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Heaven Roosted There

10/20/2015

 
Picture






















by
No Sweat

     Hardly anyone noticed the pigeons on the bridge. That steel structure had dripped the colors of orange, blue, lime and silver but now it was cedar green. Sometimes I thought of it as though it were some kind of stretched steel dinosaur. And there were times, I suppose because of all those intricate interconnecting braces silhouetting against the sky, it seemed like a giant spider web. I'd been born near that bridge and had lived there all my life and on this day, my tenth birthday, well, heaven roosted there.
     The railroad tracks that I was balancing on were a just short distance over the hill from the back of my little apartment. The tracks led under the bridge where there was this splintery telephone pole that was on a slope just up from the Kentucky river flowing in its liquid jade waters. That pole reminded me of Jesus' cross. Only there were boards up above that pole, a catwalk, running  above the wires and insulators. Last week, at the base of the pole I had propped a board.
     The bridge overhead didn't go very far before it ended and ran into the Main Street of my home town, Irvine, Kentucky. Hardly anyone had a TV and every Saturday night my grandfather, the owner of the theater, played a scary movie for the crowd. Tonight, his neon marquee advertised: "BRIDES OF DRACULA." 
     My mom was up the hill from me sitting high in her small chair at the entrance of the theater. She owned mysterious grey eyes and could look at you just like Ava Gardner. She always seemed happy and enjoyed talking to the customers and laughing with them while sitting in her glassed in ticket booth. I knew she was selling tickets for twenty five cents and that my grandfather was collecting them as the customers came through the door. Mom probably thought I was sitting where always sat, in the middle seat of the front row.  But if I wasn't there, she had to figure that I was asleep on our back porch.  
     I had been planning for a long time when I propped that board against the telephone pole. The flashlight I'd gotten for my birthday was tied off from my belt when I lunged up the board making a desperate grab, the tips of my fingers just reaching where they had to be. I had dreamed of doing what I was doing and now that I was in that dream it felt strange. If I tore my clothes or dropped the flashlight my father would surely find out. That, inevitably, would lead to a whipping with one of those leather belts that he had hanging down on the inside of the closet door in his bedroom. 
     My father was a strong man, an ex-Merchant Mariner. He looked like Robert Mitchum and ran a fruit stand on the street across from the theater. During the summers, every other Saturday night, like tonight, he would leave in his truck for Georgia.  A few days later, he would return with crates of peaches or a load of melons and cantaloupes. When he was gone mom and I were very close, often listening to Billie Holiday records. But when dad returned things were always different, especially the love.  
     In the darkness I was silent. Once atop the pole I stood up, carefully balancing, stretching upwards into the hold-less air, my fingers barely reaching  the edge of the catwalk. Pulling, I brought my body up and onto the rough boards and then rolled over on my back to rest.  Looking into the darkness, I felt the vibrations of a truck as it passed overhead.
     Turning on my flashlight, I crouched along the catwalk towards the river. Because of the slope of the ground below, each step was a gain in height. I slowly continued until I reached a massive concrete pillar that rose sixty feet above the river's edge. I paused to study the long shadow of the boat dock on the other side of the river. If I fell, well, my life was over. A bullfrog moaned in the distance and in that still moment I smelled the faint smell of a pigeon; a light and powdery smell that sent a strange satisfaction into me the same way a delicate rose does, only different.
     Death so close for the sake of what?
     A pigeon.
     The pigeons on that bridge had been taunting my soul for as long as I could remember. When my parents were gone I often found my face pressed against their end bedroom window. To get to that window you had to walk past that closet with the belts and past that bed where I was made to lay on my stomach when being whipped. I'd pull back those long and dark curtains, smelling and seeing the thick dust of the sills, and the gaze out onto Main Street with its turn of the century square brick buildings.  Off to the left was the bridge. The pigeons were always there.. 
     I turned on my light and shined it out along the long structural ribs of the bridge, The catwalk had stopped at the pillars and from there on out there were no holds. Such a vacuous feeling. I spotted two pigeons forever uncatchable. I turned my light back off and climbed back onto the catwalk and stopped at the first metal brace angling upward and out.  I shined my light and there, in a small nook, looking into my light was a pigeon: light grey in color, owning two black stripes across its wings; its neck such a jewel of blue, purple, green and its eyes hypnotized rubies. The evening breeze began moving through the tops of the sycamores below the catwalk and for a moment my mind forgot about falling and thought only of the pigeon. I leaned out onto the brace and began hugging, inching upwards, keeping my head cocked while holding the light. When at last I got within grabbing distance, I stopped.   
     It happened as quick as the thought and just as true, the bird being caught. All those years of looking and now this. Holding tight to the pigeon's wings I shimmied back down to the catwalk. Getting better control of the bird, I was intrigued  to see that the bird owned a seamless aluminum band on each leg. One band read, "AU 60 KY 6006."  And the other, "CHAS  HEITZMANN, JEFFERSONTOWN  KY."  
     What is fate?  What is it when two lives meet in a dream?
     I found myself running back on the tracks.  I stopped and my Converse cut up the trail through the kudzu to run up the sidewalk and enter past my grandfather and go into the ticket booth to show mom my pigeon. A small fan was blowing on her face when she turned and looked at me. I was the kind of boy that would always be lonely. But on this night,  I owned a little of heaven.  Mom smiled and grandfather did, too.

Return to Nothing

10/19/2015

 
                                                                   BY
                                                            NO SWEAT  
​
              I set off to return once again to Charles Heitzman's magnificent estate located on 3806 Chenoweth Run Road in Jeffersontown, Ky.  I felt emotional about making the drive to my old friend's home not knowing what to expect. As I came through Jeffersontown I noted how much it had changed and grown and nothing about all the progress lifted my spirit. It was a beautiful fall day with the trees beginning to turn and I could remember Heitzman on days such as this, always having visitors at his lofts.
              It wasn't long before I was going over a hill into a countryside area that I immediately recognized the famous white painted arched bridge lead over a creek and up a small hill into a shaded wooded area where Heitzman's home once stood. I don't know how many years it has been since I had seen the place but my heart leaped when I could see it was still all there and intact and in good condition.
              I parked my van in the circular driveway and knocked on the front door.  I saw a large woman rush off into another section of the house and she never came to the door.  I knocked several times more and did not know what to make of it.  I supposed she was afraid as the home is situated in a somewhat countryside-rural area and who knows what can happen meeting strangers in this day and time. I walked around to the back of the house and also knocked on the door. But again no person came to the door. 
             While pausing there, I couldn't help but notice the old bell still there near the back entrance.  So many times Heitzman's wife used to ring this bell for us to come in from the lofts, wash out hands and have a light meal.  Those were such special moments and the old bell brought it all back alive for me; I wanted to ring it just one more time but left it alone leaving silence to prevail.
              I looked up past the back of the house toward the famous hill that Heitzman once called "Cedar Point."  There were a few trees and a couple of smaller cedars but nothing of the stately manner that Heitzman once maintained.  The cedars were basically all gone as were all of the 41 lofts Heitzman once had. I stopped to photograph one of the trails-paths Heitzman had made many years ago that once led to all his lofts on the lower end of his estate; the ones closer down to the wooded ravine. It was there where he had once concerted a large doll house he had given to his daughter into a special loft reserved only for one pair of breeders; it was a lonely path now leading only to nothing save the woods.  I again paused to remember how many great times he and I had walked along that walk way--it was very hard to think of it all and now realize that nothing was there-As though nothing ever had been there.
            . On the big hill where his magnificent main racing loft once stood--the icon of all racing lofts in America-- there was nothing but a hillside with mowed grass.  I took a photo there as well remembering a photo I once took there of Heitzman and I standing in the exact spot--then I was using my faithful 35 MM Pentax with its timed-release shutter. The same camera having photographed so many hundreds of his finest racers. That photo of Heitzman and me in front of his main racing loft today has oddly become famous and is in the AU Museum in Oklahoma. 
               I walked over to where his guest home-pigeon library once stood. Nothing was there except for some poured concrete once being the foundation floor for his specially glazed-block building having once been that library. I knelt down there for a moment and placed my hand over an area of grass near the foundation; now, the unmarked graves of Heat Wave, Head Wind and others as I knew exactly where they were buried. It was hard for me to see just that concrete and nothing else.  Thousands of the greatest racing pigeon fliers had been in that library as well as movie stars such as Andy Devineg and celebrities such as Kentucky Derby winner's trainer,  Rex Ellsworth.  Now, there is a new modern house very close to where it once stood and also an ugly hedge.  I looked over and back towards the field going on farther away and also noted more concrete in the field and knew that was where his 2 story concrete block loft once stood; the same loft where Heitzman once fell some ten feet injuring himself. I looked at the place where he had fallen and could think nothing but of that day.  And farther on out in that field I saw the remains of the only loft still standing.  But no person would ever have known this except me as now it looks like an old tool shed.  Much of it torn away and modified; it was once Heitzman's secret and magnificent loft where he kept birds primarily going to Japan, usually beautiful powder silver bars Sions with dark eyes.; I photographed it as well continuing to remember how that oft once looked, a futuristic showcase on the modern breeding loft.
                 I stood where the main racing loft once was and also photographed Heitzman's home--the back of it.  And of all the things that I was so happy to see remaining was the great tulip poplar tree that once stood between Heitzman's library and the stock loft.  The great tree was still there and just beginning to ripen its leaves with the oncoming of another time period of fall.  I remembered one summer afternoon as Heitzman and I sat in chairs outside of his library watching his birds and noting many of them in the limbs of that tree.  He said to me "Robbie, my smart ones stay in the shade of that tree on hot days."  We both laughed.
                   It was a horrible experience to return but I knew deep inside that I had to pay one last pilgrimage and see for myself what had happened to the greatest racing pigeon flier and breeder and representative of racing pigeons that ever lived in the USA.  What I saw was a realization of what befalls all of us in the end, no matter how great or how unknown.
                  I rang that old bell one more time in my mind and then I slowly walked back to my van and drove off.
                  I will never return again.
 

    Pigeon Stories

    by No Sweat 
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