Raised during the Depression, my stepfather responded to the economic opportunity of the 1950s by buying more and more cheap, secondhand things meant to transform his life. “I got this for a hundred bucks,” he said, patting the tractor that listed to one side, or the dump truck that started with a roar and wouldn’t dump. Spreading the parts out on his tarp, he’d make the strange whistle he said he learned from the birds for a whole morning before the silence set in. Who knows where he picked up the complete A-Z encyclopedias, embossed in gold and published in 1921? “They were going to take these tot the dump,” he said. Night after night he sat up, determined to understand everything under the sun worth knowing, and falling asleep over the book of A. Meanwhile, as the weeks, then the months passed, the moon went on rising over the junk machines in the tall grass of the only world my stepfather ever knew, and nobody wrote to classify his odd, beautiful whistle, formed, somehow, in the back of his throat when a new thing seemed just about to happen and no words he could say expressed his hope.
