Vapor Trail

The Blue Angels skipped like stones across the blue sky above Cor­pus Christi bay in 1971 when I was seven and in gaped awe.
I have not thought of this for over thirty-five years until this moment. I have
not thought of the lines of flat bed trucks rolling down Saratoga Boule­vard in 1971, bro­ken heli­copters strapped on like the dragon flies we plucked the wings off in the muddy water in the ditch that crossed through Coun­try Club Estates. The war, Viet Nam, brought them, the bro­ken heli­copters, to the Naval Air Sta­tion for repair or scrap. I never knew. It was all I knew first hand of the war.

The black and white TV in the den cre­ated mem­o­ries of the war, like TV din­ners cre­ate a meal. The trucks and the matte black or green bro­ken heli­copters, how­ever, seared the dread of the war in to me. They made me a pacifist.

I have not thought of the new navy pilots prac­tic­ing touch and go land­ings at Cab­i­ness Field on Saratoga Boule­vard. I am watch­ing them (again, now) as we passed on the back way to school, down­town near the hos­pi­tal. The sun up, my dad‘s cof­fee steam­ing, the planes loop­ing through their turns over brown­ing sorghum fields alter­nat­ing with cot­ton fields, bolls bend­ing the lit­tle plants down like orna­ments on Char­lie Brown‘s Christ­mas tree. I some­times thought of them that way, the cotton bolls.

I have not thought of the cof­fee house my older sis­ters would go to dur­ing the war time, the hip­pie time, at Six Points in down­town Cor­pus Christi. They would go to help the heroin addicts I think. I don‘t know. They were all gone by the time I was able to prop­erly explore Six Points. The addicts remained. I remem­ber the cof­fee houses my sis­ters went to and I never went to them. I have a pic­ture of them and what hap­pened there and none of that hap­pened, what I remem­ber, but I have just thought of that and it is as real as the heli­copters to me and what it meant to me is real…being nine and my sis­ter heroes eigh­teen and nineteen.

I expe­ri­ence my life in the dream of mem­ory. The dream is all I have after this moment and this one and the for­get­ting begins now. They feel exactly the same, dreams and mem­o­ries: the wil­lowy edges, the com­pres­sion of time and the expan­sion, the vapor trails.