The Remarkable Around the Corner
By Bob Brussack
17 July 2008
Our TV sits to my right and above me on a shelf in the study, maybe two yards away. It's off. The most prominent sounds, now that I've turned my attention to them, are the AC, a small airplane, and the DVR, which seems compelled to whir whether or not it's recording a "CSI: Whatever" or the latest grotesquery from MTV2. I feel the presence of the TV because of a young man I met yesterday. Eder (not misspelled) has moved here from Peru to join his mother. He's twenty-one, and he plans to finish his high school education this year at Clarke Central.
I met Eder at the skatepark. He was helmeted and padded and aboard his BMX bicycle. He road alone, not quite a stranger in a stranger land, but not quite ready to join the routine chatter of the park. As I learned later, his English is still wobbly, and there's that natural shyness, I think, that marks many a BMX'er.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Eder do something remarkable, launching out of one of the skatepark's concrete valleys high into the air and spreading his legs wide and straight at the apex of his arc, rising out of his seat weightless and then returning to us still aboard, having "landed the trick." I made my way, armed with my professional-looking 70-200 2.8 Nikkor mounted on my D300, to a vantage point where I might capture Eder's next astonishing thing. He saw what I was doing, and like a moth to a back-porch light, he flew again and again directly toward my lens. Without words, we had agreed to be photographer and subject.
Then he approached me and asked, in the English he had, and taking advantage of the very little Spanish I have, whether I might stand over there, outside the park fence, and snap a shot of him sailing over the fence. So, of course, I did and he did. And then I asked him if he would do once more the backflip that I had photographed with frustrating imperfection earlier. He took a few minutes to adjust his handlebars, then did it, that always stunning 360 that sets a BMX'er apart.
We talked a bit, and I learned that he had come to us from Lima, where there might be a dozen skateparks like ours, and that there are more skaters there than BMX'ers, probably because the bikes are beyond the means of many, and that he grew up playing soccer and wanted to play soccer here for Clarke Central, but because he is twenty-one and close to the age cut-off for high school, he must focus on his studies and will be content to ride his bike.
Which brings me back to our TV. As far as I know, Eder has never been on ESPN. You almost certainly have never heard of him and wouldn't ever have heard of him if you had found something better to do than to read this. And Eder, of course, is far from unique in his utter lack of celebrity. When I practiced taekwondo under Master Yi, I saw a young man named Jeremy fly far into the air, without the aid of a BMX, hang there, slice through a board with his bare foot, and return to the mat as if he'd done nothing more than read the sports page of the morning paper — a page on which, to my knowledge, he has not yet appeared and might never appear.
The BMX'ers and martial artists and and movie stars and all the rest who inhabit the public world are very, very good at what they do. But it is not the case that the boundary between the public world and the world next door is the boundary between the remarkable and the ordinary.
A poem I read in high school and that Eder might have occasion to read this next academic year is "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray. There are lines in it that should enjoy whatever immortality there is for the things we've wrought: "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, [a]nd waste its sweetness on the desert air." On their face, the lines don't quite say what I want to say here. Eder's feats at the skatepark were not "wasted on the desert air." My son and I, and a handful of others, were there to marvel at them. And Jeremy's board-break was witnessed. Moreover, the remarkable is not necessarily "wasted" even if it is entirely unwitnessed. Still, Gray's lines, written centuries before TV, elegantly remind us that there is much that is remarkable just around the corner or down the street.
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