Blue Sky Dream (9 page)

It was easy enough at the time to believe that someday the
whole world would speak our language. I remember a Saturday morning not too many years after we had moved into our new home. My mother and father read in the newspaper about a new sculpture erected as a symbol of cultural arrival by our fast-growing city. We drove over to see the thing and when we arrived at its base and looked up, we very much liked what we saw: Benjamino Bufano’s “The Universal Child,” big blue eyes atop a tapered stainless steel cylinder shaped like a beautiful missile.

S
everal valleys over from ours, Joan Didion watched the coming of my tribe with dread. We moved her to write, in a 1965 essay, how it felt to be a “native daughter,” to have “come from a family who has always been in the Sacramento Valley” and to see that “the boom was on and the voice of the aerospace engineer would be heard in the land. VETS NO DOWN! EXECUTIVE LIVING ON LOW FHA!”

Fifteen thousand aerospace workers, “almost all of them imported,” had arrived on the outskirts of Sacramento to join Aerojet-General, a maker of missile boosters. Joan Didion’s family was, like the orchard people of the Valley of Heart’s Delight, a family tied to agriculture with a hundred years of circular rhythms behind them. Hers were a people primly insular and tragic minded, according to the native daughter. Her Valley was a place where “incautious” children visiting from out of town often would drown in the river, disappear forever, and the old locals would see a proper lesson in that, would say, as Joan Didion’s grandmother did: “They were from away … Their parents had no
business
letting them in the river.”

Joan Didion saw fifteen thousand out of towners coming to stay forever and concluded that Sacramento had by 1965 lost its “character,” that because of us it was “hard to
find
California now.” She looked at the children of Aerojet-General and thought …

In another essay written five years later, Didion gets at the profound difference between her people and mine. She writes of “growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lies not in some error of social organization but in man’s own blood.” She reveals herself, in other words, to be a pessimist about human endeavor engineered and executed on a grand scale. How different from my tribe, who would say instead: If incautious children might drown in a river, let us erect a Cyclone fence, even drive the river underground, leaving behind a manufactured surface that was dry and safe, empty and speaking of promise. That, after all, is what was done with the creek that ran by Clarendon Manor.

A past
manufactured
, Didion lamented in 1965, feeling sorry for any boy growing up like I was. But I remember a great hulk of unmanufactured past that sat by the freeway a short drive from Clarendon Manor, the mansion of Sarah Winchester, wife of the rifle tycoon. The Winchester Mystery House (as it was called on billboards with skulls leering) was begun in 1884, and old Mrs. Winchester never stopped construction until the day she died in 1922. In recent times, the house and grounds have been renovated (or “remanufactured,” as Joan Didion might say), but when I was a boy it was all crumbling authenticity. I would sometimes
be taken there for a class field trip or just something to do on a rainy day. A guide would lead us through rooms that had never been used, show us staircases that led to nowhere, point out windowpanes and tiles and even sink drains that, by Mrs. Winchester’s superstitious orders, always added up to thirteen. She believed she was haunted by wicked spirits angry over the killing her husband’s rifle had done, haunted, too, by good spirits who would ward off the bad ones as long as work continued on her house. She was as crazy as she was rich, and so her house with its one hundred and sixty rooms and forty-seven fireplaces and thirteen bathrooms stretched across six acres, a horror house to me simply for its dirtiness and darkness and wrongheadedness.

I did not like visiting the Winchester Mystery House, did not think much of Mrs. Winchester and her unvarnished past. I thought she was a silly old lady to cower in her morbid pile, as silly as were her bygone times. She was a wild extrapolation of what I imagined the orchard people to be, the best reason for there to be streamlined tract homes in clean subdivisions. We children would take the tour, and the dust and strangeness would tire us out and we’d be happy to emerge into the bright daylight. Happy to be free of the stifling
obsolescence
of the place.

If you had pointed out to any blue sky invader on the Mystery House tour that the new money in the Valley of Heart’s Delight was thanks to weapons potentially vastly more destructive than all the Winchester rifles ever made, we would have shrugged and laughed all the more at Mrs. Winchester’s guilt-driven insanity. We were not much interested in ironic abstractions. Rather than visit the Winchester Mystery House, we far more often visited the places directly next door, the Century 21, Century 22, and Century 23 Cinemas set back on a broad plain of parking lot asphalt, movie houses that were low and round and shallow-domed like flying saucers. The whole family would set off to see the movie that everyone was seeing, the big movie called
The Sound of Music
, and we would park our car between a Plymouth Satellite and a Dodge Polaris, and we would join our fellow citizens within the glowing belly of one of the spaceship
cinemas, and there on the screen would be a Catholic nun, full of fun, singing to children with our own ruddy cheeks.

We were a tribe with hubris, as I say, but you can see how we came by it. By the time we were done with a place, everything around us seemed to cheer us on. Everywhere there were signs telling us that by moving to this empty new corner of America, we had moved closer to the center of the nation’s imagination.

Joan Didion did not like it that such a tribe had found its way to the outskirts of her Sacramento. Now that the people of Aerojet-General were using the latest materials to manufacture optimism on the same farmland that had made her people hard and tragic, Didion was forced to rethink what might be the “true” California. “Which is the true California? That is what we all wonder,” the native daughter wrote in 1965. Was it the dusty Main Streets of the Central Valley that she knew so well from her childhood? Or was the “true” California her vision of my tribe, “the legions of aerospace engineers who talk their peculiar condescending language and tend their dichondra and plan to stay in the promised land”?

If she had asked my father the aerospace engineer or my mother who had joined him on a whole new adventure, they would have told her: There is no “true” California, only latest improvements in design. Our fellow tribe members in Seattle or Houston or Colorado Springs or Bethpage or Cape Kennedy or Huntsville would have told her the same thing about the “true” Washington, the “true” Texas, the “true” Colorado, the “true” New York, the “true” Florida, the “true” Alabama.

Within twenty years of the opening of Stanford Industrial Park, within ten years of my family’s arrival, the Valley of Heart’s Delight was no longer a place of “enclaves in a vast matrix of green.” It had become a vast matrix of expressways and freeways and Clarendon Manors, a vast matrix of companies making technology primarily for the government. The population had grown many times over in those two decades, and we no longer heard
the Valley of Heart’s Delight called that anymore. In fact, no one I knew had ever used that sentimental name. While I was growing up, my family simply had called it the Valley, or, as it was officially termed on the government studies and the plans of various developers, the Santa Clara Valley. It would not be until a time distant, well into the 1970s, that we would begin calling our home Silicon Valley.

T
here was yet another rite of spring practiced by my family, a rite that became possible once the occupation was all but complete, once nearly all the blossoms had been replaced by settlements like our own. On an evening that was bright and windy but too warm to be winter anymore, my father would come home from Lockheed with a kite or two, balsa sticks wrapped tightly with colorful tissue paper. If the next morning was a Saturday, he would put the kites together for us, tear us a tail from an old sheet, make a string bridle that held the kite just so, help us launch the kite and send it up over the tract homes. For just this very purpose, my father kept what seemed a mile of twine on an enormous spool, and so the kite would climb higher and higher until it became a shimmying dot against the blue.

At that point my father would go into his garage and make a small parachute. He would unfold a paper napkin and tie its corners to four strands of string, drawing the other ends of the string together and knotting them around a bolt for weight. He would stick a bit of reinforcing tape in the center of the napkin and pass through that a bent pin, making a hook that poked out of the top of the parachute. Next my father would write our phone number on the parachute with the words: IF FOUND, PLEASE CALL.

“Ready for takeoff?” my father would say as he grabbed hold of the taut kite string and hooked the parachute onto it. And then a miraculous thing would happen. Driven by the wind, the parachute would skitter up the line, joining the kite high in the
sky in what seemed an instant. When it reached the top my father would say, “Give ’er a jerk!” and the parachute would fall away from the kite and drift in whichever direction the wind was blowing until we could see it no longer.

Then would begin the wait for the phone to ring, the wait for someone to call and say they had our parachute. If hours went by, my mother might suggest a prayer to St. Anthony.

“You have to believe.”

If we said the prayer and did believe, the ring would come and someone would say, “Got your, uh, I guess it’s a parachute, here. Landed in my backyard. Almost ran over it with the mower.” My father would write down the address and he would get out the street map. He would pinpoint our destination, and we older kids would set off on our Stingray bikes, having been given a reason to trace a route we never would have traced otherwise, so empty and so much the same was every street for miles around. We would leave our cul-de-sac named Pine Hill Court (where there was neither a pine nor a hill) and we would pedal far beyond Springwood Drive and past Happy Valley Way, ending up in some cul-de-sac we had not known existed. And there would be a man about my father’s age with a similarly receding hairline and knit sport shirt, a man who seemed to be pleased at the serendipitous fun our parachute had brought into his Saturday, a man who safely could be assumed to do blue sky work for a living. Anywhere we cared to drop a parachute from the sky there would be someone like him, a house and family like his and ours. That is why I think of our game as a spring rite for blithe conquerors.

THREE
 OUR LADY OF AEROSPACE
 

W
here is God?
asks the Church.

God is everywhere
, the child of the Church is taught to answer without hesitation.

The Catholic God is everywhere, my mother was told again and again by the nuns and the priests, by her Irish Catholic father, by her Luxembourguese Catholic mother, by two sisters her elder by many years. Growing up in Rock Island, Illinois during the 1930s and the Second World War, a girl found it natural enough to believe that the Catholic God fully inhabited such a place. Life in that town by the Mississippi was nothing sure or easy, just as the Church, in its sad wisdom, had preached for two millennia. For most of her girlhood, my mother slept on a pull-out couch in the dining room of a pinchingly small house, the best her father could provide on his pay as a cost estimator for the local arsenal. There had been a time when he had been boss of a company that made bolts for the railroads, and they had all had lived in a roomy, even fashionable, home in New Jersey. But
the Depression had taken that away, and all my mother remembers is her father as he was in Rock Island, a man who was kind and patient and God-fearing after many worldly disappointments.

Rock Island’s churches were dark, full of flickering votive candles that lit the patient faces of the saints and the Blessed Mother. The steaming summers gave a hint of what suffering awaited a selfish sinner. The winters were as pitiless as the Sunday sermons. “What we heard a lot from the priests back then,” my mother remembers, “is that we’d better shape up or we were all going to go to hell.” Rock Island was the sort of Midwest smudge of industry and docks that daily made its people not expect too much, daily required hope and faith.
Where is God? God is everywhere. Even here. Especially here.