Digges Deborah - The Stardust Lounge: stories from a boys adolescence

Midday, midsummer. Iowa City. Stephen and I are waiting for our clothes to dry at the Bloomington Street Laundromat. Charles is away at summer camp.

When we arrived at the laundry, unloaded our baskets, and hauled them inside we heard something familiar, the clear, resonant sound of a cello, a young man practicing while his clothes go through the washer and dryer.

The first time we discovered the cellist at the Laundromat this past fall, twelve-year-old Charles had been undone with excitement. Mom, he'd whispered to me, this is a painting! I've got to do some sketches!

As the cellist plays, the few of us here are listeningthe attendant, an older couple passing through. In the parking lot their Air stream trailer glints in the sun. Its license plates read Idaho.

Just outside the entrance five-year-old Stephen enacts a game in which, from time to time, he whirls and crouches,brandishing his favorite blanket at an imaginary foe. A flock of sparrows anting in the dust nearby rises and circles and resettles each time he sweeps close to them.

I fold the boys bright shirts and shorts, our old, comfortable towels, mismatched socks, an ordinary activity made sacred in light of the music. The cellist plays through to the end of a piece. Then he sets his instrument aside and unloads his clothes from the dryer.

As I ready to carry our baskets to the car, the woman of the Airstream trailer comes over to me and touches my arm.

Is that your little boy? she asks, nodding toward Stephen, who kneels now, quiet in the strangeness of the silence the music created. He stares toward the sparrows taking wings full of dust into their feathers.

Yes, I answer. His name is Stephen.

He'sShe stops. There is something special about him, isn't there? I've been watching him. May I lay my hand on his head?

I must look confused, because the woman offers quickly, My husband and I are both professors of parapsychology. We study psychic phenomena. We've been traveling across country on a lecture tour. Now we're on our way home

I see, I offer, trying to hide my skepticism.

My name is Beth. What's yours?

Deborah.

Is it all right if I touch him?

If Stephen doesn't mind.

Stephen? the woman says softly as she moves toward him and kneels. Stephen, my name is Beth. She places her hand on his head.

Hi, Beth, Stephen says easily. I'm Thteve. He smiles, revealing his missing teeth as he looks into her face.

As I see it, the stars were once nameless, and the days and the months of the year. Then they had many names, the names we gave them and forgot and misremembered. They fell in and out of their own timing, the seasons particular to the angle of the light, the pitch of the planetby the laws of gravity earth's one moon decided the tides.

Maybe with people it is different. Certain people emanate something other, some newness, time or timelessness. They enlighten or shadow others. It is in them and little gets in its way.

So it is with a woman named Beth and a child with a lisp who calls himself Thteve at the threshold of the laundromat one summer day in Iowa, a moment I'll remember, a moment so many others will fall into to lose themselves or find direction.

Beth is kneeling. She is laying her hand on my son's blond head and nodding. Oh, yes, she says as she smooths his hair and stands. She touches my arm. Deborahyour Stephen? He'll know a higher turn in the spiral.

Stephen in Iowa, 1983

Thirteen-year-old Stephen has run away again. He's out there somewhere with his gang, all of them dressed for the dark in black-hooded sweatshirts, oversized team jackets, ball caps, baggy pants that ride low on their hips. Inside their pockets they hold on to guns, switchblades. Recently Stephen has shaved part of his right eyebrow.

It's about 4:00 A.M., late September. I'm in my study on the east side of our brownstone apartment house in Brookline, Massachusetts, three stories above the street.

Maybe Stephen can see that my study light is on. I imagine him looking up from one of the condemned train cars shot-out windows in the rubble field not far from us, looking up to this coin of light like a lighthouse beacon in one of my mother's favorite hymns.

But Stephen would protest he is no flailing ship. He is Henry Martin, the youngest of three brothers in the Scottish ballad I used to read to him, Henry Martin, who became the robber of the three, having drawn the losing lot.