All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (4 page)

C
HARLES
B
OYER

T
HIS IS KIND OF PERSONAL.
It may get a little syrupy, so watch out. It started as a note to my wife. And then I thought that since some of you might have husbands or wives and might feel the same way, I’d pass it along. I don’t own this story, anyway. Charles Boyer does.

Remember Charles Boyer? Suave, dapper, handsome, graceful. Lover of the most famous and beautiful ladies of the silver screen. That was on camera and in the fan magazines. In real life it was different.

There was only one woman. For forty-four years. His wife, Patricia. Friends said it was a lifelong love affair. Soul mates. They were no less lovers and friends and companions after forty-four years than after the first year.

Then Patricia developed cancer of the liver. And though the doctors told Charles, he could not bear to tell her. And so he sat by her bedside to provide hope and cheer. Day and night for six months. He could not change the inevitable. Nobody could. And Patricia died in his arms. Two days later Charles Boyer was also dead. By his own hand. He said he did not want to live without her.

He said, “Her love was life to me.”

This was no movie. As I said, it’s the real story—Charles Boyer’s story.

It is not for me to pass judgment on how he handled his grief. But it is for me to say that I am touched and comforted in a strange way. Touched by the depth of love behind the apparent sham of Hollywood love life. Comforted to know that a man and woman can love each other that much that long.

I don’t know how I would handle my grief in similar circumstances. I pray I shall never have to stand in his shoes.
(Here comes the personal part—no apologies.)
But there are moments when I look across the room—amid the daily ordinariness of life—and see the person I call my wife and friend and companion. And I understand why Charles Boyer did what he did. It really is possible to love someone that much. I know. I’m certain of it.

R
ACCOONS

T
HIS IS ABOUT LOVE
and a house I once lived in. An elderly lakeside cottage built at the end of the road at the end of the nineteenth century. A summer place for a family who traveled by horse and buggy out from Seattle through deep woods and over steep hills on logging trails. It was wild there, then, and it is wild there still.

The house sat off the ground on bricks, surrounded by thickets of blackberry bushes and morning-glory vines bent on a struggle to the death. And even though it is only minutes, now, from downtown, squirrels, rabbits, feral pussycats, and “things” I never saw but only heard had long established squatters’ rights on the property.

And raccoons. We had raccoons. Big ones. Several.

For reasons known only to God and the hormones of raccoons, they chose to mate underneath my house. Every spring. And for reasons known only to God and the hormones of raccoons, they chose to mate underneath my house at three
A.M.

Until you have experienced raccoons mating underneath your bedroom at three in the morning, you have missed one of life’s more sensational moments. It is an uncommon event, to say the least. If you’ve ever heard cats fighting in the night, you have a clue. Magnify the volume and the intensity by ten. It’s not what you’d call a sensual and erotic sound. More like a three-alarm fire is what it is.

I remember the first time it happened. Since conditions were not really conducive to sleep, I got up. When I say I got up, I mean
I GOT UP.
About three feet. Straight up. Covers and all.

When I had recovered my aplomb and adjusted to the new adrenaline level, I got a flashlight and went outside and peered up under the house. This lady raccoon and her suitor were squared off in a corner, fangs bared, covered with mud and blood, and not looking very sexy at all.

Neither my presence nor the beam of light could override what drove them on. With snarls and barks and screams, the passionate encounter raged on. While I watched, the matter was finally consummated and resolved. They had no shame. What had to be done was done. And they wandered off, in a kind of glazy-eyed stupor, to groom themselves for whatever might come next in the life of a raccoon.

I sat there in the rain, my light still shining into the trysting chamber. And I pondered. Why is it that love and life so often have to be carried forth with so much pain and strain and mess? I ask you, why is that?

I was thinking of my own sweet wife in the bed right above me, and our own noises of conflict mixed with affection. I wondered what the raccoons must conclude from the sounds a husband and wife make at night—the ones that sound like “If-you-really-loved-me-you-would-not-keep-making-such-a-mess-in-the-bathroom,” followed by “OH, YEAH? WELL, LET ME TELL YOU A FEW THINGS . . .”

Why isn’t love easy?

I don’t know.

And the raccoons don’t say.

L
ARRY
W
ALTERS

N
OW LET ME TELL YOU
about Larry Walters, my hero. Walters is a truck driver, thirty-three years old. He is sitting in his lawn chair in his backyard, wishing he could fly. For as long as he could remember, he wanted to go up. To be able to just rise right up in the air and see for a long way. The time, money, education, and opportunity to be a pilot were not his. Hang gliding was too dangerous, and any good place for gliding was too far away. So he spent a lot of summer afternoons sitting in his backyard in his ordinary old aluminum lawn chair—the kind with the webbing and rivets. Just like the one you’ve got in your backyard.

The next chapter in this story is carried by the newspapers and television. There’s old Larry Walters up in the air over Los Angeles. Flying at last. Really getting UP there. Still sitting in his aluminum lawn chair, but it’s hooked on to forty-five helium-filled surplus weather balloons. Larry has a parachute on, a CB radio, a six-pack of beer, some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and a BB gun to pop some of the balloons to come down. And instead of being just a couple of hundred feet over his neighborhood, he shot up eleven thousand feet, right through the approach corridor to the Los Angeles International Airport.

Walters is a taciturn man. When asked by the press why he did it, he said: “You can’t just sit there.” When asked if he was scared, he answered: “Wonderfully so.” When asked if he would do it again, he said: “Nope.” And asked if he was glad that he did it, he grinned from ear to ear and said: “Oh, yes.”

The human race sits in its chair. On the one hand is the message that says there’s nothing left to do. And on the other hand, people like Larry Walters are busy tying balloons to their chairs, directed by dreams and imagination to do their thing.

The human race sits in its chair. On the one hand is the message that the human situation is hopeless. Meanwhile, people like Larry Walters soar upward knowing anything is possible, sending back the message from eleven thousand feet: “I did it, I really did it. I’m FLYING!”

It’s the spirit here that counts. The time may be long, the vehicle may be strange or unexpected. But if the dream is held close to the heart, and imagination is applied to what there is close at hand, everything is still possible.

But wait! Some cynic from the edge of the crowd insists that human beings still
can’t really
fly. Not like birds, anyway. True. But somewhere in some little garage, some maniac with a gleam in his eye is scarfing vitamins and mineral supplements, and practicing flapping his arms faster and faster and faster.

T
HE
T
RUTH
A
BOUT
L
ARRY
W
ALTERS

T
HE
G
REAT
B
ALLOON
C
HAIR
R
IDE
happened in 1982. I first wrote about it that year. And I told Larry’s story for years afterward. Truly, he was a hero to me. As it turned out, some of my facts about Larry and his ride were wrong. And there is a sequel to the story—an ending that is not an ending.

First of all, Larry did not go up to 11,000 feet.

Actually, it was
16,000 feet
. More than three miles up. We know that from the pilots of the TWA and Delta jetliners who found Larry in their airspace.
Sixteen thousand feet. In a lawn chair over Los Angeles.

He did have a seat belt. But he was so excited he forgot to buckle it. The rest of his gear included an altimeter, a compass, flashlight and extra batteries, beef jerky, a California road map, and a first aid kit. This was no spur-of-the-moment event. Larry was prepared.

His glasses fell off on ascent, and he dropped the BB gun he was going to use to pop balloons to control his altitude. He crash-landed into power lines and blacked out a neighborhood.

Larry’s amazing feat did not go unpunished. The FAA cited him for, among other things, “operating a civil aircraft for which there is not currently in effect an airworthiness certificate” and for being in an airport space and not contacting the control tower. Fine: $1,500.

For a while Larry was famous.
The New York Times
. The
Tonight Show
. Letterman. All that. If you want to know all the details, go to
www.markbarry.com
on the Internet. Mr. Barry is the authority on Larry Walters. He has gathered photographs of the launching site, Larry in the air, and the crash site.

Mr. Barry has even located the actual lawn chair, which Larry had given to a neighborhood kid. How I would like to have that chair to sit in. But it’s on its way to the Smithsonian. Besides, Larry would say I should get my own chair. And get my own balloons. And fly.

There is, as I suggested, an end to the Larry Walters story that is not an end.

Ten years after his flight—on October 6, 1993—Larry Walters went hiking in the Angeles National Forest alone. He shot himself. In the heart. And died.

Why? Why? We don’t know why. Nobody saw this coming. Larry left no word.

I guess the depth of his despair matched the height of his imagination.

Larry’s photograph is on my wall. He’s way, way, up there.

And now he’s Up There somewhere—forever.

His tombstone says:

LARRY WALTERS

April 19, 1949—October 6, 1993

Lawn Chair Pilot

Beloved.