John Updike

They will not be the same next time. The sayings so cute, just slightly off, will be corrected. Their eyes will be more skeptical, plugged in the more securely to the worldly buzz of television, alphabet, and street talk, culture polluting their gazes' pure blue. It makes you see at last the value of those boring aunts and neighbors (their smells of summer sweat and cigarettes, their faces like shapes of sky between shade-giving leaves) who knew you from the start, when you were zero, cooing their nothings before you could be bored or knew a name, not even your own, or how this world brave with hellos turns all goodbye.

(¡Pura vida! —Costa Rican phrase for "O.K." or "Great!") Such heat! It brings the brain back to its basic blank. Small, recurrent events become the daily news— the white-nosed coati treading the cecropia's bending thin branches like sidewalks in the sky, the scarlet-rumped tanager flitting like a spark in the tinder of dank green, the nodding palm leaves perforated like Jacquard cards in a code of wormholes, the black hawk skimming nothingness over and over. What does the world's wide brimming mean, with hunger the unstated secret, dying the proximate reality? Con mucho gusto —the muchness extends to the stars, as wet and numerous as larvae underground where the ants in their preset patterns scurry and nurture, and the queen, immobilized, pours forth her eggs in the dark. We are far from oaks and stoplights, from England's chill classrooms and Tuscany's paved hills. For thought is a stridulation, an insect sizzling, knit of the moment's headlines and temperate-zone quips, viable in the debris of our rotting educations, that thatch where peer-groups call each to each in semes ecosystematically. Great God Himself wilts with a rise in temperature, a drop in soil acidity, a new language in its grimacing opacity. The brain's dry buzz revives, a bit, as evening falls.

Those dutiful dogtrots down airport corridors while gnawing at a Dunkin' Donuts cruller, those hotel rooms where the TV remote waits by the bed like a suicide pistol, those hours in the air amid white shirts whose wearers sleep-read through thick staid thrillers, those breakfast buffets in prairie Marriotts— such venues of transit grow dearer than home. The tricycle in the hall, the wife's hasty kiss, the dripping faucet and uncut lawn—this is life? No, vita thrives via the road, in the laptop whose silky screen shimmers like a dark queen's mirror, in the polished shoe that signifies killer intent, and in the solitary mission, a bumpy glide down through the cloud cover to a single runway at whose end a man just like you guards the Grail.

Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot, Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off Before it has a chance to go two blocks, At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage Is on the corner facing west, and there, Most days, you'll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out. Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps— Five on a side, the old bubble-head style, Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low. One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes An E and O. And one is squat, without A head at all—more of a football type. Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards. He was good: in fact, the best. In ’46 He bucketed three hundred ninety points, A county record still. The ball loved Flick. I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty In one home game. His hands were like wild birds. He never learned a trade, he just sells gas, Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while, As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube, But most of us remember anyway. His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench. It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though. Off work, he hangs around Mae’s Luncheonette. Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball, Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates. Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.