I’d never write anything of what I’m going to write were it not for the incentive provided by literature.  Danville used to be, basically, our father’s restaurants, the golf courses, and Schlarman high school.  For us, there were no churches in Danville: for us church was St. Mary’s in Westville and the rest could just as well go to hell.

But slowly, things began to change, thanks in no small part to Mona’s mariage into a family no one would ever have dreamt possible to associate with.  Everything that has happened since that marriage cannot be understood unless one admits that there at the beginning, nobody was ready, or willing, to metabolize such an event.  It was a shock, it was a surprise, it was on the order of pure chance, the clinamen of ancient Greek philosophy. 

So my boys and I were invited to the Elghammer home to have lunch, or perhaps it was referred to as brunch, perhaps giving it the relative weight it deserved in some quarters.  Helen nudged me several times, pointing out how exceptional someone had to be in order to spin off, over the years, such an incredible hearth.  The boys had no eye whatsoever for this sort of thing, but that would come later, much later, in other European contexts for them.  Too bad we all have to endure going through stages.

We were introduced to Doctor Elghammer’s penknife, and learned, much to our surprise, that no end of people were falling on the sidewalks all over the place in dire need of tracheotomy, and that in these cases they could count on superman to arrive on the scene with a deadly sharp pocket-knife able to turn the trick and slit those poor people’s throats, thus saving them for a life of inequality.  Welcome to the Elghammer scene!

Helen took time off to go upstairs for a pee, and came back down with an eyefull of the resplendid beauty of the young southern belle Doris.  The hallway upstairs was lined with pictures of one of the seven wonders of the world: a young strongt-willed, knock-down gorgeous woman whose horizon was, basically, the sky’s the limit.  Helen knows a lot about the irony life reserves for this kind of pregnancy,not the ordinary kind, but that of individual promise.  We were caught up in the drama.

Outside, there were fireworks provided by the master of ceremonies, but the key to the moment was going down to the creek, or stream, or whatever you wish to call it (I imagine that when the Elghammer’s were young, they wouldn’t have appreciated hearing it termed a creak) and, a few moments later, hearing Dick say (it may have been a year or two later) that those moments “down by the riverside” were the most precious moments of their childhood.  It’s difficult to make such a confession live in the lives of people who have never lived with something similar, except if you hit upon that similar thing in the course of reading or movie-going, for example.  This has happened to me, and I wanted to share it.  I had a by now mytholigical habit of going down to a creek under a bridge with my mother, and, accordingly to the story, was submitted to non-stop story-telling and commentary on the seasons, on snow, on grasshoppers, weeping willows, and horrible things that happened before that corner of the world got faith.  I remember, surrounded by offspring who then preferred 50 Cent and Eminem to any such natural haunt, being jealous of the Elghammer kids, for that place, indented and sunk like what my dad could only describe as a sand trap with regard to the proud superior position of the rest of the property, residence included, to be able to set out for adventures and stories they alone would be privy to, in the not perfect silent presence of a body of water that would never betray them.