Mobius Road

MOBIUS ROAD

By

J. C. Miller

Mobius road. I’ve been here before. Over and over around the same curves, looking at the same buildings and billboards.I’ve been here before. (Did I say that?)

I’m carrying a giant ball of twine and unwinding it behind me. I tied a green metal coat hanger to the end I dropped. If, after ten miles, I find the same coat hanger, I’ll know for sure, I’ve been down and around this road before.

This circuitous path is a little like my past life, always going to the same places, the same job; returning home, sleeping, and then taking the same path the following day.

The only difference is that my hair has begun to turn gray, what’s left of it.

I pass a cemetery on the way to work each day.I rarely see any changes in its rolling lawns and upright stones, just an occasional hump of brown dirt and another hole. I get the feeling sometimes that the hole-or-holes I see are the next way out—that somehow a different world exists below this one where the roads are continuous; where the roads go on forever; where there are so many new adventures, so many hills, valleys, lakes and streams. One can just keep on going, see new things, taste new foods, hear new sounds, and smell new and unusual flowers, until one somehow gets back to now, and is left with memories of a passing well worth remembering and repeating in the future.

My childhood was a little like this. I would go to school each day. That much was like the Mobius road that always led me home with an armful of new and interesting lessons to finish.

But I could sometimes digress and go down the street to Jerry’s house. We would play with the train set his father laid out on a big piece of plywood. We could see his father’s large collection of rocks and minerals in cabinets and drawers, because his father was a geologist, very concerned about the nature of the earth. (His father worked for a contractor that built roads, by the way).

Or I could go to Robert’s house, just across the street, where his father was building a new addition to the house, all from adobes made of mud from a giant pit he had dug in the back yard. His father laid out grids of boards. He poured straw-laced mud into the grids each day and waited for them to dry. When they were dried, he stacked them into long lines above concrete and rebar ditches he had dug. In time, Robert had a new room of his own. (We had always just played outside before that. I never actually knew he lived in the house until his room was finished!)

Then there were Joe and Jerry Campbell who lived next door. I didn’t play with them very much because they were younger, and they were often very boring. Their mother was often very bored too.

“Oh gee…. Oh gosh…. I wish I had a chocolate cake,” Maxine would sigh, while Joe, Jerry, my brother and I tried to play out back.But it would not last long because Joe and Jerry were not fond of playing with toy cars, toy airplanes or anything much. And they yawned a lot.

The Campbell family moved on after a few years.The house remained vacant for some weeks. Then, it burned down one night. Our father drug himself out of bed late to spray water on the walls and roof of our own house, while the fire crew dealt with the flames next door.

Maybe if it had not been for the gas leak, it would have been more fun playing with Joe and Jerry.

I remember my mother would, from time to time, take pity on poor Maxine, and bake her a chocolate cake. And then the conversation would seem to come alive in the kitchen—sort of.

“What a beautiful drawing, Jane!” Maxine would have just sat for her portrait. My mother drew well and painted beautiful watercolors and oils.

“I appreciate you saying so, Maxine. I’ll give you the drawing, once the oil painting is done.” My mother was planning an expansive larger canvas that would portray the Garden of Eden with Eve sitting under an apple tree, while eating a piece of chocolate cake.The painting was to be called “Temptation Postponed”.

About this same time, my brother fell down and hit his head on the toy box. He didn’t cry. I cried terribly because I was worried for him, even though I often teased him mercilessly because he was younger and I could think of nothing better to do. Mother rushed him down the street, pulling him in my red wagon three blocks to a doctor’s office. The doctor mended the dent in his head with two stitches. He survived, and I went back to teasing him several days later. I stopped doing that the day he threw a pair of pliers at me. He missed, but I didn’t want a successful repeat of the incident.

But I digress. I’m still here with this giant bolt of string. When I look back, I can’t see where I dropped the hanger, so I know I have gone some distance. I keep unwinding string, hoping my beginning point will come into view at some point soon. The weather is hot. The road is long. I’m not getting any younger, you know.

My mother eventually gave Maxine the drawing.She also gave her practice pages of her boys, who sat politely for their portraits. (They were polite because they were probably half-asleep). She also gave them quarter-dollar pieces for remaining still. (She called this “drawing and quartering”).

I sometimes wonder where all my childhood friends have vanished. If this was like any dream of yesterday or tomorrow, I should wind up back in the old neighborhood—and then have to walk another sixty years or so to be where I am now.I’ll stick with memories. My feet are already tired.

I’m passing the cemetery just now. More dirt humps, more holes, and a man with a backhoe smoking a cigar, while listening to loud western music on a portable radio hanging from the dash.

I’m almost near Old Man Grant’s house, so I must be over half-way home. Mr. Grant, a pensioner on social security for many years, is most remembered for the time he tried to rob a bank because he thought his pension was insufficient. Charges were never made because of the strange nature of the circumstances. He wielded a toy squirt gun that looked like the real thing. To disguise himself, and having noticed how crooks on TV always wore stockings over their heads, he donned one of the elastic stockings he wore on his legs for varicose veins. The stocking didn’t allow him to see too well. It was also much too tight, so he passed out before he got to the teller windows to demand his grocery sack be filled with bills. The bank guard resuscitated him. The police came and took him home.

I haven’t encountered any old friends, but I do see the green coat hanger laying in the road ahead. But it’s not in front of my house. I should have weighted it down with a rock. I must have drug it some distance and have already passed my house.

Maybe if I go around again, I’ll find it.

I think I could do with a cup of coffee and a nice sweet piece of chocolate cake by the time I get home. I’m pooped!

END