(An Ode To Grandpa Jack Key, for his memorial)
The first thing you need to do is find a piece of wood shaped like wishbone. It might be out there in the backyard of your grandson’s home. You go out there for a while beneath the redwood tree and search the sticks in the yard and sift through the tree droppings on the ground. If you come up short, you lean against the cinderblock wall, and take out your pocketknife, and put the long blade against whatever piece of wood you did find and peel back the layers of bark, letting ribbons of redwood curl at your feet, as the smooth and pale bone below unsheathes itself. Sometimes you don't find that perfect wishbone right away. You have to sit and wait for a while. It'll show up eventually. That's the first thing about making a slingshot. Patience. And pocket knife comes in handy.
You might walk along Route 66 in Oklahoma to find the wishbone, or else drive drive a Ford Pickup Truck issued by the Oil Company in an all-night blitz across the Texas Panhandle to arrive the oil fields outside of San Antonio. You check into your motel at night after a day’s work. If you didn’t find the wishbone atop the oil rigs that day, maybe you'll find it hanging from the stars as you step outside and light the good end of a Viceroy cigarette and take a pull, still smelling of sweat, and oil, your name on the day’s work.
If you're going to make a perfect slingshot it's a good idea to enlist in the Army at 17. You’ll want to learn how to clean and fire an M1 rifle. You’ll board a ship bound across the Atlantic and you'll fall asleep listening to the boom of the bough against the water. As you dream, you hear the ship carving a straight line through the Atlantic. The motion will teach you how to work a blade.
And you can sometimes find the wishbone buried in your backbone. And maybe you’ll toe the Morgan Line outside of Trieste where your backbone will cut its teeth. You turn into the army barracks one night and hear Bing Crosby on the radio singing I’ll Be Home For Christmas. And maybe that’s when you feel lonely, and you know, all the way across the world, that the wishbone might be back in Oklahoma somewhere. You turn down an offer for a promotion so you can head back to familiar Route 66.
And on the way back, with little rank, you join the stage manager in the theater troupe on the ship in order to get out of KP and latrine duty. Bargain for meal tickets on the deck. You carve that redwood bark from end to end arriving back in Oklahoma and going to a high school basketball game. That's when you see a blond girl on the bleachers and you say “Sally is that you?”
And the next time you drive the Ford Pick Up Truck back from Texas you drive up and down main street trying to get the attention of that blond girl selling movie tickets. Show up at the high school dance dressed in a suit, a war behind you. Hold hands with the blond girl as her date sulks in the corner. You work for her mother as a typist and one night you take her mother on a drive and ask for her daughter’s hand in marriage. Her mother tells you that she'll have to fire you as the typist if she's to gain you as a son-in-law. Accept.
If you plan to get married in the afternoon, show up to work the oil fields anyway. Climb the oil tower and let your boss walk down and yell at you “to go home and shower because, son, isn't this your wedding day?” After you walk down the aisle, hop into a car and get out of dodge as soon as you can to avoid the good ol’ boys from tying you to a tree on your wedding night. You Honeymoon for only one night in a motel with no air conditioning.
Have twin boys and a little girl and a dog named Tippy Boots. Pack your family in a 57 Chevy pulling a trailer and set out for California just like the Joad's in The Grapes Of Wrath. The road to California carves like the Atlantic, only the Chevy drives a little more steady.
The other part about making a slingshot is that you need a good rubber band. You need elasticity, and the willingness to stretch yourself. You get laid off Christmas Eve and come home to your family with a bottle of champagne in lieu of severance. Listen to Bing Crosby again. But this time it’s not so lonely.
Wait for the new year and then get a job at the post office where they have plenty of rubber bands to work that elasticity. Walk your route for 26 years. Take a few dog bites in the leg. This is the hard part— walking that route. Carrying, daily, that bag of love letters, bills, junk, invoices— be the conduit for mass communication of the world. Notch your knees into that great wheel, and with each turn grind them a little more to dust. Give up smoking while you're at it. Put safety pins in your breast pocket instead of The Viceroys.
Lean on the backbone. Rest your knees when you can. Retire one day, by the ocean, a proud a union man.
Give your grandson a pocketknife and walk the backyard with him. Wait for the redwood to drop the wishbone. Don’t tell him of patience. Show him. And while you wait teach him how to open the knife, where the sharp end of the blade is, where the thumb should go, teach him to whittle. How to peel back a shield, little at a time, how it turns into curled ribbons at your feet.
And when the redwood finally drops the wishbone pick it up, and admire it. And you’re ready. You put your blade to it.
Wait for the post man to arrive with a pack of rubber bands.
Replace one knee. Then the next. With every visit to the hospital, inform the doctor that you plan to be around for a long time. Prove yourself right.
And in your last days, as your grandson helps you from your easy chair into your bed on the night of your 90th birthday, tell him you hate to be a burden. Listen closely as he tells you that a man who gave so much to so many people could never be a burden. That his presence has only ever been relief. Smile with gums and teeth, and tell him goodnight.
And as you close your eyes know that you have tied well the bands of rubber onto the ends of the wishbone. That you have told him to be Careful. To Keep his hands steady and to never aim at people or animals. When your grandson asks what a slingshot is for, you close one eye, and pull back your good hand, and you let go… you release… fire into the air, and watch… as it keeps going higher and higher… out of sight… another star joining the firmament twinkling down on us… always… and with light.
