Around the sun

We’ve taken a trip around the sun since Jim died.

Taking a trip around the sun is a poetic way of saying a year, but, from a mathematical point of view, it’s hard to make sense of it.  While the earth is moving around the sun, the sun is moving in space, so after a year’s time, we don’t close a circle in space; we’ve only closed a circle with respect to a moving coordinate system that has been imposed upon the solar system.  In fact, even that is not true, because planets move in ellipses around the sun, but, if you want to push that, I am sure that other gravitational influences keep it from being a perfect ellipse, or even a closed curve, necessarily.

In any case, we’ve been on a trip since Jim died.  We’ve gone through all of the holidays without him:  Halloween, Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July.  I think April Fool’s Day was the hardest, though.  It was his favorite holiday. We all were just a little bit more alert every April Fool’s during his life. With him gone, this year was hard because of a tiny, irrational hope that his death had just been a fantastic setup for a practical joke.  In my deepest heart, I’d hoped we’d sit down to supper, hear a knock on the door, and there he’d be with a big ‘gotcha.’

I’ve been thinking of him a lot during this latest financial crisis.  Jim was a contrarian, economically speaking.  I might have to explain what that means.  He was always convinced that there was another Great Depression just over the horizon.  When he saw Ronald Reagan elected as president, he bought gold and oil, and I don’t mean oil futures either.  He bought quart cans of oil in preparation for the coming disaster.  Of course, from the point he bought them, the price of each was stable for the next 25 years.

If he’d lived another year to see what has happened, it would’ve added another 10 years to his life.  He’d be buying gold, gasoline, and guns.

I would love to hear his thoughts, but, in a sense, I already do.  He’s never left.  I came home the other day and saw his old blue van parked in the drive next door at 709.  I saw a body disappear behind it and I saw his legs moving beneath it. Was this a ghost, a spirit?

I got out of my car and stepped over there to see. It was his wife Janet.  My mind still has a place for him, and he still occupies it.  It attributes to him things he would do, even if he’s not the one who does them.  His memory is alive within me.

I have the clearest memories of childhood and remember looking at the adults, who, it seemed to me, knew everything, knew how the world worked.  I was comforted to know they would take care of things.  As I’ve grown older, the ones I’ve trusted to take care of things have stepped over:  First my Grampa Sam, then my Grandpa Byrd, and then my father.  There are fewer and fewer people left to take care of things, to run the world.  Like my Aunt Anne down in Davis, Oklahoma says, “We’re getting pretty thin on the ground.”

At the same time, it has occurred to me that maybe some of us kids need to step up and start running the world.  It is a thought, which, when it initially occurred, terrified me because I don’t know how to do anything and I’ve not much confidence in you, either, my friend.

But when I worked my way through the fear, it occurred to me that the folks who were “running the world” when I was a kid didn’t know what they were doing either.  We are a part of something bigger.  The world keeps on turning and moving through space without having to take much advice from me or you.

The flowers dress better than we do; the birds find things to eat.  We’ll do okay too.

Us kids have been, without thinking about it, been running the world.  It not really something you have to think about.  We just sort of slip into it. The generation behind us will have slipped in behind us by the time we step over.

In the mean time, we keep making our circles around the sun even though that’s not what we’re doing.  But that’s okay because that was going on even before we knew.

Bobby Winters is Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Mathematics at Pittsburg State University.