“What?”
“Bang! I deliver your packages, pick up packages, bring you coffee, dump your trash, run to the post office, telegraph office, library! You’ll see me in and out, in and out, every minute. Feel those shoes, Mr. Sanderson, feel how fast they’d take me? Feel all the running inside? Feel how they don’t like you just standing there? Feel how quickly I’ll be doing all those things for you? You stay in the nice cool store while I’m jumping all around town! But it’s not me really, it’s the shoes. They’re going like mad down alleys, cutting corners, and back!”
The flow of the words carried Mr. Sanderson, and he began to sink deep in the shoes, to flex his toes, test his ankles. He rocked softly, secretly, back and forth in a small breeze from the open door. The tennis shoes silently sank themselves deep in the carpet, as in a jungle grass. Emotions ran over his face as if many colored lights had been switched on and off. Slowly he rocked himself to a halt, and the boy stopped talking, and they stood there looking at each other in a wonderful and natural silence.
“Boy,” said the old man at last, “in five years, how would you like a job selling shoes in this Emporium?”
“Gosh, thanks, Mr. Sanderson, but I don’t know what I’m going to be yet.”
“Anything you want to be, son,” said the old man, “you’ll be. No one will ever stop you.”
The old man walked lightly across the store to the wall of shoe boxes, came back with the tennis shoes for the boy, and wrote up a list on some paper while the boy was lacing the shoes on his feet and then standing there, waiting.
The old man gave him his list. “A dozen things you got to do for me this afternoon. Finish them, we’re even, and you’re fired.”
“Thanks, Mr. Sanderson!” Douglas jumped away.
“Stop!” cried the old man.
Douglas stopped and turned.
“How do they feel?” Mr. Sanderson asked.
The boy looked down at his feet deep in the rivers, in the fields of wheat, in the wind that already was rushing him out of the town. He looked up at the old man.His eyes were burning, but no sound came out of his mouth.
“Antelopes?” said the old man, looking from the boy’s face to his shoes. “Gazelles?”
The boy thought about it and nodded a quick nod. Almost immediately he vanished. The door stood empty. The sound of the tennis shoes faded in the jungle heat.
Mr. Sanderson stood in the sun-lit up door, listening. From a long time ago, when he dreamed as a boy, he remembered the sound. Beautiful creatures leaping under the sky, gone through bushes, under trees, away, and only the soft echo of their running left behind.
“Antelopes,” said Mr. Sanderson. “Gazelles.”
He picked up the boy’s winter shoes, left behind, heavy with forgotten rains and long-melted snows. Moving out of the hot sun, walking softly, lightly, slowly, he turned back toward civilization…
Tom’s statistics gave Douglas a fresh idea. He decided to write down all the things they usually did every summer in one part of his yellow nickel notebook, under the title RITES AND CEREMONIES, and in the other part he was going to register things they did for the first time. The title of that part was DISCOVERIES AND REVELATIONS.
“Like eating olives?” Tom asked.
“More important than that. Like finding out maybe that Grandpa and Dad don’t know everything in the world.”
“They know every dam’ thing there is to know, and don’t you forget it!”
“Tom, don’t argue, I’ve already written it down under Discoveries and Revelations. They don’t know everything. But it’s no crime. That I discovered, too.”
“What other new crazy stuff you got in there?”
“I’m alive.”
“Heck, that’s old!”
“Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don’t watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really. In other words, you do an old familiar thing, like bottling dandelion wine, and you put that under RITES AND CEREMONIES. And then you think about it, and what you think, crazy or not, you put under DISCOVERIES AND REVELATIONS. Here’s what I got on the wine: Every time you bottle it, you got a whole lump of 1928 put away, safe. How do you like that, Tom?”
“Can’t say I got it at all.”
“Well, here’s another. Under CEREMONIES I got: First argument and licking of Summer 1928 by Dad, morning of June 24th. Under REVELATIONS I got: The reason why grown-ups and kids fight is because they belong to separate races. Look at them, different from us. Look at us, different from them. Separate races, and never the two shall meet.”
“Doug, you hit it, you hit it! That’s right! That’s exactly why we don’t get along with Mom or Dad. Trouble, trouble, from sunrise to supper! Boy, you’re a genius!”
“So, when you see something done over and over, tell me. Think about it, and tell me that.”
“I got a statistic for you right now. Take your pencil, Doug. There are five billion trees in the world. I looked it up. Under every tree is a shadow, right? So, then, what makes night? I’ll tell you: shadows crawling out from under five billion trees! If only we could find a way to keep those dam five billion shadows under those trees, we could stay up half the night, Doug, because there’d be no night! There you are; something old, something new.”
“That’s old and new, all right.” Douglas licked his favorite yellow pencil. “Say it again.”
“Shadows are under five billion trees…”
Summer was full of rituals, each with its natural time and place. The ritual of lemonade or ice-tea making, the ritual of wine, shoes, or no shoes, and at last, the ritual of the front-porch swing.
On the third day of summer in the late afternoon Grandfather came out from the front door and looked at the two empty rings in the ceiling of the porch. He moved to the geranium-pot-lined rail, wet his finger to test the wind, and took off his jacket to see how it felt in shirt sleeves in the evening. He answered the salutes of other captains on yet other flowered porches, out themselves to see if it was warm enough, deaf to their wives chattering behind black porch screens.
“All right, Douglas, let’s set it up.”
They found the swing chair in the garage, dusted it, brought it to the porch, and Grandpa chained it to the porch-ceiling rings. The swing was, in fact, the most important thing for the quiet summer-night festivals.
Douglas, being lighter, was first to sit in the swing. Then, after a moment, Grandfather cautiously settled his pontifical weight beside the boy. Thus they sat, smiling at each other, nodding, as they swung silently back and forth, back and forth.
Ten minutes later Grandma appeared with water buckets and brooms to wash down and sweep off the porch. Other chairs, rockers and straight-backs, were brought from the house.
“Always like to start sitting early in the season,” said Grandpa, “before the mosquitoes thicken.”
About seven o’clock various sounds could be heard from the house: the chairs scraping back from the tables, someone experimenting with a yellow-toothed piano, matches being struck, the first dishes bubbling in the suds