Chapter Text
One summer morning, I woke up to the sound of trumpets.
Trumpets William Tell-ing, crackling gunshots, and a deep-voiced ‘Hi-yo Silver!’ blasted me out of the dream I’d just been having about a pool filled with liquid sunsets. My eyes shot open and my heart was stampeding wild and crazy (gunshots for a wake-up sound will do that to you, even if they are old timey and obviously sound effects) but I liked it.
“Hi-yo Silver yourself,” I muttered to my clock radio and to the radio DJ who chose The Lone Ranger theme song to be part of his set. But I couldn’t help smiling, too. I liked waking up like that, all high alert and at-the-ready. I liked that my heart felt just as loud as the hooves of a horse that I imagined was carrying a masked vigilante across a desert valley ridged with white-tipped mountains.
“Hi-yo Silver! Hi-yo Silver!” I said again. This time with a little more oomph, like I really meant it, using my enclosed hand like a megaphone.
Then a bird that had hunkered down on my windowsill flexed its feathered neck and looked straight at me with its beady black eyes! I guess it didn’t like all my Hi-yo-ing this early in the morning.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said. But the bird flew off in what I’m pretty sure was a huff.
“Well it’s gonna be a real scorcher out there today ladies and germs! Hope you all stay cool in the pool so you don’t rot in the hot! Time to wake up El Paso! It’s Monday, June 15th, 1987! 1987! And a big ‘Happy Birthday’ goes out to Waylon Jennings, who’s 50 years old today!”
The DJ’s voice was a little too corny but it made me laugh thinking about this overly enthusiastic guy sitting alone in his radio booth absolutely going bananas talking to himself about the dangerously high heat index and a random dude’s birthday. I bet he really loved his job, sounding as hyped as he did. Or maybe he just liked random facts a lot. Like he’d totally cream you in Trivial Pursuit every time.
He then went on to tell a sad story about how this Waylon Jennings guy had narrowly avoided death because he gave up his seat on the airplane that killed Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens.
The story made me sad and a little awed, too. It made me think about how we never know how the smallest decision we make will change our lives. Or end them. Like the Butterfly Effect in chaos theory. How do we know when the smallest choice will have the biggest of consequences? And do we even have a choice? Is it all decided by God or fate? Or is it all just random random random?
I was trying to think about these deep things but then the DJ went straight into “La Bamba”. “La Bamba”? Really? To me this didn’t seem like a smooth segway from his tragic story. If I was the DJ I’d have picked something different. Something with a little more gravitas. But maybe the DJ was trying to tell us, ‘Hey, Life’s a party and you only get one shot at it so get off of the wall and start dancing’.
I don’t know about dancing, but I was definitely in the mood to swim. It was going to be too hot a day not to, after all.