Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 70
They were used for poems, prayers and illustrated solicitations.
The greenhouse crew picked them up with nailed sticks, but for
some time the flow of fliers seemed mysterious and inexhaustible.
This was in the autumn, and mixed with the Fiduciary University
announcements were the autumn leaves. The three swamp maples
within the wall had turned red and dropped their leaves early in
the fall, but there were many trees beyond the wall and among the
Fiduciary announcements Farragut saw the leaves of beech trees,
oaks, tulips, ash, walnut and many varieties of maple. The leaves
had the power to remind Farragut, an hour or so after methadone,
of the enormous and absurd pleasure he had, as a free man, taken
in his environment. He liked to walk on the earth, swim in the
oceans, climb the mountains and, in the autumn, watch the leaves
fall. The simple phenomenon of light—brightness angling across
the air—struck him as a transcendent piece of good news. He
thought it fortunate that as the leaves fell, they turned and spun,
presenting an illusion of facets to the light. He could remember a
trustees meeting in the city over a matter of several million dollars.
The meeting was on the lower floor of a new office building. Some
ginkgo trees had been planted in the street. The meeting was in
October when the ginkgos turn a strikingly pure and uniform
yellow, and during the meeting he had, while watching these leaves
fall across the air, found his vitality and his intelligence suddenly
stimulated and had been able to make a substantial contribution
to the meeting founded foursquare on the brightness of leaves.
Above the leaves and the fliers and the walls were the birds.
Farragut was a little wary about the birds since the legend of
cruelly confined men loving the birds of the air had never moved
him. He tried to bring a practical and informed tone to his interest
in birds, but he had very little information. He became interested
in a flock of red-winged blackbirds. They lived in swamps, he
knew, so there must have been a swamp near Falconer. They fed at
dusk in some stagnant water other than the swamp where they
lived. Night after night, all through the summer and deep into the