THANK YOU, MR. EMERSON by Gerald Berns
Preface
In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first essay Nature was published and was widely read. It immediately established Mr. Emerson as a preeminent American writer, essayist, and thinker. From that period through to today, many scholars consider Mr. Emerson’s work to represent America’s Intellectual Declaration of Independence from England. As such, nature is a vital component of this story.
Chapter One
Men live on the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they can never enter, and with their hand on the doorlatch they die outside. – Mr. Emerson, from a letter to Thomas Carlyle, March, 1838
She came out the side-back door. A week of spring rain had changed everything. The yard glistened and was green, and vibrant color was back in the flower beds and on the shrubs with their blossoms. Though brilliant yellow and orange had been on the citrus trees for weeks, there were now splotches of black and gray on the less hardy oranges and lemons, the ones that had fallen. Decomposing on the ground, it was the annual June Drop, lasting May to July.
If flowers and blossoms and citrus trees and fruit could sing, which they can (it’s rare to meet anyone who can hear them), their sound would be a chant-like hum, more bumblebee than hummingbird, more chorus than choir, more breeze than wind. After the rain-soaking, this one Southern California desert was alive with the chant-like hum.
Horizontal light from the sunset gave the west-facing side of the contemporary two-story desert home a sheen of red and orange and purple all combined. On the north side of the property, its boundary was at the exact edge of the desert. A trail led up a gentle slope for two miles where ancient mounds of hardened earth appeared some ninety feet high. A hundred yards past the last mound was the base of Dragon’s Back ridge running east and west a half-dozen miles in each direction.
North of the ridge were dirt roads, small farms with old shacks, and dusty mobile home parks. A stark contrast to Paul and Susan Winslow's more affluent neighborhood, their home was tucked away and private, their street lined with big trees.
Susan stopped on the flagstone nearest the side-back door. She searched for her car keys. Fingers scrambling in her bag, there was a cricket at her feet. Something else fast and undetectable flew past her ear. Paying no attention to either small creature, she couldn’t find the keys. “Sonofabitch,” she said.
From under a chipped flagstone, she retrieved the spare key. The sun was setting in the west as she unlocked the door. But it was stuck and swollen from the rain. It took three hard shoves to open it. The house was built in the 1980s, and it had a view all the way to the ridge. Susan stepped out the side-back door a second time. She walked briskly around the side of the house to the driveway. Susan backed her Volvo SUV down the driveway and missed the howl of a coyote echoing from the ridge.
Her face was exceptionally attractive, like a movie star's profile. From the start, her beauty had rocked Paul. Four months into the relationship he had confessed that on the first date in the car together he had fallen hard for her. Susan recalled her moment of how and when he had fallen in love.
“The magic happened,” she told him, not in the car but at the park when I changed for the softball game. You saw my bare shoulders and legs for the first time. Me, Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, you a man with a bat in your hand.”
“Bat in Hand,” he said. “Good title for a film.”
Later that day, she took him to a French restaurant and ordered in French. For Susan that had been the precise moment he had fallen in love with her.
For the next week, she made him guess her ancestry, but only if he used a phony foreign accent. It was their first made-up game, one of many that were to come. Finally, he guessed her roots were Irish and French. Playfully, she hit him on the arm, but too hard.
"Ow. You're a Hittite, Susan,” he said. “Who taught you to punch like that?"
“My Irish grandfather. And my mother and grandmother and older sister would scold him. They would yell that he was teaching me to be violent.”
“Four against one. How did he handle that?”
“He escaped down into the basement to watch sports with my father on a very rare day off.”
In the Volvo, as the sun set behind her, she slowed and put on some special music. It was an obscure American movie soundtrack that was a real find. It featured trumpeter Harry James, his jazz trumpet perfectly blending with his Orchestra. She pressed the accelerator and sped off down the country road, and it seemed the music was powering both the car and her imagination. She was looking forward to having Paul home and being affectionate.
