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LIKE HAWKS FROM A TREE, a novel

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FIRST PAGE 

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Big distractions, small adventures.  In this age of anxiety, it’s the best option on the table.

Wind howls across my face as I drive northward in a decades-old, rusted 1996 Jeep Cherokee with no doors.  It came with doors, but I removed them.  Things that are supposed to be kept whole are often more interesting when you take away a few parts.  They called it “beat up” when the dented, faded-paint door panels were attached. Now they’re gone, and it’s “shabby chic.”

The highway rolls as only highways do - fast - until a terminus appears.  Nine sculpted, orange block letters stacked atop each other. It’s a totem.  There’s no “Welcome to” or “You’re entering” or any unnecessary, cheery modifiers.  Just the name.

BALTIMORE.  

Although I prefer its other name, Charm City. That’s a moniker born from a bunch of old-time advertising agency executives who sought to re-brand - or re-baptize? - the place during its dark days in the 1970s.  Mayor W. D. Schaefer called for a rescue of his city’s image in the face of general mockery from Philly to the District, who cat-called it Nickel Town. The execs counterpunched by selling the city as a bracelet of hidden charms, and the name stuck. Hard times could hit the city, but they couldn’t stump out its charm. Menken the Sage of Baltimore told it righter - “The old charm, in truth, still survives in the town.”  

On Sundays parking is free and football is plentiful. The big distraction of today is a game.  The opening game of the NFL season - hometown Baltimore Ravens versus the Denver Broncos.

I steer the jeep flush against the curb on South Charles Street, and jump out into the heart of Federal Hill.  A legion of purple-jerseyed fans swing in and out of a rightly-named bar called Banditos, rowdy and booze-soaked.  Deep bass techno thumps from the bar’s sound system.

My first thought is to immediately don my prized vestment - my rival’s jersey, orange and blue - but then think better of it. My heart is not on my sleeve. It remains balled-up in my hand as I pass unnoticed and unharassed through the purple legion. Maybe this impulse makes me a meeker fan.  But here, in purple territory, snap judgements trend conservative. It’s a survival instinct.

Ten steps forward, and I’m ducking into my destination -  the Mad River Bar and Grille with its imperial facade akin to a Grecco temple.  Circular emblems raised from the rock walls declare 1797 as its date of birth.  Certainly this bar wasn’t here in 1797.  But maybe the stones were, and in the world of architecture - as it is in manhood - the foundation matters most.

Once indoors, I slip on the orange and blue.  It falls across my shoulders like silk armor, boastfully declaring my symbolic heraldry of Number 19 and a white horse - a Bronco.

My eyes scan the bar for the friend who called this rendezvous.

There he is, John.  He spots me first and waves energetically to find my eyes amidst a packed bar room of moving purple fans.

John is all heart and all force - he’s the ever-blazing furnace of a principled man amongst a unpredictable society.  For any question or doubt or fear - he will cut you an answer from stone.

So I ask the hard question.

“Does Peyton have one last Superbowl in him?”