Old Home Familiar Pt. I

A vigorous, opposing wind blew, bending against the growing, green-row slopes. The hills curved with perfect fields and grasses, moving with a turbulent midday dance of bright green jubilation to the great white sun. Cottonball cream clouds with the baby blue abyss threw patches of shade and sun alike onto the waving slopes.

I rode against the sharp piercing air, a bandana over my ears to silence its howl, the brim of my hat tugged down and my glasses on to keep my eyes from drying. Slowly and constantly moving west, I inched for hours into the wind. Everything turned monotonous. My eyes settled to the asphalt streaming immediately before me. But slowly, unconsciously, the black road faded from vision. My mind began to wind with ecstatic, vibrant dreams of the amber evening ahead, and I forgot where I was.

Straight ahead, Sioux Falls: my old home familiar. Just out town past the white water tower and beyond the dusty line of railroad tracks to the dirt road, opening on glowing stretches of fields where from far off piqued does watch intensely the billowing dust of the road dispense, and turning left down the drive - there the blue house of all my old friends from golden old high school days seeming so far away and so long passed. These dear delicate images stirred up in me with an imminent sense of proximity while a blur of Iowan pavement dragged on, ineffectually. I'd get rolling papers and tobacco, and off to the ice cream shop for my sweet pint of coffee-brown chocolate ice cream in a big Styrofoam cup, to the grocery store's great big beer room to deliberate over a while, and then seeing all of my beloved people of that town, to clink frothy beers round a rollicking front-yard fire hearing all about their lives of the past year.

Looking up I recognized the rolls of hills ahead and was pulled from my daydream. I was tired but most of the day had escaped without notice and knowing I was near was a relief. The first veil of buildings passed me and the town grew thicker. The place returned to me like a pair of lost shoes, worn in, long forgotten, but found afresh and slipping me into it, comfortable and perfect. Being in town gave me a yearning for a cigarette. I bounced from store to store looking for tobacco, and at the third shop and I'd found a packet. On the hot concrete outside the store I sat down, sore, aching and wind-beaten. Pedestrians striding by, seeing me and my bike, went without acknowledging or shot me with sharp eyes of contempt. I didn't care. I rolled a cig and tried to call Jeremy, but he didn't pick up so I started to move across town toward the house.

On the south side I stopped at a restaurant for tater tots and spicy cheese. Sitting on the curb outside a man came by and handed me a folded up $10 bill. Flabbergasted, I said thanks and then tried again at calling Jeremy.

He answered, “Nathaniel Benjamin!”

I told him I'd got to town and was eating at Cliff and 57^th.

“No you're not. Where? Do you see me? In a red truck.”

I looked around and I actually did see him, in a red truck idling at the red light. He turned and pulled through an adjacent parking lot, then drove up jolting to a halt at my curb. Biggest town I'd been in in what seemed to me a long while, yet, out of the whole preoccupied place there he stood before me. We caught up briefly. He was just off work and had half a pizza which he took out, offered me a slice, and then went straight to perusing my bicycle and its, what were to him, strange furnishings. He did this a good while then with a “See ya there,” drove off to meet me at the house.

I went straight to it and knocked on the front door. Drew opened it up, “Thanny! How've you been?” That was how I'd been known in those old days. In the main room Jonah was sleeping on the couch, and dragged himself slowly to waking. Those two lived reversed days, staying up through the night to count their cards at the new casino complex on the brim of town, or else kept up by video games in a dry-eyed stupor, tethered to the blinking television into drowsy dawn.

The ancient golden retriever, Buddy, lazily roamed the carpet. He stopped and looked at me a moment with his dull, far-removed eyes of a sage and flapped his tail a little. Then he collapsed onto a deliberately chosen patch of carpet to doze, his big tired body perpetually devoid of energy. Jeremy came down the stairs, stepped around the dog and told me Broeks was on his way.

I followed Jeremy through the garage and around to the backyard to let out his black Labrador, Diesel, from the chain link kennel. Last I was here this had housed three pet ducks, not a dog, but they'd apparently escaped or more likely been cooked up and eaten. Diesel bounded off into the grass, sniffing and biting at the little wild flowers. He was a burly black hunting dog bred and intended for fetching and listening. The South Dakota wilderness is one only experienced with a rifle or a fishing pole.

Broeks arrived. “Are you reading anything right now?” he asked me, then also if I'd searched through the bookmobile yet. We always exchanged our recent discoveries, musical or literary, but now I didn't know what he meant. “That bus out back is stuffed full with dusty books.” I'd never known.

We walked over the grass to the faded red bus on the edge of the property, its tires deeply entrenched in the ground. “Sioux Falls Public Library Bookmobile” was traced on its sides in worn red. Behind the springy door and up the steps hung the stagnant, musty air of a vault. Broeks eyed the dim book spines all around us, “It's all the landlord's, but I've come in plenty of times and taken stuff out. He'll never read 'em anyway. It's been back here for eternity.” Books of all kinds filled the shelf walls, or stood in precarious piles on the front seats and floor, mingled among boxes of old analogue records in paper sleeves. War histories, girths of fiction, politics collections, archives of Nat Geo arching back to the sixties, Socrates dialogues, intros to archeology, astronomy, economics, elementary school texts, & everything else. A film of dust had settled on all upward faces, burning auburn in the angular sunlight bent through the round rear window. I took five novels. I was hauling too many books around as it was.


More pictures on Facebook: Albums 1, 2, & 3.