Dreamers Rise An Open Notebook And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate. Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. The top of the world They had come from far away in the south, from a place where it never snowed. There were only two seasons: rainy and dry. Some of them had never heard the word “autumn,” not even in their own language. They traveled for days, following the directions sent home by those who had gone on earlier: who to see, how to get across, how to find the small town where the others had settled and where there was a chance they would find work. They carried little, just the clothes on their backs, a small satchel, a little pocket change, a keepsake or two from home. When they came into town they asked around for their friends. They would speak to strangers only if they looked like they, too, had come from back home. If they were lucky and found a familiar face they might be invited out of the cold, for a meal and a good night's sleep. They learned where to stand, in the mornings, in hope of work, where to look for a rented room. The work was hard and there wasn't enough to go around. But if the weather was good they might work from day to day; if the boss took a liking to them they'd be told to meet the truck the next morning. The fortunate ones got steady jobs inside, cutting vegetables or cooking or hauling crates, all off the books. In the evenings they would find their friends, down in a bar or up in someone's room. The lonely would walk the streets or sit in the brush by the creek, watching pedestrians cross the shop windows on the other side of the parking lot, sleeping in the shadows behind the willow trees if there was nowhere else to go. Sometimes the cops made them get up and move on; most of the time they let them be. In time they found girlfriends or married, or summoned their families from home. The women pushed strollers down the sidewalks; the toddlers held on to their fathers' hands as they passed through town. Already the older children were in school, speaking the new tongue with the strange clusters of consonants, the fickle vowels, that their parents struggled to master. Some were swept up and sent back home, others remained but never settled, and lived alone, on the margins, in the places no one thought to look. There were days when it seemed to them that they were no longer standing on the earth at all, not the warm brown earth over which their footsteps had once flown when they were small. Everything here was concrete and blacktop and glass; in these latitudes even water, in the wintertime, was hard and brittle, cold and white. They waited for the return of spring. March 28, 2007 [ Permalink ] Previous page Next page Home Index About Email me