Take me back, take me back, take me back
Take me way back, take me way back, take me way back
Take me way, way, way, way, way, way, way back
—Van Morrison1
Summer in the heartland is humid, sticky, murky, hot.
June's all right - cut grass, mown hay, blossoms on low-hanging branches, water lapping over the roots of the willows on the lake's soft sandy banks - but July screams with cicadas and reeks of fish funk, swamp weed, hot tar.
Come July, the sun heaves itself into the sky early - you'd have sworn the damn thing just went down. Day breaks against your window like someone threw an egg. The high summer sun is a mean one: blazing bright, unrelenting heat. The air is heavy and thick. Dogs dig their way under the house, kids sob and slog off in wet sneakers, parents snap and holler, everyone's half-drunk of horse piss beer, the kind that cools you off but makes you mean. Someone picks a fight, someone else takes the bait. Something slams, then echoes: it slams and slams and slams. July air is empty, hollow. Voices carry; everyone hears.
My family moved to Minnesota the summer I was eight, in July. My father drove the moving truck; my mother drove the hand-me-down Ford. At a truck stop diner outside Reno, my father choked on a chicken bone and nearly died. At a lodge in Yellowstone, my twin brothers turned 14; there were 14 candles in the baked Alaska they ordered in the fancy dining room of the hotel. Somewhere on the two-lanes that twist through the Rockies, my father pulled over, moved whichever kids had been riding with him into the car with my mother, and joked that that way, if he and the truck went over the edge, all she'd lose was the furniture.
Somewhere hot - blazing hot, July hot - my mother's car broke down and my brothers and I stood with her next to the car in hopes that some trucker would see us - a lone woman with three kids - and take pity and stop to help.
By the time we pulled up at a rented brown duplex on a noisy four-lane thoroughfare in the Minnesota suburbs, I still hadn't figured out why we left California. But I keep good notes; I'd written down the roads, the states, the route by which we came. If I needed to leave, I figured, I knew how to get home.
Forty-three years later, I'm sitting here in a camp chair outside the Scamp in the blazing heat of the July sun that's beating down on the heartland's green rolling fields, thinking about the Fourth of July.
My brothers' birthday is July 6; they'll be 57 on Sunday. We must've spent the Fourth of July in 1982 on the road.
So that means the first whiffle ball game took place in 1983.
Way, way back, way back When you walked in a green field, in a green meadow Down an avenue of trees On a, on a golden summer And the sky was blue And you didn't have no worries You didn't have no care
It's the heart of the Cold War.
Nuclear fallout drills in our square, squat cinderblock school start off with a screaming alarm that alerts us to the end of the world and we clang and clatter out of our little chairs and fold ourselves into small packages under our desks as practice for when the Russians bomb.
Some little shit in a hockey jacket has started a rumor at school that I'm a commie because no one knows how to pronounce my name and someone asked me What kind of name is Marya? and I said It's Russian and now the blond girls in dresses whisper about my jeans and sneakers when I walk by.
Flashdance is breaking records at the box office. The flashy soundtrack, "What a Feeling," just bumped Bowie's "Let's Dance" out of the number one spot on the Billboard chart, only a week after Bowie dislodged Michael Jackson's "Beat It" out of position and days before The Police grab the ring hold onto it for fully two months with "Every Breath You Take." They're still The Police; Sting's era-defining anti-war album The Dream of the Blue Turtles won't be released for two more years.
We've been here a year and I want to go home.
You were walking in a green field, in a meadow Through the buttercups, in the summertime And you looked way out over, way out Way out over the city and the water And it feels so good, and it feels so good And you keep on walking And the music on the radio, and the music on the radio Baby, has so much soul, has so much soul And you listen in the night time When it was still and quiet
We lived in a little split-level on one of those ponds you see in the burbs
- manmade, ill-advised, clogged with invasive species, leaches, snapping turtles, bullheads, gunk. In July, it stunk. You couldn't swim in it, though the Lund boys had a rope swing slung over a branch and spent the summer bellowing and cannonballing into the mire. Nancy Lane was a cul-de-sac with just four houses that widened into a large circle at our driveway, on the end.
The circle was of a shape and size that would serve as a whiffle ball field: our driveway home plate, the bases the neighbor's driveway, the willow on the far corner, the maple just over the berm. Right outfield was the street, down which no one ever came; left outfield was the lake.
So if I'm recalling this right, on Fourth of July, 1983 - the first summer we were in that house, one of the last summers I ever spent with my brothers, the first of five summers I spent mostly hiding in the cool hush of the sprawling public library, reading my way through the fiction section row by row, top to bottom and left to right, plotting an escape plan to get myself back to California - in three years, when I’m 12, my parents will reject my written proposal, posted on the fridge like Luther’s theses, that I be allowed to move into my own apartment - and developing a deep and abiding fascination with maps - the aunts and uncles and cousins and various friends and however many dogs came over for the inaugural whiffle ball game, which Brian, my best friend and closest cousin, won.
Though there were more athletic players, certainly, and more competitive ones, god knows - my family runs mean as July - and though Brian didn't give a rat's ass who won and spent the whole game with his face broken open in his joyous grin, and though he got his own rules, and though he couldn't run, could barely walk because he was already losing what little strength he'd had in his limbs to the painful wasting effects of muscular dystrophy, and soon he'd have to use a wheelchair, and then have to use it most of the time, and then all of the time, and by the time he'd graduated from college he'd require the help of an aide to get out of bed, into the shower, dressed in work clothes, and into his wheelchair before being driven to the State Capitol where he worked as a legislative aide, and even though it drove some of the cousins nuts that he got "special treatment," the rules were that when Brian was at bat, he got to swing till he hit the ball, and then he got as long as he needed to get to first base, and everybody else could shut the fuck up.
Brian was a year and a half older than me. I had no memory of a world without Brian in it, no sense of what a family without Brian could possibly be, no understanding of what love was without the core understanding of how I loved Brian and how he loved me. He was my family, my soulmate, my best friend.
It's 1983. Brian is slowly making his way to the plate. I'm on third, waiting to run - always, somehow, waiting to run.
Take me way, way, way back, way back To when, when I understood When I understood the light In the golden afternoon, in the golden afternoon In the golden afternoons when we sat and listened to Sonny Boy blow In the golden afternoon
It's 1983.
Five years before I go away.
Ten years before Brian's in college, in his wheelchair and a tuxedo, mopping the floor with the Oxford debate team. He rolls onstage to introduce his own team, waits politely while somebody lowers the mic, looks solemnly out at the audience, and says, "I bet I know what you're thinking."
The audience titters nervously - I mean, as Brian often pointed out, he’s usually the only Korean guy in a wheelchair in the room.
Brian lets them squirm. Then he says, "You're thinking, There's the jackass who got the last good parking spot."
Thirteen years before I sell my first book; 14 before I type in the dedication, print the manuscript, and send off the final draft.
For Brian.
Fifteen years before Brian dies.
He did, too. This fucker died when he was 25.
In the eternal moment In the eternal now Everything felt so good, so good, so good, so good, so good And so right, so right, so right, just So good, and so right, and so right, in the eternal In the eternal moment When you lived, when you lived
It's the Fourth of July, 1983.
Hours of light left before fireworks, the sun still high and blazing, my nose sunburnt and peeling. I've got one foot cocked and ready to push off; my muscles twitch when I look at the base the way your mouth waters when you smell salt. I'm on third; Brian's heading up to bat.
He's grinning so hard I laugh. I shout to him, I clap and cheer till he makes it all the way to the plate. He looks over at me, standing under the maple just over the berm; he's beaming. I beam back. Someone hands him the plastic bat, helps him hold it, maybe his mom; someone, maybe his dad, bends their body over his body, four hands on the neck of the bat, two bodies turning as one body, pulling the bat back, twisting at the waist, letting the momentum run up their side through their arms to the bat to the end of the bat and then crack -
or, since it's whiffle ball, whiff -
and the ball goes wherever it goes, it doesn't matter, no one knows.
Now time stops while Brian runs.
When you lived in the light When you lived in the grace In the grace, in grace When you lived in the light In the light, in the grace And the blessing
He runs in slow motion;
he doesn't want help.
The sun begins to slant, turn gold. Light glints off his black hair, shines off his round grinning cheeks. Brian runs, and I watch, for minutes, for hours, for years.
It's still 1983. Brian is still running, and I will watch him for as long as it takes.
P.S. I forgot this week was the 4th - Scamp Homecoming video incoming next week!
All lyrics from “Take Me Back,” written and produced by Van Morrison, 1991.
I will sit in every single word sandbox you're playing in, Marya, just to watch you make things beautiful.
Now you’ve gone and done it…