Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle (3 page)

In the summer and fall of 1960, Jack and I spent hours discussing, with the unparalleled wisdom of 10-year-olds, the possibilities that awaited the first men to penetrate the vastness of the cosmos. NASA, created only two years before, could have benefitted greatly from the rich science of our boyish imaginations, if only they'd known we were available to them. Sadly undiscovered, we nonetheless outlined the dangers, enumerated the possibilities, and created, based on our knowledge (gleaned primarily from comics and the aforementioned Tom Swift novels), the best course of action for the lucky pioneers of the last frontier. When, on April 12 of 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, we celebrated his victory over gravity with Pepsi-Cola drunk from appropriately missile-shaped bottles and a recreation of the event in our very ownVostok I made from three O-Boy lettuce cartons and copious amounts of aluminum foil purloined from our mothers' kitchens. While our parents murmured unhappily about the Soviets' early lead in the space race, we knew only that Gagarin had fulfilled our dreams, and was therefore worthy of becoming our hero. He held the position for less than three weeks, when we unceremoniously dethroned him for our country's very own Alan B. Shepard. This time our relieved parents threw a backyard cookout in celebration of America's success. Rechristening our ship Freedom 7 , Jack and I gloried in the power that was NASA, lying side by side in the cramped confines of the boxes and soaring together toward the moon while our fathers drank beer and our mothers dished up potato salad and hot dogs. We dreamed of one day being chosen to lead the charge to Mars, or Venus, and promised one another that we would do it as a team. Afterward, we dashed around the yard holding sparklers bought for the Fourth of July but broken out early. Spinning them in crackling circles of silver and gold, we were two comets hurtling with carefree abandon on dizzying trajectories through the early spring evening. The friendship of boys is a powerful and mysterious thing. To the observer looking in from the outside, it may appear little more than a social contract, and to some extent it is. Boys, especially when young, form friendships based on nothing more than the proximity of their houses, a mutual appreciation of a sporting team, or even a shared enemy. Ask an 11-year-old boy why his best friend is his best friend, and you'll likely receive a shrug and an "I don't know" in response. Ask the same question of an 11-year-old girl, and the reply will be not only heartfelt but built around an extensive list of thoroughly-explored reasons. Despite the seeming simplicity of the bond between boys, the core of the relationship is as complex as any advanced mathematical proof. Even the boys themselves may not understand why it is they seek companionship with one another. "I don't know" is, in fact, an honest answer. Rare is the adolescent boy who will look at you and, with measured tones, say, "I guess he's my best friend because when I'm with him I forget about all of the millions of self-doubts and insecurities I have. Oh, and even though I don't really understand it, knowing that he likes me makes me feel good about who I am."

Jack and I were no different. We gave little thought to what we were to one another. We just knew that we were best friends, even if we had yet to define what that meant. And we were to have two more years of innocent bliss during which things just were, without reason or motivation. But a funny thing happens in the twilight time around 13. The skin of boyhood begins to feel a little too small, and the soul starts to itch as it expands and the body follows. As legs grow too long for the pants of youth and wrists extend beyond the cuffs of shirts that fit only a week before, the world takes on strange new shapes, as if only now are the eyes coming fully into focus. Seemingly overnight, what seemed safe and familiar is revealed as foreign and filled with perils.

We were no exceptions to this rule. As 11 turned to 12, and 12 to 13, the very molecules of our bodies rearranged themselves. Voices deepened, muscles thickened, hair and new scents burst forth from beneath skin suddenly teeming with mysteries. Changing for gym class, we and the other boys stole anxious glances at one another, searching for evidence that we were not alone. This, in turn, gave rise to new anxieties as we began to compare and contrast the shifting geographies hidden beneath our clothes. Seeing someone further along in the process of adulthood made us question our own progress, filling our minds with a host of doubts and imagined failures.

I say "we" because I have the benefit of looking back with the surety provided by more than half a century of life. Almost certainly we were, to a boy, in the throes of agony caused by the machinery of previously-dormant gonads thrown into production, of glands and ducts dripping intoxicating elixirs into our blood that turned us mad and betrayed us in terrible ways. It is the rare boy who escapes the deliciously malevolent torture of becoming a man, and although nearly unbearable at the time, the end results are almost always worth the hardships.

And so we suffered in 1963, alone but together, the boys of the seventh grade class of James Buchanan Junior High School. Even our grade level was symbolic of our position, sandwiched as it was between the relative safety of the sixth and the restless excitement of the eighth, the springboard into what we believed (wrongly, we would find out soon enough) the total freedom of high school. Trapped in this limbo, we wandered the halls of a school named for the only Pennsylvanian to hold the highest office in the land. Buchanan, incidentally, was also the only bachelor president, a fact which might have comforted a few of us had we understood its potential significance to our own lives. At the time, we were too preoccupied with being embarrassed about everything to care. We were a group of little wolves, men disguised as boys, trying to both remain a pack and forge our own paths. We pretended to be ready to take on anything, all the while scared to death that we would fail. We staged mock battles in the guise of football games and science club experiments, fighting for the chance to be king, if only for a moment, the other boys our grudgingly worshipful subjects until it was their turn. Most of all, we rode the swells of our emotions up one side and down another, startled at the ferocity of our feelings.

In the midst of all this, on the afternoon of Friday, November 22, as we impatiently awaited the arrival of Thanksgiving vacation and the promise of pumpkin pie, the world came to a standstill with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. People of my age are frequently asked if they remember what they were doing when they heard that Kennedy had been shot. I do, of course, for more than one reason. It was a little past two o'clock, and I was standing in the locker room of the school's gym. I was looking, but trying not to, at the penis belonging to a boy with the unfortunate name of William Williams. We called him, of course, Bill. Tall and beginning to fill out with the muscles that would make him the formidable man he eventually became, Bill was the current frontrunner in the race in which we were all feverishly participating. I was pulling my T-shirt over my head, using the opportunity to peer from beneath its temporary shield for a lingering look at what hung between Bill's legs and comparing it, unfavorably, to what lay cradled in the cup of my jockstrap. It was the last class period of the day, the only thing standing between us and a week free from classes, textbooks, and tests. There were two new Hardy Boys novels awaiting me at home, and for that brief moment even the looming threat of dodgeball and the victory of Bill's superior penis over mine couldn't bring me down.

Then Coach Stellinger walked in, his ever-present clipboard held at his side, and asked for our attention. We listened as, tears flowing from his eyes, he informed us of the death of the man who had promised to bring about a brave new world. School, he said in a voice shaking with unconcealed sadness, was to be dismissed early so that we could return to our families for comfort. We were told to get dressed and report to our homerooms as quickly as possible.

I walked home with Jack through a world that seemed to have come to a standstill. The policeman who waved us across the street had cheeks wet with grief, and even the dogs in the yards were quiet as we passed, as if they knew that life had forever changed. We stopped first at Jack's house and, finding it empty, went on to mine, where we discovered our mothers in the kitchen, teacups untouched as they awaited further news—any news—that would reverse time and make everything all right again. That night Jack was allowed to sleep over, and instead of our usual arrangement of sleeping bags downstairs, we shared my bed. In the darkness, the moonlight illuminating the model rocket ships that hung from the ceiling, we talked awkwardly of our feelings about the murder of a man we didn't know, but whose loss we understood to be great.

I don't recall the words we exchanged. What I remember is the feeling of Jack's body next to mine. We'd slept together before, but that night it felt like the first time. Perhaps, electrified by the nation's shared heartache, I was filled as with the Holy Ghost, my soul expanding beyond reason and amplifying every feeling. When Jack's leg brushed against mine as he shifted beneath the blanket, I held my breath, both wanting the moment to end and wanting it to go on forever. When he didn't move, the warmth of his skin seared itself into me. His words became meaningless, and mine back to him instantly forgotten. My head swam with feelings of loss coupled with a growing excitement I couldn't explain. Horrified, I felt myself growing hard, and was instantly ashamed. I shut my eyes and willed myself to think about the president, his head burst open and his blood spilling across the pink field of Jackie's lap as her screams rent the air. Like a martyr tempted and beseeching God for aid, I looked into her face and asked for forgiveness.

Beside me, Jack faded into sleep. As he did, his hand slipped from where it rested on his chest and fell atop mine. I let it stay there, the beat of his heart transferred to me through his fingertips, until eventually I was overcome by tiredness and confusion and my mind saved itself by rendering me unconscious. My sleep that night was filled with visions of many things, of gunshots and people running in blind panic, of Bill Williams gently soaping his chest beneath a spray of water, of rockets and falling angels. When I woke up, I knew that not only the world, but I had changed forever. Next to me, Jack was on his side, turned away and snoring gently. I resisted an urge to put my arm around him and pull him close, my chest to his back. Instead, I turned away, pressing my hands against my belly as if in prayer. It was then I discovered that my pajamas were stained with the milkiness of dreams.

I often tell my first-year students that when attempting to understand history, it's crucial to ask yourself what the defining moments are. They nod in agreement, as if this is something they themselves have stated repeatedly to their friends. Then I ask them to name some of these moments. Inevitably, they rattle off a predictable list of battles, or discoveries, or inventions, and label these the points at which civilization took the next great leap forward: the harnessing of electric power, the ascendance of George of Hanover to the throne of England, the bombing of Hiroshima. These, they tell me with confidence, are the pivots on which the course of history has turned.

I then inform them, gently but firmly, that they are wrong. I tell them that the examples that they've listed are the manifestations of the turning points. The actual points themselves occurred earlier, probably in unremarkable places and under mundane circumstances, and will in most cases never be publicly known. They occurred in laundries, on trains, and in the holds of ships. They occurred while someone was standing on a hilltop in winter looking at the falling snow and thinking that it might provide excellent cover for an early-morning assault on the camp of the enemy below, in a bed where one or the other of a pair of sated lovers suggested that life might be more agreeable if an inconvenient spouse were done away with, and during a tedious sermon when an uncomfortable congregant's attention turned from the glory of God to the problem of ill-fitting trousers.

These seemingly unimportant moments, noticed by none but those to whom they happen, are the real history of the world. The parts seen by the rest of us, the results documented in artworks, written about in poetry, and celebrated in songs and statues, are the outcome of individual decisions. The bombing of Hiroshima, although spectacular and dreadful, would not have occurred unless someone somewhere had decided that the best way to get the attention of Japan's leaders was to present them with a display so terrible as to wipe away every trace of hope they held of victory, regardless of the human loss. The instant that decision was made and steps were taken to realize it is the instant at which history was made, not the well-documented moment when bombardier Thomas Ferebee pulled the lever that released Little Boy from the belly of theEnola Gay .

My students, when I tell them these things, look at me in either surprise or anger. It has never occurred to them that their field of interest is based almost entirely on moments they can never truly be witness to. They resent this deeply. They are bitter over the fact that although they can read numerous and lively accounts of the French Revolution and the role of the sans-culottes in bringing the monarchy of Louis XVI to its bloody, headless end, they can't possibly know the exact moment when the first laborer decided enough was enough and chose to do something about it. They cannot, no matter how much they read, know what possessed the first person to eat an oyster to suck such a peculiar creature from its shell, or what sequence of events (the sudden desire to go for a walk to escape the tedium of a boring text? an invitation from a friend? an attempt to impress a love interest?) led to Tycho Brahe's observation of a solar eclipse in 1560 and inspired him to abandon his studies of philosophy and law for a journey through the heavens. They want what they call history to be comprised of things that can be measured, about which they can write theses and dissertations, about which there is proof. But history is not really about such things. It's about the inner workings of the human heart and mind that steer individuals in new directions, resulting in action and reaction. Wars are not really about armies and guns and strategies so much as they are about the motivations and fears of the people who wage them. The rise and fall of civilizations, while of course affected by natural disaster, plague, and other tangibles, are ultimately brought about by the greed and honor, the dreams and neuroses, of the populace. Who really knows how many cities were razed because some ancient warlord, rebuffed by a pretty girl when he was 15, sought a direction for his shame and cloaked it in the glory of territorial expansion. Or how many symphonies were written when a composer, frustrated at a rival's accolades, was spurred to compose what he later claimed was an ode to joy instead of the teeth-gnashing expression of irritation at the fickleness of success it truly was.