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Rocketboy ConFessionsSunday, March 21, 2010
Isaiah 43:19-21
Philippians 3:13-14 We made a little windfall money one year and bought a microwave and beta videotape player. We couldn't spend much money on tapes, and Chris and Marc watched the same shows over and over. We had a tape from Sesame Street, and Chris loved it. When it was Marc's turn, he wanted "Baby Rocket!" Baby Rocket! Baby Rocket! Once she translated, Margaret popped in the video, and there was the man in the coonskin cap. Carrying his musket everywhere, facing bears and Indians and Mexican armies, Davy Crockett was the spirit of the American frontier. Marc watched the tape over and over and over. He wanted to go to the Alamo. He still does. The story never got old. That was fine with me. I remembered 1955, I was six years old, we were still getting used to our first TV. Every Sunday night at 6 pm there were the fireworks above the fairy castle. Disneyland! A world much bigger than the one I lived in. Walt Disney himself introduced the show, and when he announced another Davy Crockett episode, he had me. Did I clap my hands and shout, jump up and down and laugh, run around the room in circles? I don't remember. Probably. I can't find my old coonskin cap, so I guess it's gone the way coonskins always go. It hasn't been gone that long, though. I think I took my lunch to school in a Davy Crockett lunchbox. Baby Rocket lunchbox. For a long time I wanted to get a long pole and push some big boat down the Mississippi. And I wanted to see how it felt to hole up in the Alamo. Those pleasures are yet to come. In my mind Davy Crockett, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer and Abe Lincoln all mix up into a sweet aromatic memory of adventure, and I still want to follow that tangy smell of forest and sea into any wild land available. The face in my dreams, my leader into the dark woods, is always the same - gentle, strong Fess Parker, who died last Thursday. He was 85. He will never die. He died in the Alamo in 1836. In 1955. Already. Not yet. Heroes die. Their pictures don't, and my memories are more vivid now than ever. It's tempting to think of Jesus the Hero like this, but it'd be wrong. Not quite what God has in mind when he sends his son into the wilderness. And that's a story for more than three Sunday night episodes of my Disney, under the spreading fireworks, sitting up straight with my ears perked, every muscle ready.
You have done great things for us, Lord, and when you bring us out of exile we are like men dreaming. Our mouths fill with laughter and we sing and sing. Bring that joy again, Lord, like the torrents in the desert. --- Psalm 126
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When our children were small we lived in a house on top of a hill a few miles outside Lincoln, Illinois. Clapboards were loose, and the wind blew every day out of the west. We planted a windbreak, but the trees were tiny. Carpets were thin like the walls. It was cold in the winter, and we had to bundle up. We slept in a water bed, always heated to 90 degrees. Kerosene heaters helped.