Seeing Red

Take me to the moon.

Listen.  I tell this story how my father tells it; you can take it however you want. It is his story, anyway, at least the way he tells it.  It was the sixties, roll the theme music, the theme music in this case being "She Said She Said" by, yes, The Beatles.  Don't worry, Michael Jackson's dead and McCartney's in a mood to license, an avaricious mood.  So we'll roll "She Said She Said," but no undulating hippie chicks here, we roll Midland Michigan, circa 1965, and there's Dad, test tube to the light, the glasses horn-rimmed, the hair, already, at 22 in retreat.  So there's Dad, and with his test tube he seems the scientist, but he's -- "For No One" starts playing from the horn part at the bridge -- and Dad sees himself in full college marching band regalia, playing the horn part on his cornet.

Except can we step back to interject that maybe Dad didn't exactly have Revolver on his iPod in 1965, for reasons having to do little with the twin anachronisms of Revolver's 1966 release, and, well, the iPod?  Namely see the horn-rims, Dad was no hippie, yet.  Dad was, if not a square, a straight arrow, some kind of rural patriot, Earth salt.  See the regalia from his very own daydream.

But so Dad's there with the test tube thinking, "How did I let that end?"  And in the daydream it's a school fight song.  And in the daydream he's engaged at least twice.  And they are broken off, these engagements, about the point when these women realize he's daydreaming their engagement too long to hold down his chemical weapons job, the one he'll get when they graduate from this daydream, but that he'll lose, not so much for the daydreaming, but for the sort of semi-Buddhistic no-mindedness it suggests.

And maybe I should say that Dad, even in retrospect, would not shoe-horn semi-Buddhistic no-mindedness into his experience, Buddhism, unlike The Beatles, never becoming even his pretend youthful bag.

And so Dad is wondering how he got here, and by this time it's 1969, and Dad's been fired but it doesn't seem to matter because he's also been drafted and here he is, guard duty at some fort in Texas, but it's not some Old West gunslinger desert, as he, Michigan boy, had imagined. No, it's an outpost between quasi-tropical Louisiana and the aforementioned ghost-town desert.  The dust storm drops directly into a swamp.  The alligators wrestle tumbleweed.

But here's Dad standing guard, the weight of his rifle balanced between both hands, the wet heat and the dry heat to his east and to his west, respectively.  And he faces south, but his right side feels just as stifled as his left, the divide being not so cut and dry as to place one foot in a bog, and the other on salty, cracked, gray soil.

Dad finds in guard duty what he never had in the lab: space for exactly the kind of semi-Buddhistic no-mindedness he was of no mind to recognize in 1965 or 1969.  But in this fervor, he did recognize one thing for the first time:  Red.  The color red.  Or, rather, a new shade of the Green he was always told was Red, colorblind as he is or was.  Dad saw red for the first time in the rosebushes outside the General's house, across from the hospital he guarded.  Not that it was red as we the color-sighted see it, nothing brilliant, just an off-green.  But for Dad something beautiful and new. 

Which is when God spoke to him.  Or maybe it's safer to say how God spoke to him.  A demonstration of first principles, a promotion of the essential aesthetics of creation, indeed the createdness of creation, and Dad's place in it as fallen, colorblind man.  So God spoke to Dad, he says.  Which is when he told his CO he wouldn't be killing anyone, and his CO -- played by the same actor as his boss in the Du Pont scene where he was fired for his daydreaming and all that it indicated about his fiber -- his CO said, That's ridiculous, you're not a Quaker.  But it's true, Dad said, and he let it slip, God told me so.

And so next Dad is in the hospital he was guarding, and he is strapped to the bed, because in spite of the pacifism he was preaching not moments before, the Codeine they have given him, or the injection they have given him and say is Codeine, the Codeine is reacting badly.  Dad is reacting badly to the Codeine, but after giving the nurse an Indian Rope Burn and being strapped to this slab he wants nothing more than to make like a fetus because all he can see is Red.  And there's God outside the Universe, but if God is outside the universe, where is God?  Yes, the Ultimate Reality.

When Ringo, who looks no less droopily sad than ever, extends a hand to my father, and they board a moon taxi.  And Dad never comes back.  Dad's released from the hospital and the army on disability and he meets Mom, and they have five extant children, though he'll bring up the SIDS death of a sixth and the miscarriage of a seventh at suddenly very dark occasions like Thanksgiving and baptisms.  And he trots out Mom's Beatles LPs, like they are joint purchases, somehow prior to their meeting.

But Dad never came back from the moon.  So that's why I'm in this taxi.  That's why I'm going to the moon.  To find him.  What's your story?