YESTERDAY, RAKING LEAVES from the driveway with the plastic rake, its long arp, aarp, aaarp sounding animal, I thought of the velociraptors’ barking from the famous movie with velociraptors in it. I saw it on opening weekend, June 1993. That I was there, that I was able to enter the inner sanctum of a movie genius’s brain, and on opening weekend at that!
All that in retrospect, of course. I was there as part of John McNulty’s eleventh birthday party, one of six or seven kids chucking Mike and Ikes and charley-horsing and giggling all throughout. We were little shits, all of us—we were ten, eleven years old, and I forgive us. And yet the dad in the row in front of us turns to me even now and says, piercingly, “You’re ruining this for us.”
Recently my nearly ten-year-old has started moaning as a joke. I should say that the raking sounds have, apparently, put me in mind of these semi-sexual moans too. Jamie knows the sounds have something to do with sex. He knows they make his prudish parents uncomfortable.
“Oh, Jesus,” I say to Sharon. “Is it already time for this?”
And thinking too, in all this, about that evening walk with my older son, Liam, my traveling companion and child of my first marriage, like in the Paul Simon song. Liam is thirteen now, but on the night I’m thinking of he was only nine, and he turned to me and said, “Why did Jesus make this night so beautiful?”
I thought about how that worldview would need tending to eventually, but in the meantime I was touched. Why did Jesus make the nights here so beautiful, soft to the touch? And did I really have a substitute explanation to offer my son? It was wonder, trust, a dawning aesthetic sense, all rolled up in that sonorous name: Jesus.
All these things are happening to me, I thought, and taken together I call them my life. I looked down at Liam and saw that he was looking up at me. It wasn’t a rhetorical question. He wanted to know how the night had become beautiful.
“It is beautiful, isn’t it, love?” I said, dodging the question.
Ryan McIlvain is the author of two novels, most recently The Radicals (Hogarth/Penguin Random House). He is at work on a third novel, a detective story. He teaches at the University of Tampa.
Photo by Wendell Shinn on Unsplash
