Dateline: Wamego

To Wamego and Back

June 4, 2014

Dateline: Wamego, KS

I don’t get Roz’s parents — I never got my own — but I’ve always wanted to think that long-term couples had figured out a way to live together that worked for them.  Roz says the first is true - I don't get it - but the second is not necessarily so. What seems to be working isn't always, she thinks.

We drove over to Wamego on Wednesday.  The day came in, hot but dry.  The thunder that caromed confusingly around the clear sky came from the guns at Ft. Riley, fifteen miles away.  We drove Ft. Riley Boulevard, KS-18, but in the opposite direction, through Wabaunsee, what there is of it, to the Oz Highway, and into Wamego, where we knew where we were going.  (See "Under Cover of Darkness.")

     Agnes had fixed us lunch.  “Come for lunch,” she’d said.  “We’ll have something all-American.”  And we did, BLTs, chips, and Cokes in fountain glasses, on a checkered table cloth no less.  “Whaddya think?” Agnes asked — about her display.

     We ate.  Roz and Agnes were laughing about a guy they’d both dated at Hastings, one after the other.  “It was like you handed him off to me and I was supposed to run with him, preferably, from your point of view, as far down the field as possible.”  “Where, fortunately, you fumbled.”  “Wait.  He was a basketball player, wasn’t he?”  I listened and laughed, too.  They could have been Burns and Allen, with both of them playing a little Burns and a little Allen.  It’s always amazing to see — at least for me, always such a loner — how people can pick up the rhythm of their conversation so many years later.  Roz and Agnes, and Nashe and Sommers.

     “Sit still,” Agnes said, as she cleared the plates and poured more Coke in the glasses.  There’s no place in the whole darn house more comfortable.”

“I came home in good part,” she began, stopped, and started again: “I wanted to come home.  I was sick of ‘education,’ because it is always about the future, what we’re going to do about this, about that” — she gave the demonstrative pronouns dramatic, undue, emphasis, so that one heard in them something like this [huge problem], that [impending disaster] — “about this, about that, about the other thing.  I thought maybe in Kansas, back home in Kansas [giving the phrase a glow] I could live in the present even if that was only Wamego and Fred.”  She took another sip, and another, of her Coke.  “But I left so long ago and was so young and naïve, and inattentive.  I forgot. if ever I knew, how much planning goes into him. I didn’t realize how difficult it is to go from odd job to odd job and keep busy, and that it was Mom that always found the next one, had it ready, so the future was always taken care of and never became the present.”

     Roz looked both dazed and sympathetic, as if she had no idea and every idea.  (I have no idea how she does that; I’ve given up trying to learn.)

     “But that takes only so much time.  I can do it in the evenings.  So, I went back to teaching.  Fifth graders: surely they live in the present.”

     “Yes.”

     “Or maybe.  Or not.  I’m not quite sure.  Or, maybe I’m not quite sure it isn’t the job of their teachers to teach them otherwise: Think before you act.  Think ahead. Plan ahead.  Consider what’s next and next and next” — what huge problems, impending disasters, looming tornadoes of death and desire.  (She put so much emphasis on the last next.)  “Fred: I don’t know.  I love him; he’s my brother, right?  If anyone lives in the present, he does.  He gets up, gets dressed, the same clothes every day until I take them to put in the wash.  We eat breakfast.  He gets out, “Bye, Sis” then goes where I tell him, or someone comes to pick him up.  He does what he’s told, the jobs are nothing he ever has to think about.  I don’t know what he thinks about.

     “In the evening after dinner and we do the dishes — this is odd; or I wouldn’t have thought it anyway: I pictured him down in his room in the basement watching television.  But he doesn’t watch television, he doesn’t read either; so he’s never elsewhere, he’s always present.  Though does he know it?  Summer till it gets cold, he sits on the porch and watches night come in.  Winter till it gets warm again, he watches through the window.  He’s like an old dog.  One that used to bark and run to the door when the mailman came and now just cocks his head and grumbles in his throat.”

     She started crying.  Roz got up and bent down.  She put her arms around her.  It was beautiful, and I was ready to go.

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