June 1947: A Story

Posted on June 22, 2013 by savi0043

The story which is titled ‘June 1947: A Story ‘, is a story that features of a boy of ten years of age and his father and the introspections, unusual observations and experiences that each encounter. The setting for the narrative is a small town located near a mining camp rural, inland Florida, during the early summer of 1947.The emphasis of the story is not concerned with contrivances of plot, or suspense, or interpersonal melodrama. Instead, the narrative focuses on an unusual thought experiment had by the main protagonist named Johnny, and the theme of fronteirs, as well as the themes of travel and the passage of time.

June 1947: A Story
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jason_D_Leary]Jason D Leary

JUNE 1947

June had finally come again to the small, inland Florida town, a town with wide porches, leafy green oaks offering meagre gifts of shade, and ponds: fed by rainwater and busy with fish.

Now the slow and almost forgotten town was full of odd rumblings: the noise of cars and trucks: noisy, too damn noisy. Of course it was only 1947, and so, on June evenings, you could still hear the crickets.

Today, Johnny had purchased a magazine–a sort of comic book–from Jim Cartwright’s Pipe and Tobacco Store. His sack also held a goodly helping of black jellybeans, two green gumdrops, and a single tootsie roll. He had been saving up the weekly allowance he got by watering the yard of Old Man Ned Mackenzie: a long- time friend of his father, for just that purpose. Papa recently returned from visiting kinfolk in Butler County, Pennsylvania (Concord Township and Oak Hills off in the Western reaches of the state), and so a trip to Jim Cartwright’s store for staples was long overdue.

The Second Great War had already been over for two long years now, and summer was once again at hand. Johnny’s father: Lee drove the jalopy down State Road 22, the road built just the year before- the very year after the end of the war. How different it seemed. The very horizon looked quite different from the way it had looked before, yet there was still the same Eastern sky; a vestige of the manner in which the sky once looked when the orange clay road still led its trucks and other four-wheeled stragglers through a ten-mile trek flanked by hills of sugar sand, orange groves, canebrake, and wet prairie to a town by an enormous lake. The town consisted of a train depot, a large general store, a mining camp, cattle farms, and little else.

Lee groped for the right words to express such nostalgic thoughts, and although he lacked the poetic words to describe fully the trace of the segment of land and sky paired together, which held something of the old shape as it converged toward the vanishing point, he felt a wistful fullness in his heart. During the long drive, he felt hard-pressed to put into words the feelings fostered by the miles and miles of blue sky, the ever- present whirr of the wind and rumble of the road: giddy, tired feelings.

Tonight, Lee would dream of the earlier road: the one of orange clay, and he would see it throughout the night (or the image of the road) move around a circle of landscape, repositioning itself like a minute hand around the circle of an enormous clock.

Now Johnny looked at the cover of ‘Amazing Tales’ and marvelled. The cover art featured a rocket-ship in vertical flight, heading towards Mars.The day-glo scarlets and nearly Technicolor blues, the faded, velvety black of space and the salt white of the stars, the reluctant silver of the rocket-ship, all seemed almost as otherworldly as the future they portended.

What would it be like to go into that place they were calling ‘outer space’? Johnny felt a keening in his bones. The curiosity welled up in him like unto the sort of limerence one feels when eating a delightful dessert tinged with nutmeg; an upwelling of a mood: a mood like unto a gesture of mind that is somewhere trying to find its moorings, somewhere between a hint of satiety, and anticipation still glowing.

There would be no mosquitoes there to buzz in one’s ear with that fetid, warm, muffled, grating, humid sound. No mosquitoes there, as in Florida, to bite and cause that hideous and prosaic sensation called itching.

Now, mind you, Johnny, at that tender age, was not verbose and, hence, would not have used all those florid adjectives. Nonetheless, Johnny hated itching, hated the buzzing sound that mosquitoes made in his ears, and, therefore, hated mosquitoes.So his pining for an outer space where there were no mosquitoes was no lie, nor was it an exaggeration.

Furthermore, way up yonder, where the rockets would go, there would also be no middle- aged men and women gossiping about other people (like some do in town).

But what *would* be there? Johnny stared at the cover of the magazine. He stared and stared, and stared some more.

Johnny did what some today call meta-thinking. He reflected on the very act of trying to imagine what one would see in outer space, and exactly how one would even be able to see! At school, in the science classroom, there was a terrarium: a long rectangle of glass, with dirt and plants within, that was home to a hamster. The hamster spent its whole life inside that terrarium.

Johnny, on that day, had conducted the thought experiment of trying to imagine a man who had somehow been raised in a terrarium (albeit the terrarium would be larger than the one that harbored the hamster). Suppose the man who lived in the terrarium had all his physical needs met: adequate food, water, a fan to keep him cool in summer, blankets to keep him warm in winter, a cozy bed, devices for exercise, a toilet.

Now suppose that man had visitors who periodically came into the terrarium to visit him, offering nurture and comfort, and even teaching him various skills. Suppose the terrarium had (on its vast glass surface) portals of tubular openings (Johnny didn’t yet know that fancy phrase, but that’s what he meant) which (with the right tinkering by outsiders) could function like chimneys, replete with lids that opened from the outside, where visitors could slide down, like old Father Christmas, minus the red cap and the scent of reindeer on warm mittens.

If one day, the man, who came of age in a terrarium, and who had looked out of its near transparent walls at the outside, and seen many figures (some which tended to stand still and others which came and went) and who had mistaken the horizontal line, located at the top of the terrarium, for the horizon of the place where all of what -is: *is*, were to be taken outside the terrarium and, at long last, allowed to walk around and walk further (even eventually allowed to walk further still so that he walked outside the room and, then, even outside the building that contained the terrarium), then, wouldn’t the man from the terrarium find that the places outside didn’t quite match the look of the way things lay from inside the terrarium?

Johnny pondered.

There was another question which Johnny considered. Johnny wondered when the government would get the rocket ships in gear so that people could go off to those far away, strange places: Mars and Mercury, and also planets around other stars. Johnny thought of a random date some years off. Would people get in rocket ships and go to those places in 1955? June 1955 was only eight years away. Couldn’t the people in the rocket ships have gotten to those far off places by then?

1955! Johnny wondered: what would happen by then.? Surely the scientists would be up to something big by then. What about… Johnny groped for the names of far off years and months… June 1985?

Surely the men with the rocket ships would, by then, have seen lots of moons, comets, planets,and who knows what else, by June of 1985!

He reached for ciphers again: such being a rather simple exercise in getting the feel of large temporal “distances” and the adding up of an approximate pile of anticipations. What about 1992?

Johnny’s exercise in anticipation, with raw anticipation itself as fuel for an attempt at imagination (despite imagination being not much of a vehicle yet) was quickly starting to run aground. Johnny wished 1992 would arrive soon so he could stop being tantalized, and see what would be then a “now”, then.

Last weekend at the revival meeting, hosted at the Church of the Nazarene (a revival to which he and his father had been invited by Papa’s friend and fellow union member Clarence “Grady” Timdale), a visiting preacher named Vernon had some rousing words for the congregation, spoken with a slightly practiced note of fervor.

“Friends, they’re going to build a new highway up in the county just north of here. There’s a state senator from the district, and he’s been talkin’ it in up, and I heard it with my own two ears just last week. Another ten years… another twenty years… another fifty years… and then where will we be? (Pauses ever so briefly in meditative silence) They’re gonna build a lot of highways… they’re gonna build a lot of fancy streetlights and toll bridges, and plow that asphalt and concrete through the swampland from now to the Twelfth of Never. Where they goin’ with their fast automobiles and their jet airplanes? Where do they think they can get to by goin so fast? They won’t even know that they was here –as fast as they are goin’. They wont even know we was here. They won’t know and they won’t care.” (The preacher pauses again, as if somehow stricken with a sudden shyness at the strange, yet keenly insightful, words pouring out of his mouth ).

“They won’t care about the poor man who saved the city… they won’t care about all our labor under the sun. But I know someone who does! And I know that you care, ladies and gentlemen! I know that you Godfearin’, upright people who come out and slosh through the mud and rain to come to an old sawdust tent to hear an old hack like me trying to make our church and our lives count for somethin’ more than money, and somethin’ more than famous movie stars, and gossip, or who’s got the preacher with the biggest honkin’ car, or who’s the preacher with the biggest gold watch in all of this here Land of Liberty. I know you care!!!! I know somebody cares! ”

A few tentative, yet sparky, Amens and, then, with the help of a fat, weathered woman standing upright at the back of the tent, still more Amens and Hallelujahs are soon shouted, until the whole tent explodes into a volley of tambourines and then a quick, steady clatter of clapping hands.

Now, it is has been yet another week since Johnny took home the copy of ‘Amazing Tales,’ It has been two weeks since he and Papa heard Vernon (the preacher in the tent) give the sermon.

Tonight, the slow, steady Florida rain falls lightly on the tin roof of the house where Papa sleeps, and Mama feeds the canary, and writes long important letters to congressmen about how there ought to be a decent hospital in the mining town (where there aren’t any women trained to be midwives).

Lee dreams yet again, all night long, of the orange clay road that slowly goes round and round a circle of land, like the minute hand on a clock.

Johnny lays in bed but finds no sleep tonight. He thinks again and again of rocket ships (even visualizes them in great detail) but does not feel he can, for the life of him, come up with anything nearly vivid enough (in the way of imaginings) as to what they will truly find. He keenly wants to *know* specifically what they will find. They’re going to find something one day… somethin’ new.

1992… Johnny decides.

And then:… something more.

Another fifty years past then… and something more than mosquitoes… and concrete… and asphalt… and fast cars…

‘But I know someone who cares,’ the tent preacher said.

Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?June-1947:-A-Story&id=7467352] June 1947: A Story