Chapter 4: Resonance

I blinked, and my eyes opened to see my Father crouched above me. He managed to look worried and relieved at the same time, as I heard him, softly say, "Son, are you okay?

"Yeah, Dad. What happened?" I started to sit up, and Dad grabbed me and held me down.

"Stay down, you fainted or something, you were unconscious for several minutes."

"I fainted?" I sputtered. "What was that explosion I felt?"

"Explosion? Davey, there wasn't an explosion. You just stopped to look at something and boom! You were out!" he reached down and tapped the tool bag my head was resting on. "If I hadn't caught you, you might have really banged your head good!"

"Phew!" was all I could think to say in response to that. Dad leaned down, staring intently.

"Let me look at your eyes. Follow my finger!" he began waving a finger back and forth in front of my face like a fleshy metronome. I followed it obediently for several passes before finally sighing. "Come on Dad, Everything you know about medicine you learned from watching St. Elsewhere in college. You told me so yourself!" I sat up then, adjusting my shirt. "Help me up. Really, I feel fine."

"Fine," he said, giving me that patented parental stare that seemed to defy you to be anything but perfectly well. "But we're making an appointment for a complete physical as soon as we get home!"

To this day I wonder at the calm with which my father helped me up, handed me my bag and headed, without another word towards a debris pile near the back of the recess. I followed, in the wake of his apparent calm, and when he stopped and sat cross-legged in front of the pile I mirrored his actions. I flopped the tool bag in the dust between us and opened it, then I sort of froze, waiting to see what my Dad did next.

He reached down and put his hand on the shop brush he'd had me grab, and smiled over at me. I read my father's understanding of me in it then, or perhaps just of boys in general. And I smiled back. He knew I'd just resisted the urge to grab a hammer and start poking. He read the appreciation in my smile for his restraint. It is an undervalued commodity these days, the unity of mind and purpose a father and son can achieve.

"Lets just dust the surface here and see if we find anything colorful under this layer of dust." he said, carefully feathering the soft-bristled brush across the surface of the debris.

Under his careful and calm direction we spent the next three hours slowly sorting through the first four inches around the edges of the debris pile. The pile promised to be interesting. Dad explained that as the various soft layers above had eroded away, they had dropped anything harder embedded in them into this debris pile, leaving a mixture of different stones from several different kinds of rock layers. We worked in quiet cooperation without a break until finally, a little after one in the afternoon Dad leaned back, wiped his dusty hands on the front of his shirt, and called lunch break.