anyone's.
I put on Leonard's Hank Williams album, 40 Greatest Hits, Volume 2, turned it up. I got one of Leonard's pipes and some spare tobacco off the fireplace mantel, packed the pipe and lit it. I dragged his rocking chair out to the front porch and sat there and puffed the pipe until I remembered why I didn't smoke. I thumped out the tobacco and continued to sit there in the cold afternoon, listening to Hank Williams, occasionally flipping the record, and feeling the cold get colder.
It came to me as I sat there that Trudy, for all her blind idealism, had at least been on the right track, heading for the right station, but she got derailed.
Me, I didn't even have a station in my life anymore. It was like she said, I lived from day to day and thought it was good. But she had shown me something about heart and soul again, and I knew why it was I always went with her. At the bottom of it all, she believed that things could be better than they are. That life wasn't just a game to get through. I had believed that way once, and lost it, and that's why, in spite of myself, I had always liked her coming around, no matter what it did to me. She made me believe that human beings could really make a difference. In the end, her way of doing it was as bad or worse than those she was against, but the idealism was there.
Knowing what I knew now, I could never feel exactly the way I had. I was too experienced and too practical to go back to seeing life through rose-colored glasses, or think you could figure out life's solutions with paper and a slide rule.
But to lose my idealism, to quit believing in the ability of human beings to rise above their baser instincts, was to become old and bitter and of no service to anyone, not even myself.
Idealism was a little like Venus in the daytime. There'd been a time when I could see it. But as time went on and I needed it less and wanted to pass on the responsibility, I had lost my ability to see it, to believe it. But now I thought I might see it again if I made an effort and looked hard enough.
I went inside and flipped the record for the umpteenth time, turned it all the way up, and went back and moved the rocking chair to the yard, pulled my coat around me and looked up at the sky, tried to pick out Venus before the day gave out and it got dark.
