Shelter (from the Munich Tales)

SHELTER
By Michael Kroetch

He was going to collect the wind. He would trap it in jars on his roof. He didn´t tell his parents about the idea. He kept the carefully chosen jars ready and hidden under his bed. To do it, he would go up into the tree that was outside his window and climb from it to the roof with a rucksack strapped on his back. He would have to be cautious not to jostle too violently the jars nestled inside the rucksack as he made his way up through the tree´s branches. For protection, each jar would be gently wrapped in swaths of old cloth. The cloth he´d selected was as special as the jars. It came from the shirts his great grandfather Leo had once worn when he spent time as a logger in the Rocky Mountains of Canada. Even though they had never met, his grandfather meant a lot to him. He knew the man would have approved of his plan for the wind. He would sometimes seek out the fabric of the old torn shirts when he was feeling most weak and alone. In touching the ragged cloth he thought he sensed some of his grandfather´s often praised strength and humor. These things he so very much desired in his own life, but could not find. He knew the people in his neighborhood thought him strange. His clothes. His hair. His face. He didn´t want to be strange. He wanted to fit in and be like everybody else, but somehow it never quite worked. But he knew having the wind would help. It would lift him up. If he could get it inside him, it wouldn´t matter what others thought. He would have the wind. He got the idea of the wind from an old documentary he´d seen the previous summer. It was on late one long hot night when he couldn´t sleep. The show had been about a man trying to decipher the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. The man claimed daVinci´s unusual creative power had come from his ability to pull the wind of life itself into his being and harness its energies. Even though the boy´s whole family had been long asleep andhe had wanted to be as well, when he heard these words, something galvanized inside him. And in looking at the image of da Vinci on the screen, he was struck even more by the uncanny resemblance between da Vinci and his own grandfather. They could have been twins. Almost. He did not decide right away to embrace the wind. Many months went by with the memory of the TV program becoming almost entirely lost in shadow. But then, seemingly out of the blue, the narrator´s voice would fire up again in his head and he would once more feel the lucid charge in his veins he´d felt that night he first heard about da Vinci´s secret. The feeling was so strong that it made him slink down to the dank, dark closet in the basement, where his grandfather´s old, ragged logging clothes were stored. When he was sure no one knew was there, he would open the cardboard box and run his fingers gently over the fabric, imagining them on his grandfather high up in a tree in the middle of the Canadian wind. In such special moments he felt his soul grow a little larger and a little more vibrant. And he knew then that soon he too would live in the wind. But not only that, he would also be a kind of home where it could find shelter.