Can You Hear the Corn Grow?

“Going for a ride” was a ritual in my family. Dad would say, “Let’s go for a ride” and we piled into the station wagon.  He seemed eager to get out of town and slowed onto the gravel roads, as he sang “I’ve been working on the railroad…” or recited “I saw them tearing a building down…”.

When I visited as an adult,  my dad would say, “let’s go for a ride” and we did. Just me and he in the big red blazer meandered down the gravel road to the farm in silence.

Dad was a thoughtful driver. No hurry. It was always summer and hazy steam blanketed miles of sun-soaked cornfields as the tassels yellow fuzz wilted into the green. I knew only awe.

 After four miles, Dad would turn to the right through a hard-to-see opening into the corn forest. Dad navigated through loamy ruts and over serious bumps with such reverence, I sensed that he was taking me on a holy journey to an ancestral Mecca.

The corn was taller than the car when he ceremoniously clicked into park and turned off the engine. Our silence would be so comfortable, I’d forget why we had come.

Then, he would whisper, “Can you hear it?”

 “Hear what?”, I would ask, suddenly remembering the script.

“The corn”.

“The corn?” I would say still remembering the script yet forgetting the answer.

“Can you hear the corn growing?” he said tenderly.

I couldn’t hear it but said I could. At the time, I figured that, for some reason, it was important to him that I could hear what he heard. As time went on, I  chalked the corn thing up to a sweet figment of his imagination until.