I WAS TRYING
TO DESCRIBE YOU
TO SOMEONE
by Richard Brautigan
I was trying to describe you to someone a
few days ago. You don’t look like any girl I've ever seen before.
I couldn't say “Well she looks just like Jane Fonda, except that she’s got red
hair, and her mouth is different and of course, she’s not a movie star…”
I couldn't say that because you don’t look like Jane Fonda at all.
I
finally ended up describing you as a movie I saw when I was a child in Tacoma Washington .
I guess I saw it in 1941 or 42, somewhere in there. I think I was seven, or
eight, or six. It was a movie about rural electrification, a perfect 1930′s New
Deal morality kind of movie to show kids.
The movie was about farmers living in the
country without electricity. They had to use lanterns to see by at night, for
sewing and reading, and they didn't have any appliances like toasters or
washing machines, and they couldn't listen
to the radio.
They built a dam with big electric
generators and they put poles across the countryside and strung wire over
fields and pastures.
There
was an incredible heroic dimension that came from the simple putting up of
poles for the wires to travel along. They looked ancient and modern at the same
time.
Then
the movie showed electricity like a young Greek god, coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of
his life.
Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of
a switch, the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in
the early black winter mornings.
The farmer’s family got to listen to the
radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the
newspaper by.
It
was really a fantastic movie and excited me like listening to the Star Spangled
Banner, or seeing photographs of President Roosevelt, or hearing him on the
radio.
“… the President of the United States… “
I
wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world. I
wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to President Roosevelt
on the radio….
And
that’s how you look to me.
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