If you remember that time as a child,
you might remember the smell of those red Swedish fish – slightly
greasy to the touch when fresh, slightly hard when old and dry.
Their smell was the smell of something like cherry and yet more like
paint if you thought about it. You might remember the songs of
television and a world where grouches lived in garbage cans and
monsters with ping pong balls for eyes ate cookies and didn't scare
anyone.
If you remember the night the church
bells rang and you remember that time as a child, you might remember
a world where old men and women were from another century and they
had raised their families through something we couldn't understand,
something called a 'depression' – something that caused them to eat
things you might not normally eat and wear things you might not
normally wear. Our moms made us meatloaf and TV dinners and dressed
us in matching clothes with animals on them that taught us how to
coordinate our colors. Not so for the old men and women. Their
children had no TVs. No TV dinners. No zebras and no monkeys.
On the night the church bells rang a
very small boy in a Midwestern suburb got up from his bed and
wandered to the front door to wonder at the racket. He pressed his
nose against the screen and smelled the dust and the fly-dirt and
wondered at the racket. His older brother walked up behind him and
picked him up in his arms. He unhooked the door and they stepped out
into the cool night air on a fine summer evening. He put his little
brother on his shoulders and they carved small circles together on
the front lawn.
“Why are the bells ringing?”
“It means the killing's gonna' stop.”
A few more small, slow circles on the
lawn and he took his little brother inside and returned him to his
bed and tucked him in. Sleep came easily after that for both. When
the killing is going to stop, you sleep a lot easier.
If you remember the night that the
church bells rang, you might likely remember having to grow up
eventually and not knowing that you had done so. All sorts of things
came along - the mortgages and graduate school and the deaths of
parents who might have been the children who ate the things you might
not normally eat and who wore the things you might not normally wear.
These things all came along and you might have lived through them or
you might have ignored them or you might have missed them due to a
sudden death or a slow death or just the right amount of the proper
chemicals that would have transformed your thinking-organ known as
the “brain” into a mass of silly putty.
On the night that the church bells rang
a very small boy in a Midwestern suburb fell back asleep and dreamed
a dream so vivid. He was on his older brother's shoulders and they
were carving small, slow circles together on the front lawn. He bent
his head forward and smelled his brother's hair – it was always
clean, it seemed – clean and fresh and smelling like the stuff that
big people put in their hair. He put his lips on his brother's head,
and then rested his cheek there, feeling as safe and as secure as he
had ever felt. His big brother was never going to have to go away to
a war and kill anyone or have anyone try to kill him. He would never
have to go away to the place called Vietnam that they showed on TV.
And if they had ever tried to take him, like when he was away at
college, he would have told his brother to come home right here and
he would hide him in his room – under his bed or in his closet and
President Nixon never would have found him there. And he would have
brought meatloaf and TV dinners to him and hidden him there as long
as he needed to to, but that wasn't anything to worry about now, now
that the church bells were ringing.
A whole generation dreamed and a whole
generation slept easily until it realized that there was no reason to
sleep easily anymore. And a whole generation got out of bed and got
dressed and took its tranquilizers and its prescription pain killers
in massive quantities, washed down with light beers and hard lemonade
and energy drinks and red wine and vodka. It took its medicine like a good
patient and sometimes even got up in the middle of the night and
pressed its collective nose against the screen and smelled the dust
and the fly-dirt.
And it waited for the church bells to
ring.
