Hole in the Sky: A Memoir by William Kittredge

Author:William Kittredge [Kittredge, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, History, Non-Fiction, Personal Memoirs, United States
ISBN: 9780679740063
Google: wN_TAIMB3OQC
Amazon: 0679740066
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1993-06-01T23:00:00+00:00

In the early summer of 1954, when my daughter was an infant and my wife and I were both of us twenty-one, we lived on the second floor of an old house just across Seventeenth Street from City Park in Denver. In the heat of afternoon we would move out onto a screened-in porch—high up, as if we were in a secret tree house with leaves all around us, and nesting birds. Soon huge electric storms would form over the Rockies, the light turning yellow-green as those storms came sweeping down to us with drumming rain and shattering bursts of hailstones.

My daughter was a miracle. So long as you have this, I thought, you have enough, you have everything. My wife and I loved each other, it was clear.

This is a time I like to resolve into memories of tranquillity, even though I know the actual days were mostly formed around bewilderment—who were we, who should we want to be? It was the first time either Janet or I had ever lived in a city, or on our own, and we were half a continent from home.

As an airman third class, I was going to school at Lowry Air Force Base from six o’clock in the evening to midnight, training to be what was called a photo interpreter, learning to “read” aerial photographs and assess signs of damage from conventional (non-nuclear) high-altitude bombardment. A couple of years later, in the Strategic Air Command at Travis and on Guam, I got closer to what I thought of as the real stuff, high-tech radar bombsight scoring, and huge glossies of the aftermath from nuclear explosions over doomed Pacific atolls.

It was as if we were still in school and only had to make it to the next check from home, our lives an enormous distance from anything that could be considered actual. I cannot speak for the woman who was my wife; she lives far away in her own privacies. But in these latter days I find sad pleasure in recalling the summery stillness of Denver, and recall watching her push the stroller through the traffic on Seventeenth Street so she and my daughter could see the ducks ringing the edge of the pond in the park before the storms. I don’t recall going with them even once.

We all lose much of what could have been ours because we don’t pay much attention while we invent the future. But I have to resist telling myself that I can see that young woman and her little girl so much better in my imagination these thirty-some years after the fact than I could when they were real and I was deep in the young man’s disease of looking beyond the moment. Such a notion is mostly hindsight nonsense, insulting to the people we were. A friend of mine said that the first summer he was in love exists in his memory like a church he can go visit, and those years are like that for me.

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