Old Songs in a New Cafe (2 page)

We’ll ride along through Asian nights with Captain Charlie Uban, an Iowa boy who took C-47 cargo planes into territory where
they were never meant to go, into the snow and wind of the southern Himalayas when the world had lost control. We’ll fly yet
another time, with a flock of Canada geese beating their way south through a midwestern blizzard, and well think about what
it means to fly no more when we look through cage wire at a fellow named Orange Band, who was the last member of his species,
resting there on his perch and perhaps contemplating what zero truly means.

There’s more—things run amuck when river otters are turned loose in Iowa, and we’ll look at the art and technique of the long-range
jump shot. I coast by my fiftieth birthday and wonder about it, my father confronts an assault on his honesty, and I run into
an extraordinary woman in the back country of Florida.

In short, this is a book about people and animals and things I care about. It’s about growing up and showing your stuff, finding
love, winning and losing, and getting older. It’s about where I began and where I came to at a particular time in my life,
as a person and as a writer. And I suppose it’s also about where Pm headed, though I never seem to realize such things at
the time. We come, we do, we go, and the doing can be a rather grand voyage if you don’t panic and if you believe, as I believe,
in magic and imagination and wizards who live along quiet country rivers.

R
OBERT
J
AMES
W
ALLER

Cedar Falls, Iowa

January 1994

______________________________________

L
ike some rumpled alien army awaiting marching orders, the brown trash bags hunker down on the patio in a column of twos. A
hard little caravan are they, resting in sunlight and shadow and caring not for their cargos, the sweepings of childhood and
beyond.

With her eighteenth birthday near, Rachael has moved to Boston, leaving her room and the cleaning of it to us.

After conducting a one-family attempt at turning United Parcel Service into something resembling North American Van Lines,
we gather by the front door early on a Sunday morning.

Beside the suitcases are stacked six boxes, taped and tied. In my innocence, I tap the topmost box and ask, “What are these?”

“That’s the stuff I couldn’t get in my suitcases last night; you guys can send it to me,” she replies, rummaging through her
purse. Out of habit, I begin a droning lecture on planning ahead, realize the futility of it, and am quiet.

She has a deep caring for the animals and purposely, we know, avoids saying good-bye to them, particularly the small female
cat acquired during her stay at camp one summer, years ago.

The cat has shared her bed, has been her confidant and has greeted her in the afternoons when she returned from school. Good-bye
would be too much, would bring overpowering tears, would destroy the blithe air of getting on with it she is trying hard to
preserve.

We watch her walk across the apron of the Waterloo airport, clutching her ticket, and she disappears into the funny little
Air Wisconsin plane.

Turning, just as she left the departure lounge, she grinned and flashed the peace sign. I was all right until then, but with
that last insouciant gesture, so typical of her, the poignancy of the moment is driven home and tears come.

We hurry outside and stand in hot sunlight to see the plane leave. I note that we have never done this before, for anyone.

Clinging to the heavy fence wire along the airport boundary, I watch the plane take off to the west and make a last allegoric
circle over Cedar Falls. East she travels and is gone, disappearing in the haze of an Iowa summer.

Back home, beer in hand, we sit on the porch, listening to the hickory nuts fall, recounting the failures and remembering
the triumphs.

For the 500th time in the last eighteen years, we describe to each other the night of her birth, how she looked coming down
the hall in the Bloomington, Indiana, hospital on the gurney in her mother’s arms. How we felt, how we feel, what we did and
didn’t do.

We take a few days off, just to get used to the idea of there being only two of us again. Then, tentatively, we push open
the door to her room.

The dogs peer into the darkness from around our legs and look up at us. The room—well—undulates. It stands as a shrine to
questionable taste, a paean to the worst of American consumerism. The last few echoes of Def Leppard and Twisted Sister are
barely audible. Georgia sighs.

I suggest flame throwers coupled with a front-end loader and caution the cleanup crew, which now includes the two cats, about
a presence over in one of the corners. Faintly, I can hear it rustle and snarl. It is, I propose, some furry guardian of teenage
values, and it senses, correctly, that we are enemies.

Trash bags in hand, we start at the door and work inward, tough-minded.

“My god, look at this stuff; let’s toss it all.”

The first few hours are easy. Half-empty shampoo bottles go into the bags, along with three dozen hair curlers, four dozen
dried-up ball-point pens and uncountable pictures of bare-chested young men with contorted faces clawing at strange-looking
guitars.

Farther into the room salvage appears: the hammer that disappeared years ago; about six bucks in change; 50 percent of the
family’s towel and drinking-glass stock; five sets of keys to the Toyota. More. Good stuff. We work with a vengeance.

Moving down through the layers, though, we begin to undergo a transformation.

Slowly, we change from rough-and-tumble scavengers to gentle archaeologists. Perhaps it started when we reached the level
of the dolls and stuffed animals. Maybe it was when I found “The Man Who Never Washed His Dishes,” a morality play in a dozen
or so pages, with her childhood scribblings in it.

In any case, tough-mindedness has turned to drippy sentimentality by the time we find the tack and one shoe from Bill, her
horse.

I had demanded that Bill be sold when he was left unridden after the five years of an intense love affair with him were over.
That was hard on her, I know. I begin to understand just how hard when Georgia discovers a bottle of horsefly repellent that
she kept for her memories.

We hold up treasures and call to each other. “Look at this, do you remember… ?”

And there’s Barbie. And Barbie’s clothes. And Barbie’s camper in which the young female cat was given grand tours of the house,
even though she would have preferred not to travel at all, thank you.

My ravings about the sexist glorification of middle-class values personified by Barbie seem stupid and hollow in retrospect,
as I devilishly look at the cat and wonder if she still fits in the camper, “Here kitty, kitty…” Ken is not in sight. Off
working out on the Nautilus equipment, I suppose. Or studying tax shelters.

Ah, the long-handled net with which Iowa nearly was cleared of fireflies for a time. “I know they look pretty in the bottle,
Sweetheart, but they will die if you keep them there all night.”

Twister—The Game That Ties You Up in Knots. The ball glove. She was pretty decent at first base. And the violin, Jim Welch’s
school orchestra was one of the best parts of her growing years.

She smiles out at us from a homecoming picture, the night of her first real date. Thousands of rocks and seashells. The little
weaving loom on which she fashioned pot holders for entire neighborhoods. My resolve is completely gone as I rescue Snoopy’s
pennant from the flapping jaws of a trash bag and set it to one side for keeping.

We are down to small keepsakes and jewelry. Georgia takes over, not trusting my eye for value, and sorts the precious from
the junk, while I shuffle through old algebra papers.

Night after night, for a year, I sat with her at the kitchen table, failing to convince her of the beauty to be found in quadratic
equations and other abstractions. I goaded her with Waller’s Conjecture: “Life is a word problem.” Blank stare.

Finally, trying to wave hope in the face of defeat, I paraphrased Fran Lebowitz: “In the real world, there is no algebra.”

She nodded, smiling, and laughed when I admitted that not once, in all my travels, had I ever calculated how long Smith would
need to overtake Brown if Brown left three hours before Smith on a slower train. I told her I’d sit in the bar and wait for
Smith’s faster train.

That confirmed what she had heretofore only suspected—algebra is not needed for the abundant life, only fast trains and good
whiskey. And, she was right, of course.

The job is nearly finished. All that remains is a bit of archiving.

I have strange feelings, though. Have we sorted carefully enough? Probably. Georgia is thorough about that kind of thing.
Still, I walk to the road again and look at the pile. The tailings of one quarter of a life stacked up in three dozen bags.
It seems like there ought to be more.

When I hear the garbage truck, I peer out of an upstairs window in her room. The garbage guys have seen lives strung out along
road edges before and are not moved. The cruncher on the truck grinds hair curlers and Twister and junk jewelry and broken
stuffed animals—and some small part of me.

She calls from Boston.
A Job.
Clerking in a store, and she loves it. We are pleased and proud of her. She’s under way.

The weeks go by. Letters. “I am learning to budget my money. I hate it. I want to be rich.”

She starts her search for the Dream in a rooming house downtown and finds a Portuguese boyfriend, Tommy, who drums in a rock
band and cooks Chinese for her. Ella Fitzgerald sings a free concert in the park. The cop on the beat knows her, and the store
is crowded with returning college kids late in a Boston summer. Here in the woods, it’s quieter now.

Her room has been turned into a den. A computer replaces curling irons and other clutter on her desk. My pinstripes look cheerless
in her closet where pink fishnet tops and leather pants once hung.

Order has replaced life. I sit quietly there and hear the laughter, the crying, the reverberation of a million phone calls.
The angst of her early-teen existential crisis lingers, drifting in a small cloud near the high ceiling.

And you know what I miss? Coming home and hearing her say, “Looking pretty good, Bob! Got your suspenders on?” She could make
a whirring sound just like the motor drive on a fine camera.

Those few moments of irreverent hassle every day are what I miss most of all

Regrets? A few. I wish I had walked in the woods more with her. I wish I had gotten mad less and laughed longer. Maybe we
could have kept the horse another year.

Victories? A few. She loves the music and the animals. She understands romance and knows how to live a romantic life. She
also has the rudimentary skills of a great blackjack dealer. I sent her off with that instead of luggage.

She has her own agenda. She’s had it for years. It’s not my agenda, not what I would choose, but then she has more courage
than I do. She’s out there on her own, cooking on a hot plate in a Boston rooming house, pushing and shoving and working and
discovering. My respect for her escalates. She’s going to be all right.

And I know I’ll sit on the porch as autumn comes this year and other years, in some old sweater with some old dreams, and
wonder where she goes and how she goes.

I hope she goes where there’s laughter and romance, and walks the streets of Bombay and leans out of Paris windows to touch
falling January snow and swims in the seas off Bora Bora and makes love in Bangkok in the Montien Hotel.

I hope she plays blackjack all night in the Barbary Coast and, money ahead, watches the sun come up in Vegas. I hope she rides
the big planes out of Africa and Jakarta and feels what it’s like to turn for home just ahead of winter.

Go well, Rachael Elizabeth, my daughter. And, go knowing that your ball glove hangs on the wall beside mine, that Snoopy’s
pennant flies bravely in the old airs of your room, that the violin is safe, and that the little cat now sleeps with us at
night but still sits on the porch railing in the late afternoon and looks for you.

______________________________________

I
hear the slap of the clay as you work it, late in the night. And I know you are there in your studio, in bib overalls, an
old sweater, and heavy work shoes. Soon your wheel will begin to turn in time with some faint and distant music, and the teapots
and lamps and goblets will lift effortlessly from nothing more than moistened earth.

So the night wind moves the trees outside, and I remember you from a college-town party hall Twenty eight years ago now. Through
the smoke and across the tables we were taken with each other from the start. An enchanted evening. Our own private clichÉ.
The sort of thing people don’t believe in anymore.

And then years later I watch you. Coming toward me on your dancer’s walk through the early twilight of high-plateau India.
Your sari is silk, and blue above your sandals, your earrings are gold and dangling long. Heads above bodies in white wicker
chairs along the veranda of the West End Hotel turn as you pass. Your already dark skin has been made even darker from our
days in the Bangalore sun, and there are speculations about you. An Indian man asks, “Is she Moroccan?” “No,” I reply. “She
is Iowan.”

I take another beer from the refrigerator, hoping you stay in your studio a while longer. I want to sit here by myself, listening
to the muffled sounds of your hands at work, and think about what it means to be married to you for twenty-five years. In
another month, it will have been that long.

I grew up dreaming of rivers and music and ancient cities and dark-haired women who sang old songs in cafes along the Seine.
You were raised to be a wife and a beauty, and you probably would have been satisfied, maybe happier, with a more conventional
man. At least it took you a long time to discover what I am up to and to know this race I run, a race between death and discovery.
You were plainly discomfited by my lurching from one passion to another, from basketball to music, from the academy to think
tanks, from city to city, from the solitude of my study to the dark bars where I am at home with my instruments.