There was a field behind our house when we were kids. We called it The Field, but it was really a farm. What was left of a farm, anyway. Just a small scrap of acreage surrounded by suburbia on three sides and forest preserve on the fourth, but to us it was A Field. The herds of deer that communed there at dawn and dusk were like something straight out of a Disney movie. During the summer the air above The Field was lit up by thousands and thousands of lightning bugs. They were so unbelievably numerous; there was only a matter of inches between each impossible glow. Like the warm night sky had somehow drifted down to cover our neighborhood like a blanket, putting the stars suddenly within reach. We never collected the lightning bugs in jars like kids always did in stories -- there was no need. All you had to do was sweep your arm through the air and then just watch them shimmer in your cupped hands. To this day it's still one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. True magic. I couldn't understand how we could be so lucky to have such a thing in our own backyard.
We were devastated when the farmer finally sold The Field to developers. The bulldozers came in and pulled down the trees and scared away the deer and flattened the tall grasses that used to whisper as they moved in the breeze. The lightning bugs never returned.
The machines worked relentlessly, pushing the earth up into great mounds that shed rainwater and mud directly into our basements. The new houses stared straight down into our backyards like disinterested, judgmental spectators with square unblinking eyes.
Still, we were children and we were adventurous, and we salvaged what we could from the situation. We explored every inch of those houses as they were being built, first stepping through the skeletons and trying to imagine seeing walls instead of sky; then sneaking in through unlocked doors and windows, creeping up half-finished stairways to stampede down roughed-in hallways in a race to claim the best bedroom. This was important, you must understand, because we shared a very deep and abiding dream about Upstairs Bedrooms. We had long been of the opinion that the deepest, truest magic of Christmas would be revealed to us only when we were able to tumble from our beds at dawn on Christmas morning and race down a proper staircase to the living room, which would of course have a proper fireplace with a proper mantel from which to hang our stockings. Those stairs, that fireplace...they were better than anything Santa could have left us under the tree. The bare bones of those new houses made it so real that we could almost hear our dad's old Christmas albums on an imaginary record player.
Oftentimes our dad would join us on our adventures. The second-youngest son in a large and loving-but-poor Irish family, he showed us how to collect slugs from the sawdust and debris and then use them to buy Cokes from vending machines. He made us promise not to go into the houses once the walls were up, and never into any house when it started to get dark. Never alone. Ever. But he didn't have to tell us that part. We were never alone. We were us.
One day we came across another man from the neighborhood. Dad stopped to be neighborly, but mostly they just stood in the sawdust and mud, sighing heavily and shuffling their feet as they stared bitterly down into our backyard. No doubt they were thinking grimly of the mud they'd be mopping up after the next thunderstorm. My dad made a wry comment about something having to do with all of the construction, something along the lines of: "Look at all of those [somethings]." The other man laughed with little humor and then said something I'll never forget. He said, "Yeah, they've got more [somethings] than
Carter's got little pills." I had no idea what it meant -- I thought it must have something to do with Jimmy Carter's liver -- but my dad laughed long and hard. He explained it to me later, and I treasured that clever bit of adult dialogue like a jewel in my mouth.
I don't know why that phrase has stayed with me, but it's a part of me now. It rises up from my subconscious at odd moments, sometimes only once every few years, but it's always when I'm contemplating large quantities of something. I'll find myself muttering it under my breath. It returned today like those cicadas that awaken once every 16 years, found me on my back deck in what is probably the next-to-last bit of summer warmth. I was refilling my goldfinch feeders and enjoying the sunlight when I said, to nobody in particular, "Man. I've got more thistle shells than Carter's got little pills." It bubbled up from deep inside of me unbidden, forgotten and unfamiliar until the moment I heard the words in my own voice. And just like that I was 8 years old again, holding my father's hand on a cold spring day and walking beside him through the ghost of somebody else's home.
Isn't it funny, the things that stay with us?
