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Rendezvous Forty Years Roger Schmidt
Across the street a young man sits on his porch on a faded upholstered sofa. He is wearing wrap-around sunglasses and has a red baseball cap on his shaved head. He has a bottle of beer between his legs and from here it looks to be a Michelob. Music drifts out from the screen door—The Eagles greatest hits. He is a college student and has lived in the house with another student for about two months now. Their friends come and go, and many of them spend their Saturdays sitting on the porch drinking beer. They do not seem worried about time. There is a small lawn between the porch and sidewalk and, surprisingly, the students keep it well-watered. Perhaps their landlord insists on it.
That grass has not always thrived. Before the college students came, about five years ago, an old retired railroader lived in the house, a widower, and he too spent days just sitting on the porch. He would cough—long, retching coughs from deep in his chest—and he would sometimes mutter profanities at people passing by on the sidewalk. He rarely got off his stool. He had a black dog, fat and arthritic, that would struggle slowly down the steps, barking hoarsely at whoever the man was swearing at, but by the time the dog made it to the bottom of the steps, the people would be gone. The dog would lift a stiffened leg and urinate in the weeds growing against the porch and then clamber painfully back up the steps. Soon the dog became too old for even this feeble display and would just make a moaning sound without rising from the worn floorboards. One day the man died suddenly from a hemorrhage in the brain. I learned this from a daughter who came and organized a small garage sale. For two dollars I bought the wooden stool the man had always sat on, burnished, blackened with grease, and held together with baling-wire.
The house stood empty for nearly a year. Then the “No Trespassing” sign disappeared. Workers put on a new roof, a new porch rail, and nailed down artificial-turf on the worn steps. They unrolled a pick-up load of dark green sod into the dust. I sat on the stool on my porch and watched.
Someone once told me that there is grass in the Holy Land that has been growing since the time of Christ. Sheep chew it to the ground, but it grows back, and centuries of fire and wind have not destroyed its roots. Drifting down the lower Salmon, we had passed through much burned over country, steep blackened slopes of juniper and sagebrush. In the spring after such fires, the grass returns thick and green.
I doubt the grass in my yard will return. Weeks without rain, endless days of sun, and the grass turns white as the dust. Dark green weeds sprout up randomly. Across the street on his sunlit porch, his face motionless behind dark glasses, the college student seems to stare out at nothing. Below him the sprinkler spins quietly, casting the old water up into the light. |
