The lily pond was quiet, save for dark bubbling waters. The piped sounds of classical music had faded, the people mostly gone home. A tree frog peeped from beneath jungly hosta leaves. This strange Eden carved from cornfields and beneath the prairie sky fell into shadow, casualty of another latter summer's dying day. Over the horizon, great cities; you could almost make out the glow of the lights. Above, cirrus clouds and jet contrails. Feathered memories, a gray sky purple, twilight, a modern moment, now something like a quarter of a century ago. The sun passes on, inexorably, into another place, another time.
The back patio overlooked the park, both careful cement and proper green a testament to aging suburbia. Maples and fir frame the sky as time passes, shadow of a day, shadow of a decade. The warm smell of garlic frying, wafting smell through open kitchen window. Moments of another time, a time when the expectations were different. There were promises back then, promises of rules and plans, of unspoken social contracts, of a heady future, weighted with promise, weighted like spring grass is weighted with dew and green. We could be good children back then, good children who knew the rules, of how the game was played. Good job, good kids, nice house, a 401K. The cracks were so small, the cracks in the promise could be ignored. The smart people were making the rules. What could possibly go wrong?
The prairie was tamed once. Tamed and rebuilt, proof of man's grand design, man now tamed and domesticated too. There was condescension in gray eyes, knowing condescension, and a glass of good red wine raised to a future that promised only half-truths. The wine was good but even a half-truth is only a lie — those who didn't play by the rules would be the outcasts, that was true. But many of those who did play by the rules? There would not be enough cookies and carrots to go around, not for all the good kids. Only so many goodies in a new world order with not enough to share. We were just too young and heady and full of hope to know.
The prairie was tamed once, long ago, and then untamed. A movement was born to make plantings appear wild, indigenous plants chosen, a simulacrum of wild, a facade, forced virtue, unwilling prairie coneflowers replacing water-hungry impatiens. Virtue takes many forms, false virtue many more. Fortunes won and lost, millions of a generation sold down the economic stream. Ideology preserved — nothing was more important, of course — even as the can got kicked further on down the road. Sun rose and sun set. The future seemed bright, bright before 9/11, bright before the banking failures, bright when all we knew was the false gravitas of talking TV heads, piano jazz on NPR of a Sunday night, and Jerry Springer. The internet was new and unthreatening. This wild west had not yet been born. Just a simple dial up modem that screamed the blood of unseen robots, and a little company named Amazon which sold books and DVDs.
Even in chaos the world was ordered then, ordered by someone else. Information was compartmentalized, and we — the obedient masses — stayed compartmentalized too, just like we were supposed to. Another red wine toast, another contrail-laden sky, another economic recession. More tamed prairie, but now the prairie of the mind. Wild thoughts kept like coneflowers, carefully tended next to the artemisia. Right where we're supposed to be. That was the promise of a future past, a future now dead and buried. Rich globalism died last week, for worse, for better, voted into an early grave for a wild west the likes of which the most redolent of political and scientific minds did not foresee. But America had always thrived on the frontier, an escape from the stagnancy of past monolith. In the end, beyond the prairie, beyond the good red wine, the condescension and the disgust, there is hope and a rising sun tomorrow. Broken sky promises have their cost. And their reward.
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