Feel like I’ve indulged in this meditation, or something nearly like it, before.
It has to do with figures, mostly meaning people, viewed as they recede in the distance. It is a familiar trope of Hollywood movies, sometimes sad, sometimes happy at the end of a drama — the hero or the lovers together or a disappointed lover alone walking off down a beach or John Wayne, at the end of The Searchers, walking off alone as the door to the house closes and THE END appears. In a John Steinbeck story called “The Mountains” in his book, The Red Pony, a child has a distant view of a man who’d been a visitor riding off into the mountains.
Edward Arlington Robinson captured such a moment and such thoughts, meditated on them over and over during the long poem, “Man Against the Sky” that begins:
Between me and the sunset, like a dome
Against the glory of a world on fire,
Now burned a sudden hill,
Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher,
With nothing on it for the flame to kill
Save one who moved and was alone up there
To loom before the chaos and the glare
As if he were the last god going home
Unto his last desire.
Well, I’m traveling and constantly saying hello and goodbye to people along the way. But in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, my companion Diane and I checked into a motel and then went looking for a place to have dinner. We pulled into a rather plain and ugly parking lot in front of what looked like a restaurant, but it turned out to be an ice cream place. That wouldn’t do. So we sat checking the internet on our phones in search of another address of another possible eatery. It was dinner time, or just after it in some households.
Now, I’ve been living in Florida, a very flat state with few exceptions, those being up in the panhandle. There are no mountains or notable hills — true hills. This section of Pennsylvania, by contrast, had mountains — be they the Poconos or some stretch of the Appalacian range. The motel looked off toward mountains.
The parking lot where we’d paused was ugly, as noted, and had a strange dip in a break between strip centers where one could drive or walk to a lower parking beyond which there was a steep hill topped by a neighborhood of houses.
As we sat idling in the car, a young boy of about twelve emerged from the ice cream shop with what was certainly his little sister. They commenced to walk toward that macadam dip, probably bound for those house. The boy had a bundle, probably ice cream, destined for the dessert table of one of th ose houses where parents and maybe other siblings happily awaited this post-dinner ice cream feast, or so I imagined.
The little girl — the little sister — appeared to be about six or seven. She was pretty, wore a dress, had long hair and she was…marching! Yes, her happy stride, holding her brother’s hand suggested delighted expectations – for ice cream and for all of her still innocent life. She was marching along with big brother who was just walking, probably kind of used to the way little sister liked to happily muse and march along in life. I watched them, yes, recede from view as they headed down that black tar gully and out of sight. And I said…I’ll remember that picture.
But, as we went to drive away from that parking lot, there suddenly appeared, unexpectedly to one who for five y ears now has dwelt where the last view of anyone or anything is on a flat plane — a fond, heartening, distant vision:
The young boy and his high-stepping, pretty little sister appeared again, side-by-side with their ice cream bundle, rising distantly up that hill toward those houses, small figures now, destined to vanish from my view. But there they were, a distant, receding vision, destined to vanish from my happy view of them and from that moment — forever. I wished I could have followed them, seen the rest of their life’s drama — how life would treat both of them, praying for the very best for them as they climbed that hill, getting smaller and smaller.
They will always be walking — her happily marching, him with his bundle — and that glimpse of them will always linger in my memory. Yes that movies will always be running in my mind..
without my ever seeing on the screen of my memory the words…
THE END
19 Cent Notebook 