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    El Paso Days
    El Paso Days
    El Paso Days
    Ebook161 pages2 hours

    El Paso Days

    By Elroy Bode and Robert Bonazzi

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    About this ebook

    The thoughts, scenes, and observations gathered in this collection written by an aging Elroy Bode concern themselves on the surface with the daily happenings during a typical year, reflecting the author’s sense of kinship with the people, creatures, and beauty of the Texas desert. Upon closer inspection, however, these short sketches deal with the nature and meaning of life and the inevitable loss of its pleasures, satisfactions, and mysteries—especially in the context of the natural world that surrounds him. The book ends with a long and powerful recounting by Bode of the incredible circumstances surrounding the death of his son.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWings Press
    Release dateMar 1, 2014
    ISBN9781609403423
    El Paso Days
    Author

    Elroy Bode

    Elroy Bode (1931-2017) is the author of nine books, including Texas Sketchbook, Sketchbook II, Alone in the World Looking, This Favored Place: The Texas Hill Country, Commonplace Mysteries, Home Country: An Elroy Bode Reader, and El Paso Days. He is a former contributing editor for the Texas Observer and has twice received the Stanley Walker Award for Journalism from the Texas Institute of Letters. Bode, who taught in Texas public schools for forty-eight years, retired from Austin High School in El Paso. His work has appeared in the Nation, the Texas Quarterly, the Texas Observer, Redbook, the Southwest Review, and many other publications.

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      Book preview

      El Paso Days - Elroy Bode

      Spring

      Today the Earth is, as usual, solidly in place: meaning, revolving in air in the middle of nowhere. My life on Earth is equally solidly in place: meaning, suspended for a while between my origin out of nowhere as a dot-sized sperm-and-egg and my end into nowhere as a decaying mass of flesh.

      So it goes in the life of a sentient being.

      But despite it all—the uncertainties, the unknowns— what a remarkable interlude it is, this strange human sojourn. For example, consider the subtle transitions we are a part of: each hour sliding into the next, a day passing to another and a year passing to another, from childhood to the middle years to old age. These unnoticeable mechanics of change, of movement, never reveal themselves to us. They work their mysteries with an amazing sleight-of-hand, and we seldom take time to focus on how it happens: how shadows lengthen; how we breathe in and out—so rhythmically, so unconsciously; how cells grow and then degenerate; even how at 5:30 in the afternoon the summer sun, billions of miles away, lays the whitened imprint of itself inches away from the same spot of bark on the same trunk of the same tree that it had touched the day before.

      The process is forever hidden from human understanding. We never really know what is going on nor how it happens. We just keep moving about in our daily routines, accepting as normal—as ordinary—the infinite and incomprehensible orchestrations of the natural world.

      Words keep chaos away. They build a wall around me— like a protective medieval barrier around a castle, keeping at bay the Vandals who are roaming the countryside but are capable at any time of breaching the turrets and sweeping into the stronghold.

      I once saw a high-tech scan of sperm attempting to penetrate the surface of a human egg, and it was as if the Great Magician’s Hand had pulled back the cosmic curtains and, lo, there it was: life: revealed at its source.

      In the beginning we are nothing—existing in the gap between sperm and egg. We are without form or intention, unpersonalized, unrealized. We are pure space and possibility. Then, if one of the swarming sperm succeeds in burrowing into an egg, the nothing of us becomes the single dot that enlarges and ultimately becomes a Something: a shape—the you, the me that we are, have been, will be: by the millions.

      …the experience that demands expression –Whitman

      This identification is important. You cannot think about it enough if you want to do any good writing. Not just experience for experience’s sake, and not just expression for expression’s sake, but the experience that demands expression, that won’t let you alone until you have found the words to lift it out of life and allow it to live on paper without it being just words. Some experiences don’t demand expression; others do. Understanding this distinction is the key to good writing.

      Lillie, the white cat, lies stretched out on her back. She is motionless in the grass, and the pink edges of her ears gleam in the warm sun. Her right front leg is high above her head with the paw slightly curved inward, as if she is holding a pose in a yoga class. She is luxuriating at mid-morning.

      Her eyes closed into slits, she watches us as we watch her: Lillie, our Isadora Duncan of backyard indolence and ease.

      I don’t know if it is a matter of temperament, or a personality flaw, or just ordinary human awareness, but I cannot manage to keep the world at bay for any length of time. I whistle a tune—and, before long, images of Third World children with bloated bellies float before my eyes. My mind will not stay put. I cannot simply cultivate my own garden, enjoy my own spring, if I know that a bleak winter is covering the lives of others.

      Doves in the backyard suddenly decide to leave so they take off from the grass or the trees and fly directly into one of the kitchen windows. We hear the whomp, and look, and see the white smudge of feathers left against the window-pane by the impact. Amazingly, the doves are never killed. They simply recoil, nursing their monumental headaches, and continue to fly on past the house.

      Phoebe was told that if she would cut out a construction-paper outline of a bird—wings facing up, not down, for some reason—and attach it to a window the doves would be spooked and would not bash into the panes again.

      It works.

      At 7:30 I came outside the house and looked east and the yellowish full moon in its sky of early nighttime blue nearly knocked me over. There, in the familiar neighborhood of familiar streets and homes, was, once again, the reminder of constant beyondness—a beyondness that should bring all of us to our knees.

      After another day of routines and personal concerns we look up and there it is again: that ever-circling, ever-numbing reminder of a truth that humans apparently can’t or won’t stay focused on: We live our lives in total mystery.

      I have never understood how people deal with this situation so easily, so indifferently: living, incredibly, on a rotating ball in the middle of space and continuing to act as if such a reality didn’t exist or at least didn’t matter very much.

      How many could immediately identify the it in the statements below:

      • You cannot see it, taste it, feel it, hear it—yet without it you could not exist on the

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