Who is Jerry Holiday? Chapter 3
Toddlers are always so curious and energetic. Like a tornado that has no purpose or destination but just appears and spins and destroys and brings chaos and then disappears.
Or an alien explorer who comes to a new world and doesn’t understand the signs, the streets, the cars. So it looks and discovers and asks a million questions as it finds its bearings and begins to discover its new world.
If we could all be so curious, so energetic, we could learn so much, see so much, experience so much. But we grow calloused and hardened with our eyes and minds fixed on money, sex, power. We search for comfort and sameness rather than excitement and chaos. We fix ourselves in our bunkers and build walls, aim cannons, dig holes deep into the ground. Become like stoic mountains.
Mountain ranges so high and steep no one can pass. Mountains that block the land from the sea, and create desert wastelands on the other side. Hot, vast expanses of sand. Nothingness. Like the emptiness of space. A space with no stars, no planets, no moons or suns. A space of nothing but the vacuum of our own cold thoughts. And then we hope that someone out there can find us. That someone out there will be brave and strong enough to scale our mountain ranges.
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These have been here for millennia. They were created by slow, violent crashes of land. These impenetrable mounds of rock pointing at the sky like jagged fingers. Like ridged knife blades. And the rain has pummeled them and the winds have blown against them and shaped them. But they still stand. Tips covered with blankets of snow. Bottoms clothed in trees with lush green leaves. And there are climbers and even scattered homes and buildings. But at their core they are rock. Strong and stalwart. Mighty and majestic, and so high they reach into the clouds. Like imaginative minds searching the skies for meaning and purpose, gazing into the deep unknown of space.
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I forgot who I was for a second. Looking out at the expanse that was spread before me. The towns in the distance. Their lights like tiny golden specks on the horizon. The trees skirting the sides of mountains, distant foothills. Reflecting pools looked like small mirrors. This was a vastness that couldn’t be captured in a picture. That could only be experienced. You only got the full effect when you were surrounded by it all.
And she was there with me. Beautiful Evelyn with her long, golden hair. Her black tights and blue shirt. Her backpack with everything she’d need to survive up here. And she was looking at me with those blue eyes. Those blue eyes I always lost myself in like I was looking at the sky. Even at our advanced ages. She looked the same to me as she did when we met all those years ago in college.
“You’re so beautiful,” I said.
She laughed at me. “Donnie. We’re all the way up here surrounded by all this beauty, and you’re talking about little old me?”
I smiled. “Of course. What else is there to talk about?”
She shook her head. “But I guess that’s what I love so much about you. You’ve always noticed me. Even up here with all this beauty and splendor. You’ve always looked out for me.”
“It’s so quiet above the tree line.” I watched a marmot shuffle between some rocks. “I have trouble concentrating in this quiet.”
“Back when I taught those toddlers in preschool…” she chuckled. “Taught is the wrong word. It was more like babysitting. Anyway, all those years, decades ago, there was a little boy I remember who used to say that same exact thing.”
“What thing?”
She grinned as she reminisced. “I have trouble concentrating in this quiet. His name was Jerry Holiday. And I can’t remember what he looked like at all. But I remember his energy. His defiance. His inability to follow the simplest instructions. And he would yell and talk and scream when it was nap time. And when I reprimanded him, he would say those same words. I have trouble concentrating in this quiet.”
“That’s a strange thing to remember right now,” I said.
“I only remember because you said it.”
I looked out at a rocky mountainside as it turned pink with Alpenglow. The sun was setting, spilling its orange beauty across the sky. Then I watched as gray clouds swallowed the top of that mountain. “Oh no.”
“What?” she asked.
“There’s a storm coming. We need to get down below the tree line ASAP. We don’t want to be the highest things when the lightning strikes.”
We started down the mountainside as yellow flashed inside the oncoming clouds. Then the thunder sounded, shaking the landscape. We picked up our pace and ran, and the sky grew dark above us. We ran as fast as we could until we were in the trees once again.
I was out of breath. “I think we’re safe now.”
“If we don’t die of heart attacks,” Evelyn said with a smile.
“Evie, don’t joke about that. Not at our age. We need to drink water.” I pulled the bottle out of my pack and drank, then glanced at her pretty face. “Come on. Drink up. We just went down a lot of mountainside in a short time. We don’t want to end up with acute mountain sickness.”
She was trying hard to catch her breath.
“We’re gonna be fine.” The lightning was close. The rain started pouring down in sheets, pummeling us like tiny wet fists.
“What are we gonna do?” she asked. “I can’t go any further.”
I’d been lifting weights. And she was 120 pounds or so. But I lifted her like I was carrying her over the threshold but I carried her down the mountainside. Through trees and slippery ground. I slipped a bit but was able to catch myself. Then we hit a particularly slippery slope and I slid on my ass, still holding her as we sped down towards a cliff side. The cliff was probably three hundred feet or more. “Oh my God!” she shouted.
I grabbed her wrist with a strong grip. There was no way I was ever letting go of her. And I spun and grabbed a hanging branch.
Her feet were dangling off the cliff side. But I pulled her up through the mud and we both leaned against a particularly thick tree stump.
She smiled at me. “Well, there was another near death experience.”
I grinned. “Honey, this is how we’re gonna die one day. Alone on a mountain, where no one can find us.”