September 6, 2001

Oak trees divide the lanes approaching Mertzon from the south and west. Visitors locate the small ranch and oil town by the oaks in the middle of the highway. Enhanced by the Highway Department's addition of a curbed lawn and shade trees, the approach resembles an entrance to a country estate, or a country club.

The exit on to San Angelo, however, is equally spectacular. Savala's concrete tank works on the right features pinto-colored goats climbing on wrecked cars. Hamilton's flea market stands at full inventory a block on the left. Down the road, a real estate lady and her husband live up under the shade of a huge oak tree adjoining the now defunct horse and mule pens. "Defunct," I suspect, because the fellow running the place was so much more honest and dependable than his product. (Horse traders the world over are scorned for being dishonest. Be advised there is no beast breathing as full of surprises as a horse, especially one changing owners.)

On Saturday evenings driving in from the west, I pass the ruins of the Oak Grove Café, a spot where folks danced every weekend in the 1940s. Rolling into town, the site is vacant where the Boyd's Super Exxon Service of a tin garage once rattled in the wind, offering shade to a few prominent young men, long on time and short on a suitable watering spot. Next to Boyd's lot is the Mertzon Locker Plant in the "Doc" Sorrel's pool hall building. "Doc" really let the community down, dying without leaving his pool hall in an irrevocable trust.

In town, I try to visualize how the near-empty main street, locked in a somnolence only interrupted by the bells ringing on the self-service gas pumps, looks to high school graduates spending a last summer home. Wonder if they think, as we once thought, that city folks live in perpetual excitement and constant diversion. Stationed at my town house near the school, the smooth cheeks rumble by in sport cars and black pickups, mufflers drumming the mating call of the machine age, severing the final cord to class and grounds. I flinch as a motorcycles roars through the stop sign on the corner, carrying a rider without a helmet the exact age of my boys when they once did wheelies on dirt bikes in the city park.

A long ago vigil comes back of an intensive care waiting room, watching parents and grandparents sitting numbed by grief and racked with guilt. Stunned to an inner silence while tubes gurgled in the body of a teenager — their teenager — clinging to life by the thinnest thread from a rollover with a Corvette or a Harley Davidson. ("Make good grades and Mamaw and me will buy you a hulk of steel more deadly than a rocket launcher or a torpedo tube.")

Then the drive home at night, furious at the sputter of every motorbike peeling away from the intersections, defying concussion and collision, they rider wearing a baseball cap to deflect concrete or steel. Driving and cursing every sports car for thundering through speed zones, running red lights, sound waves pulsing with booming music played by a driver slumped on one door in complete disregard for personal or community safety. Next, to cringe at the thought of being as out of step and old fashioned as a Mennonite farmer harnessing a black horse to a black buggy to go to town for supplies.

But back to one Saturday. I shut off the water and walked up to the front of the school. Found I was looking through the same eyes that looked at the same tan cut stone school building all those years ago. Same eyes seasoned by 56 summers, but a different projector and film in place. I couldn't say I still didn't yearn to make a touchdown or hit a home run, but I was over wanting to go to Hollywood, or be in the rodeo at Madison Square Garden.

My last direct contact with the school was a graduation announcement followed by a wedding invitation from a kid who mowed my yard his junior year. Along with a $50 check, I wrote that if that was too much to come by and mow part of the yard. If fifty wasn't enough, I'd come by and mow his yard until we were even. He hasn't answered. I remember him being more interested in playing tennis than written work. He might have stopped by the courts for a few sets and forgotten our deal.

Until way in the night the throb of motors coasting through the stop signs by the house interrupt the stillness of the country town. I hope the bills on the caps turned backwards will protect the active little rascals. I am thankful mine are grown and through doing motorcycle tricks in the park…