A crack in the present with a glimpse of my past

Today is Friday. My client, his mother and his girl-friend/financee are waiting in the lobby of my offices. I am sitting here in front of my computer awaiting a phone call from the assistant district attorney.

The phone rang a few moments ago and it was one of the realtors for the closing which was supposed to happen today. I had to discuss with her the fact that it was not closing today and would probably close on Monday or Tuesday of next week.

The brain is a strange thing, and perhaps mine is stranger than most. For some, unknown reason, I just had a brief memory of my previous life in Huntsville, Alabama flash through my mind. For just a second, I could smell and see a dark, rainy afternoon in Summer, on the sidewalk in a suburban shopping plaza on the outskirts of Huntsville, in 1965. I could witness the dark clouds hovering above us and feel the humidity as it wrapped around me in a precursor to rain. The concrete was clean and hard on my tennis-shoed feet and I could sense my brother and mother around me, but they weren't in my vision.

The odd thing is that the little aches and burdensome heaviness of my fifty years were not felt for the moment, and I really felt like I was eight again. The years and the pounds had melted magically away and I felt like all of my future was ahead of me, rather than only half of it. The sense of youth was so palpable that the promise of life ahead of me was not just a promise but a present reality. An unforeseen, unsensed future reality in the present.

Now it is gone. I sit in front of my computer and jam heavily on the keys. My shoulders ache from the stress of my body drooping down towards the center of the earth, as if magnetized towards the core. If I stood up and walked I would feel the sharp knives in my knees cutting through the years of torquing my knees one way or another, reaching for running backs or chasing a toddler. Stressed by the extra pounds around my abdomen. Just thinking about my shoulders, exacerbates the feelings in my neck and shoulders. Age. Fun.

But why did Huntsville creep through my mind? I consider the Huntsville of 1965. The somnolent village along the Tennessee River in Northern Alabama, surrounded by cotton fields and Monte Sano are almost gone, replaced by the world of Space Exploration and missiles. Werner Von Braun, a rocket scientist, plucked from Germany at the end of World War II and sent to live and work in this little Southern town, is the unofficial king of Huntsville. He appears at school open houses and Fourth of July parades. Everything is brand new and modern. My school is new, my home and the subdivision in which it is located are brand new. The designs are so modern, so different from the little frame houses in which the rest of my family live.

The school age boys in my neighborhood play in the houses under construction after the construction crews go home at night or run through the cotton fields at the end of our road, picking cotton bolls like mad boll weevils in the summer sunshine. Nothing is more wonderful than a large pile of dirt in someone's yard, a place for the imagination to see battlefields and constructions sites (what irony) or plantations along the Tennessee River. Only the call for supper and the inevitable shower from a garden hose before we enter the house with all that dirt, can stop our ramblings.

This time living in Huntsville was only a short respite between the Indianapolis of my toddler years and the rest of my life in Georgia. Everything about it was a midpoint. I remember shopping for groceries in an old country store a couple of miles from home and eating pork barbecue in a joint on the edge of town, the walls covered with calendars decorated with hunting scenes or the latest team from Tuscaloosa or Auburn. I remember my bus driver loudly singing country songs to us as we pulled into the drive for our elementary school. And I remember the "whites-only" pool in which I learned how to swim and the exotic vegetables at the farmer's market, varieties of which I had never heard until we came down South and inspected nature's bounty up close.

But I also remember attending school programs at Redstone Arsenal and seeing the missiles and rockets and cannons, which were all the most current techology, pointed away from Huntsville and Alabama and toward the world and beyond. I see my dad representing the brand new computers of IBM in his suit, white shirt and tie. I remember feeling the earth shake and hearing the windows rattle as NASA tested the Saturn rocket boosters which would lead man to walk on the moon. I remember looking out my window at night, trying to catch a glimpse of one of the astronauts as they sailed overhead.

So everything was old and antique and a sleepy reminder of earlier times, but also restless, brand new, vibrant and promising of the Future. Ray Bradbury had come to live with Truman Copote and the world of To Kill a Mockingbird. That was Huntsville, Alabama in 1965.