The Visitor to the State of Maximum Bliss

The summer was passing away in front of his eyes.

The September skies were marred by the altostratus clouds of monotonous gloom rather that the greyish black cumulonimbus that brought the excitement of the world gradually darkening, strong cool winds that came out of nowhere, lightning bolts and thunder that came closer and closer that climaxed in a spectacular summer tempest. By contrast, the current sky was the portent of an unstoppable bleak wintry future of cold and depression. It was the vanguard of the invincible army that had conquered summer and forced its abdication as summer would not fight the new regime.

Charles Miller stood and viewed a flock of migratory birds in a V formation that were the refugees seeking the warmer climes of happiness in the fabled lands of Somewhere in the South.

For those who remained, the saving grace would be an Indian Summer counterattack that would provide a sense of beauty to the inhabitants of the autumnal world; the upcoming glorious splendour of autumn with its cornflower blue skies and brilliant Technicolor red, orange and yellow leaves leading up to its holiday of Halloween...Sadly, he wouldn't be there as he soon would be one of the migratory birds; flying Southwest to the shores of his Australia.

Had he left anything undone in his visit to his birthplace and former home of Waukegan? Though so many things had changed, he still had a checklist of things to do and locations to see, but today was his final full day in the city. The gloomy skies would not curtail his excursions into nostalgia.

He found himself walking again through the familiar streets that he had walked so often. In his college days, with his childhood and high school friends gone, he walked those streets in solitude. He gave the homes and the trees in front of them the same places in his memories that he had given to friends he once knew and enjoyed.

He stopped off at the neighbourhood bakery for his morning tea of American coffee, a colourfully iced cookie and a chocolate éclair. He explained to the impassive cashier that an éclair had custard, only a Twinkie had white cream. The only sit-down customer, he looked through the window of the bakery to his old Glen Flora Elementary School across the busy Glen Flora Avenue. He imagined himself as being back in of those classrooms as a student envying the freedom of his future self who could now walk the streets during school hours and fly around the world, though the opportunity didn't come all that often.

As he left the bakery, he noticed the sun was making a comeback. In order to avoid the noisy automobile traffic of Glen Flora Avenue, he walked around the corner of Chestnut Street up to Grove Avenue where he walked up the gradual hill of the quiet tree lined avenue to the smallest of parks in his neighbourhood, Victory Park. As he walked closer to the park, the sunshine grew, so he would have a fine September day as his last full day in Waukegan.

Victory Park was a large block of land with the Western half being a park whilst the Eastern half was once Victory Memorial Hospital; the land, park and hospital were a celebration of America's victory in the First World War. Like his neighbourhood bakery, the hospital had been renamed, but the park kept its original designation. Before his birth there were two different streetcar lines on the streets bordering the park; in his childhood he enjoyed seeing the defunct tracks that remained in places on the street. He would imagine riding those streetcars in the days gone by, the images that he felt still somehow remained embedded in Waukegan's landscape that were transmitted like electricity into his mind as the memories of things that though they had never happened to him...they should have. He never wished to explain to anyone his habit of having memories of things that had never happened; he wondered whether it was just his lifelong eccentricity or was a sign of mild mental illness.

Unlike Waukegan's other large parks that featured forested hills and ravines, Victory Park was mostly flat land containing a baseball diamond and tennis courts that once were frozen into an ice-skating rink in the winter. The key word to Charlie was 'mostly' as behind some trees there was a small ravine on the northern side. He had always imagined it as his own secret park as he had never seen anyone else in the area. Again, acting on an impulse. he went behind the trees to view the small ravine. The area was vacant as it always was.

He noticed that one of the trees was a pear tree bearing fruit. He found himself reliving his childhood and adolescence by climbing the tree, enjoying a ripe pear and an elevated view across the ravine. It would be another memory that he would store and enjoy sometime when he was far away. He felt so joyous that he wanted to sing out, as if he were the lookout on a sailing ship that had spotted land after a long voyage.

He looked up at the blue skies and yellowing leaves where he saw an enormous ripe pear that he hadn't noticed before. He stretched in order to grab it...

'What are you doing?'

He searched his field of vision to see a woman across the ravine from one of the houses on Stanley Avenue.

'I'm enjoying the Golden Apples of the Sun! Would you like one? It's a pear actually.'

Unlike the 'old crab' women of his childhood who were never overjoyed to see young interlopers in or around the ravines bordering their property, she laughed.

'Well done, Aengus! Yes, I'd love one. Why don't you come over for a cup of tea?'

'I've never turned down a cup of tea in my life', laughed Charlie.

He filled his wide brimmed hat with pears, and carefully climbed down. To the woman's delight and disbelief, he scampered down the slope, found some rocks to cross the brook and made his way up the slope to the amazed woman.

'I expected you to come around the corner and come to the front door!'

'I'm running short of time, like Bennnn Gazzzzaraaaa', Charlie eagerly pronounced the actor's name from the mid-1960s Run for Your Life television show with zest and excitement, 'I hope you don't mind, I'll take off my shoes.'

She opened the back door, Charlie handed her his hat full of pears, then took off his shoes.

'Oh, I'm Charles Miller, but I've been "Charlie" since I've come back here, not 'Angus'. Did I look like a mad Scotsman up in the tree?'

'A pleasure to meet you, Charlie. I'm Jane Daniels.'

They smiled and shook hands.

'Yeats once wrote a poem about a wandering man called The Song of Wandering Aengus that ends with him picking The Golden Apples of the Sun. It describes how the man in his old age hopes to find the young beauty and her embrace, her youth and her love. I'm hoping these are the fruits that you brought to me.'

Charlie was stunned, but managed a reply,

'I only know Yeats through our own Ray Bradbury quoting his The Golden Apples of the Sun poem in one of his stories and a book of the same name. I've never read the poem, but I've certainly found a beauty!'

'I'll wash these and make the tea and...', the late middle-aged woman around Charlie's age suddenly stopped, 'I've never done this before in my entire life!'

'Nor have I, but that's what life is about, new adventures!'

She showed him into her living room, began preparing tea and cleaning the fruit as she wondered what on Earth she was doing. Suddenly there was a stranger in her home, an enchanting, clean cut and well-groomed though rather childish middle-aged stranger, but...

She heard Charlie's voice from her living room.

'Wilton Boy Scouts! I've never met anyone who collected them. I just have to know, how did you get started collecting them?'

'First tell me something about yourself, Charlie. Who are you, where are you from, and how did you end up in a tree where we shouted at each other and you crossed a ravine without any effort, and I let you into my home like a long-lost friend that I've never met before?'

'Well, Jane, originally I'm from here.'

She widened her eyes as she entered the living room where she placed the platter containing the tea set and the peeled and sectioned pears in small bowls with forks on the table between them. She answered,

'I've been here awhile but everyone I know here is originally from somewhere else, including me! I've wondered if there were any original inhabitants still left or they were mythological creatures!'

'Like Bigfoot?', he asked as he displayed the bottom of his size 12 foot.

She laughed and asked, 'Where do you live?'

'Now I live in Sydney. I had some business in Chicago, and I'm flying back to Australia tomorrow. Where are you from, Jane?'

She went to a sound system beneath her bookcase and began playing music that he recognised as George Winston's Autumn.

'Belle Plaine, Iowa. My ex-husband worked at Abbott Laboratories in North Chicago. Not too long after he started the job, we divorced, he transferred somewhere else, and I've remained here. I've only been here for not even a year. Now, here's a strange but pleasant man sitting in my parlour who knows Yeats, my ravine, and ENESCO Scouts, Wilton are cheap plastic copies, Charlie. Now as your Pauline Hanson once said, "Please explain".'

'Well, I was raised in Waukegan, then left home to travel the world, and as I said returned for some business in Chicago. I lived not all that far from here on Chestnut Street and played in the parks like this one. Strange, you've said that you've never invited any stranger into your house. I've walked the streets for decades and looked at the houses and I've never been invited into any of them except our immediate neighbours when I was a child. When I walk the streets, I never think of the people, only their houses and the trees in their front yards, and now I'm inside one of them! But please, I have to know, how did you come to collect those Scout figurines?'

'You're going to tell me that you collect them too?'

'No, not at all, as I said I need to know why one collects them.'

'Why?'

'Do you know the block of shops on Glen Flora between Chestnut and Jackson?'

She nodded as she sipped her tea.

'I know of them as I've driven by them, but I've never been to them.'

'When I was a boy there was a dime store, White's Variety Store, that was one of the shops. I have no idea when they first opened, maybe when I was very small in the late '50s, then it closed in the 1980s. They had a window display that never changed. They had these wedding cake type tiers, one was full of glass animals like The Glass Menagerie, the other featured those Scouts; Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Brownies and Cubs all in those same poses. I knew girls who collected the glass animals, but I never knew anyone who bought any of those Scouts. I used to wonder about who collected them and made an image in my mind of a woman who did, now, at last, I've got you to tell me why people collect them.'

He sipped his tea and began eating pieces of the pears as his hostess did.

'Tell me about the woman you imagined, Charlie. Who was she and why did she collect them?'

'She was a rather sad middle-aged woman in a scrupulously clean house...like yours. She had once had a child who died, and she kept those as a reminder of him where sometimes after she'd be cleaning or watching a 1940s afternoon movie she'd sit down and look at them and remember things...'

She left the table with her cup and saucer to walk over to the tabletop where the figurines formed a semi-circle facing one of her chairs. He rose and followed her holding his cup and saucer as she sat down in the overstuffed chair facing the group of Boy and Girl Scouts, Cubs and Brownies in positions of sitting and reclining on a field of green baize. He stood behind her holding his cup and saucer and looked at her audience of Scouts.

'Well, no tragedies in our family, Charlie. I picked up the lot of them in an antique store. At the time I didn't know why I bought them; it was just an impulse thing. But now I can tell you what I love about them. It's their poses and expressions of wonder and innocence that they have on their young faces. It reminds me of the conversations I'd have with my best childhood friends when we discussed oh so many things about the world around us. That's what I remember most about my childhood. I talk to them quite often about a multitude of things...'

'Funny, what I most remember about my childhood are the jokes and the games, it was only when I was talking to an old childhood friend that the memories of those conversations we had sitting on the kerb came back to me. Isn't it funny how the girls remember the conversations, but the boys only recall the games and the laughs?'

She smiled, nodded and enjoyed a sip of her tea. He continued,

'Like going to the cinema I guess, men love action and comedy, women love to watch other people talking. You know, my older brother had a Marx Boy Scout playset. The figures were unbreakable plastic, like toy soldiers and were actually doing things, like hiking and archery, the opposite of those fragile figurines lounging about. How funny, indeed.'

She remained entranced with her Scouts and the sound of his warm accent as he picked up and examined one of the figures that were arranged in a semicircle as if they were in a conversation with her as she described. He pondered,

'They always seemed too young to be old enough to be real Boy Scouts, they're like kids who wanted to be Boy Scouts but were too young for the outdoor activities like hiking and camping. Now you're their...', he mentally struggled for the right word, 'Den Mother?...Pack Mistress?'

She giggled like a child. Her laugh took him back to his childhood where some of the girls in his childhood neighbourhood gang would laugh at a joke or suddenly and inexplicably do a cartwheel as a manifestation of sheer joy.

'I like that title! Were you a Boy Scout, Charlie?'

He placed the Scout figure back down to the place where he had come from.

'When I was very young, I used to look forward to being a Scout and having adventures like the old movies but when I was finally old enough to be a Boy Scout it all seemed rather passé', he continued, 'I was a Marine, though.'

She visibly showed a startled reaction.

'You know the difference between the Marines and the Boy Scouts don't you, Jane?', she shook her head, 'The Boy Scouts have adult leadership.'

She laughed again that was contagious.

'You must be the tall dark stranger fortune tellers have been telling me about', she laughed.

She went to the bookcase in the room and pulled out a small volume, looked through it and brought it to him pointing at an open page.

'Would you be kind enough to read this out loud, Charlie?'

He felt as if he was back in his Glen Flora School classroom and Miss MacNeill, his fourth-grade teacher who was his first crush had called him out to embarrass him in front of the class after he had made everyone laugh with an unwanted joke.

He began to read where her finger was pointed, halfway through The Song of Wandering Aengus-

'And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.'

He found himself dumbstruck with the beauty of the poem, and the beauty of her happy brown eyes.

She eventually broke the timeless silence as she took his empty teacup,

'May I make us some lunch?'

He was caught totally unaware.

'That would be lovely, but I really don't want to impose on your kindness. May I shout you to lunch at Louie's?'

'You're going to shout at me?'

'As you were, the Strine kicks in. That meant I'd be happy to treat you to lunch at Louie's.'

'You know, I've never actually been there!'

He couldn't hide his surprise.

'Any other time I'd love to go with you, but I haven't made lunch for someone in a very long time. I'm worried if I leave the house, time would get away from us and the day would be gone before we knew it. I want this day, this very special day to linger on and on for us. Won't you come into the kitchen with me?'

'Thank you, that's very kind. I used to think intelligence was the most desirable quality, but I finally realised that the most desirable thing in the world is kindness.'

He sat at the kitchen table and watched her prepare lunch as they chatted. She had accomplished the mastery of multitasking, where she could give full attention to two things without getting confused. When he tried to do two things at once he made a hash of both of them. She prepared their lunch as she controlled the conversation.

She had him talk of his memories of their city from a long time ago and of his travels around the world in a mixture of places that she had always dreamed of going and of places that she had never heard of before. He coaxed her to talk of her childhood, schooling, and university, and how she came to Waukegan.

She was enraptured by his ethereal tales of Waukegan as a whimsical collection of moods rather than a geographical location; it was as if she was holding an esoteric and ephemeral illustrated travel brochure from another time in her hands where she followed him with perfect understanding and childlike delight. To Jane, Charlie was James Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life who actually succeeded on leaving home and going around the world, but like Ulysses, never returned until his youth was gone.

Time not only seemed to stand still in her home, but the time seemed to be going backwards to the days of his childhood. Looking at the clock that showed the time of noon, he mystified her by suggesting he felt that he could turn on the television and see a long-gone childhood favourite lunchtime television show Bozo's Circus, that he explained to her. After that there would be a black and white Warner Bros. 1940s woman's film. He wondered why she seemed to be fascinated by the stories she got out of him that he thought must've sounded as dull as dishwater at best, the ravings of a madman at worst.

She set the table as she talked and dished up the food. She placed lunch on the kitchen table for them and he found himself oddly excited by having her behind him. It was a luncheon that he felt was as timeless as the atmosphere. They had bowls of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches with glasses of milk to drink. The remainder of the sliced pears provided their dessert. The colours of the red tomato soup with sprinkled green parsley and the brown and golden toasted cheese sandwiches matched her kitchen decor as it matched his memories of his having the same aromatic lunch made by his mother when he came home from his lunch break from school. He had found a refuge from time...He felt like he was going to play hooky from school...

He waited until she sat down and gave him a smile, a smile that he wanted to always remember.

The meal was finished as the time showed one o'clock. He helped her clear the table and strutted in a funny manner to the sink that he called the Bozo Grand March.

'Charlie, you have the most incredible memories...'

'That's because I'm always somewhere in the used to be...always...Now, may I do the dishes, Jane?'

'No thank you, Charlie. I've my own way of doing things and I let them air dry.'

They continued their conversation with her back to him. She turned to him,

'What do you want to do on your last afternoon in Waukegan to make it memorable?'

He furrowed his eyebrow like Sean Connery making a one liner in a 1960's Bond film.

She removed her spectacles, placed them on the table with her eyes saying everything without speaking a single word...

He picked her up, she put one arm around him and pointed a direction with her finger.

Entering the bedroom, they slowly undressed each other like sensuously unwrapping birthday presents from their significant other...He was now in the Maximum State of Bliss...

* * *

He awoke on a field of grass looking up at a pear tree.

How on Earth had he got here? He was climbing a pear tree, and...some pears were around him...he must've fell out of the tree when picking the pears...he must've...

His watch was approaching 3:45, he would have to get moving to make the train back to his hotel in Lake Forest. The sky was darkening with what looked like rain clouds.

He looked down at the ravine, there were none of the stones that he had used in what he must have dreamed was his trip to one of the houses where he had met...

Jane Daniels awoke from her nap in the stuffed chair facing her semicircle of Scout figurines who gave her their eternal smiles and fascinated expressions. She addressed her friends,

'I've just had the strangest dream...'

FIN

Author Notes: I am the author of three Extra Dimensional/Ultraterrestial military science fiction novels MERCENARY EXOTIQUE, OPERATION CHUPACABRA and WORK IN OTHER WORLDS FROM YOUR OWN HOME! as well as two travel books THE MAN FROM WAUKEGAN and TWO AUSTRALIANS IN SCOTLAND (all from Lulu.com). I live happily ever after with my wife in paradise (coastal Kiama, NSW Australia).

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