I Sing the Body Electric

“My God, I was stirred up there for awhile.”

“I remember,” she said.

“But now I figure, well…” he drifted his voice, mostly to himself. “Millions of cars come through every year. Like it or not, the road’s just not big enough, we’re holding up the world, that old road there and this old town. The world says it’s got to move. So now, on that new road, not one but two million will pass just a shotgun blast away, going where they got to go to get things done they say are important, doesn’t matter if they’re important or not, folks think they are, and thinking makes the game. If we’d really seen it coming, thought in on it from every side, we’d have taken a steam-driven sledge and just mashed the town flat and said. ‘Drive through!’ instead of making them lay the damn road over in that next clover patch. This way, the town dies hard, strangled on a piece of butcher string instead of being dropped off a cliff. Well, well.” He lit his pipe and blew great clouds of smoke in which to poke for past mistakes and present revelations. “Us being human, I guess we couldn’t have done but as we did…”

They heard the drugstore clock strike eleven and the Oddfellows Hall clock chime eleven thirty, and at twelve they lay in bed in the dark, each with a ceilingful of thoughts above them.

“Graduation.”

“What?”

“Frank the barber said it and had it right. This whole week feels like the last days of school, years ago. I remember how I felt, how I was afraid, ready to cry, and how I promised myself to live every last moment right up to the time the diploma was in my hand, for God only knew what tomorrow might bring. Unemployment. Depression. War. And then the day arrived, tomorrow did get around to finally coming, and I found myself still alive, by God, and I was still all in one piece and things were starting over, more of the same, and hell, everything turned out okay. So this is another graduation all right. Frank said, and I’m the last to doubt.”