little to do with my parents and everything to do with me.

It is more that my memory of life in those years – while fine and safe and punctuated by laughter – was a grey day that passed slowly, leading to the sunlight of now.  Why go into detail about how overcast the sky is, how it looks like rain, how it rained yesterday, how perhaps it will rain today.  Maybe, maybe not.  How it looks like rain tomorrow.  Maybe just a drizzle, but bring your umbrella.  The clouds were always present, and I didn’t know it until the sun broke through and exposed what needed to be purified in the rays from that heavenly body.

Now.  Now there is sun and there is no need for umbrellas, even when it pours, because the rain is like a balm that washes and cleanses.  It does not oppress as it did before.  Before, the world was a grey treeless street like the photos of Communist East Germany; now it is an English garden after a summer shower.  Colors burst, and music is implicit.

There is a sun, a morning star, which was always there before but which I couldn’t see for the clouds and rain.  Now I can see the sun – this morning star - because it has appeared, much to my surprise.  So how can I go back?  And why would I?  Regardless of how seemingly joyful things might have been, how can I long for memories from before then, before the sun, before that morning star?  It was all grey then.  It is all color now.

Always.  Even when it rains.

photo:  bjearwicke

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