I have been telling and retelling this story for so long I can’t be sure if I lived it or if it lived me. Truth can be stranger than fiction for sure and fiction can reveal truths that never happened at all. StoryTellers have been exploring that foggy never-land for as long as there has been story.
In my upstairs bedroom, in our old, clapboard farmhouse on Blue Ridge, it got unbearably hot. So I would take a sheet and pillow down under the locust trees in our front yard, to an Adirondack lawn chair my dad had made from scrap boards. I slept soundly, stirring occasionally to whining tires on the Ridge or the wail of a steam whistle down on the K.C. Southern line. One pitch dark night I woke up to a bright light shining down through the treetops. A voice called down, “LeRoy, LeRoy, are you down there?” That was when I went by my middle name. The light was too bright and the dark was too dark, I couldn’t see a thing. “LeRoy, wake up!” I mumbled something and squinted my eyes. “LeRoy, when you were born you were left here on Earth by mistake. You are not one of them.” I understood what the voice had said but too muddled to reply, I just sat there. “We have missed you. It is time for you to come home with us so we can all be together again.”
I thought about Superman, come to earth from another planet, adopted by good people. Could it be? I didn’t have any super powers but there have been many times when I felt like an alien. I asked how I would get up to them and the voice came back, “We will throw down a ladder.” Just then, as I stood up, the porch light came on. My mom called out; “Is everything alright out here?” I said that it was. She turned off the light and went back inside. The bright light and the voice, they were gone. That hot summer night was enough to sprout the seed, to beg the question: am I an alien? I always sensed I was different; had I been left here by mistake?
It is a recurring dream, not too often but enough, enough to keep begging the question. “Was I left behind by mistake?” If I could phone home like E.T. I wold still be dialing. I wondered if my search party would ever come back. I still wonder. Seventy earth years later, I wonder. I have acclimated to Earth and human culture, not that it fits like a glove but I manage. People get transplanted erroneously all the time here and they manage. The ugly duckling outgrew its paradox, reunited with other longneck swans, a happy ending. But I never outgrew the ‘Human’ look.
In my lifetime, through 14 presidents, through major wars and undeclared hostilities, through Jim Crow, through unmitigated nationalism, through millions of innocent victims, untold crimes against humanity; occasionally something good unfolds. They finally let women vote and fatherhood is no longer license to beat your family. But women are still exploited openly and domestic abuse runs unchecked just under the radar.
In my lifetime, technology has made the leap from a flathead Ford V8 to soft landings on Mars, from aspirin to laser surgery. One would think, with evolved brain power, we would naturally become better people. But as we employ better physics and chemistry, every generation must reinvent the wheel of human interactions, over and again. I am feeling alien, with no recourse. We are stuck in a repeating cycle of arrested development. Civilization is bogged down if not stuck with the emotional balance and poise of a 3 year-old. Poets and peaceful souls, they babble platitudes and proverbs as if someone were taking it to heart. Their wisdom falls on anxious ears but with every important decision, the petulant 3 year-old is called in to prevail. All it lacks is experience and reason, no empathy only apathy, no patience only distain.
As wonderful as it seems, the curse of intellect and reason is that they only comprehend and recommend. At the end of the conversation, a self righteous 3 year-old has to decide. I am feeling alien to this planet and its people. When I go to the bank I drive by the old place. The old, clapboard house is gone with a modern one story in its place. The old trees have given way to new trees. Still, every time, I note the spot where, on hot summer nights, the Adirondack chair used to cradle me and the question begs itself again. “LeRoy, are you there?”
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