Deep blue

It was a time between times—there was enough for me to stay at school without going home. So, like other teenagers have been spending leftover time for generations, I hopped in the back of my truck and made myself comfortable. With the back lid propped up and my feet dangling from the fender, I was in a position to observe and absorb.

The orange and green trees, along with a small, plain garage served as the foreground of my stage for sight: a great, big, Texas sky with only a few low clouds bordering the horizon—a sky between skies. I guess you could consider it empty as a result of being cloudless, but to me it seemed full of something else. When I looked hard into the deep blue, it started to move and I saw shapes and thought of cells and biology class. In trying to see invisible stars through the daylight, I saw other figments that might not have been in the sky but were real enough for my eyes.

Now I did see a strange white dot moving almost too slowly in a descending arc from the top of my view...a satellite during the day? It must have been broadcasting dusty soap operas or professional bowling. I saw it better with one eye than two and held up my keychain, so as not to lose track of it if I blinked. Once it finally submersed into the graying bottom of the blue, I decided to hunt for more air traffic in the big sky country, catching small white planes in the ring of my keychain as they raced through space until they, too, disappeared into the deep blue.

I found that although it is immeasurably easier to cage a flying bird than a flying plane, it was much more difficult to for me capture one of the former within the sightlines of my keychain. Yes, commercial airliners can cross oceans, but blackbirds can twitter and swoop and dance elusively around my imaginary ocular enclosure like naturals, which they are. And geese, whose flight paths are considerably more predictable, span thousands of miles each year but can still ruffle their feathers and make little geese in the springtime. This was a comforting indication to me that more aspects of life remain inimitable by human science.

But back to planes—the sky was full of them. Each one left behind a great sweeping sound while passing overhead. The faraway swoosh of white wings thousands of feet above the roof of my school was both wistful and soothing. Another joy I felt was that of anyone who has ever played a perfect game of hide and seek, without ever letting their gender be reduced to “it”: to those unsuspecting passengers careening through the atmosphere aboard 757s, I whispered, “I seee you.” And the blackbirds in the orangegreen trees laughed and danced and crooned background music all the while.

These moments cannot last, though, and after a long nap and some more sky hunting, my time was no longer between the two it had been before. Coach Gillum walked over and asked rather amusedly, “Why are you sitting in the back of your truck?”
To me, the answer seemed like common knowledge: “’Cause it’s great.” Coach looked around the truck’s interior—a skateboard, a box of tissues, a mound of uniforms, a red backpack, and me. “Uh...no, it ain’t.” And I just smiled and smiled.