CONTINUED: Trestle

If a train came along, we might just stand still and enjoy its passing.  That would not be very safe, of course, but I’d certainly hear it coming and have time to get back to the bank where one end of the span was anchored.  I was wrong.  As we peered down at the falls through the spaces between the track ties, we couldn’t hear anything over the thundering water.  I realized my error too late.  I glanced up and saw the light on the engine moving rapidly toward us.

The trestle was built only wide enough for a train, and then a tiny bit more in case someone was dumb enough to get caught out there when a mountain of steel came beating down the tracks.  And because the builders didn’t have casual walkers in mind, there were no railings.   We stood on an emergency walkway, two parallel boards perhaps each ten inches wide, laid out in a string across the ties and parallel to the tracks.

We quickly started back off the trestle where we could step out of the way of the oncoming freight.  I held on tightly to Dave’s shirt collar to ensure he didn’t bolt ahead of me, slip off the narrow path of boards and tumble over the edge of the trestle to the falls below.  The train closed on us rapidly.  We weren’t going to make it.  Better to wait it out here, I quickly concluded.

The two locomotives pulling perhaps a hundred cars now charged on to the trestle and the structure began to shake.  That settled it.  I sat us down and wrapped Dave in my arms and legs as if I sat behind him on a toboggan.  Squeezed in between the edge of the trestle a few feet away and the rails that would carry the train past us, we sat watching the behemoth fly up to devour us.

When something that large is about to miss you by inches, it appears to be coming right over the top of you.  I grabbed on to the edges of the boards underneath us and held on for dear life, steeling myself against the urge to jump up in a heedless panic, only to slip over the edge and fall  end over end down into the water.

“We’re perfectly safe, Dave,”  I shouted .  “Just keep your head and your hands down.”

And for good measure, “Close your eyes!”  But I left mine open till the very end.

The blast of air as the train passed over us … for that’s what it seemed to do … pressed the cheeks up into our eyes and felt strong enough to blow us off the trestle. It might indeed have done so if we had remained standing.  The roar was terrifically loud, like a thunder clap that went on and on.  Dorothy on her farm in Kansas would have recognized all the earmarks of being swept up in a tornado.   We held on to the planks beneath us and with my legs I held on to this most precious bundle, my son, for as long as it took.  And it seemed to take forever.

I may have imagined it, but I thought I saw something coming toward us sticking out of the side of the train.

I flopped down on my back and forced his head down on my chest.  He resisted my effort and started back up.  “Oh, God,” I thought, “don’t bolt.”  He didn’t.  He lay back.

I had been staring over at the side of the trestle, making sure we didn’t somehow slip over that way.  But now lying on our backs, I no longer could gauge how close we might be to the edge.  Looking upward at the sky, all I could see were big puffy white clouds painted on a bright blue canopy.  A loving God lived up there, I began to fervently hope, because now it was all up to him.  Other than gazing at his front door, I could do nothing but wait this out.

And then it was over.  The train was gone.  Dave moved, but I held him down a few seconds more.

“We’re going to stay here a minute so we can recover,” I said, “before we get up and walk down the planks.”

 “Hey, that was neat!” he said, turning his head around and beaming up at me.

“We’re going to stay here a minute,” I repeated, “so Dad can recover before he gets up and staggers down the planks.”

I suppose I learned something that day.  So much for always feeling in charge, for example. In fact, I look back on the incident as holding signs of everything that would play out in my career as a father.  No matter if future calamity were brought on by stupidity or fate, I could not save my son from forces so overpowering that they were beyond our control.  I was often able to do nothing but figuratively keep my arms around him in the coming years when I stood with him as he grew to be a man.  He would sometimes overrate his own capabilities as I had, but he would own his own disappointments and grief.  I would have nothing to arm him with but hope, which was what he needed most from me.  He would face deadly disease and later the loss of the woman he loved, his own precious bundle gone off to a heaven he didn’t believe in.  Through his life, he would walk out on his own train trestles and he would somehow survive.  I may have sometimes been clueless as a father, but I loved him through it all.  And that would be enough.

And honestly, as I told my wife later, over and over, we were indeed safe.  We were not THAT close to the edge of the trestle and the train derailing on top of us had no more possibility of happening than it might the next time I waited for a passing train while I sat in my car at the crossing.  Still it was a dumb stunt on my part and I can’t really object when my son today introduces me as “my father … the man who tried to kill me … several times.”

And I won’t forget that day, as I sat up and looked around at the beautifully colored leaves of fall, and then down at the water raging beneath the trestle.  I no longer felt like a great explorer, but it was good to be alive.  In a few minutes we walked off the trestle, my legsmore than a little wobbly.

“Wait’ll Mom hears about this!” Dave said gleefully.

I could hardly wait.

copyright David Griffin, 2010

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

ave@windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: CXLvii. Trails End

“Not really,” I said. I was too busy watching the storefronts glide by as I hoped to recognize at least a few names among the businesses.  There were none that I remembered.  Bouncer scrunched down in his seat and looked behind us.

“It’s an older woman wearing a Boston Red Sox hat, “ he said.

“That’s nice, I replied,” but I wasn’t really listening.  Where the hell was that ice cream shop we used to go to after school when I was a sophomore?

At the top of the hill, we turned left on Eagle Street and that's when I began to realize the Cornhill before my eyes in no way resembled the Cornhill I remembered.   Half of the homes were gone, burned down I had heard, some by residents and some by the city.

How does that happen? An entire section of the city that once housed working men and their families, church goers for the most part who kept regular hours, who took vacations in the summer, bought books for their kids as well as movie tickets and tried to raise them to be responsible adults. How did it all disappear, to be replaced by poor families, many of whom accepted social welfare benefits as a right rather than a loan? What rights did the current residents possess that men and woman of our parents’ generation did not have?  What society or government had allowed it to happen? And why?

We stopped the car on Steuben Street in front of my  grandfather's small bungalow. The man had died there in 1948 and Grandma came to live with us. A black man sat on the front porch. I saw him reach his hand under his jacket and leave it there as the two of us got out of the car.

"Hi, we're religious brothers," I said unnecessarily, since we were wearing our robes. "We stopped to look around. My grandfather lived in your house." I waved to indicate the house.

The man on the porch said nothing, but continued to look from one to the other of us.

"Many years ago," I continued. "They lived here back in the 1940's. And Thirties and Twenties ...."

No response came from the porch.  I looked up and down the street and wondered when was the last time it was filled at mid day with children playing.  Girls drawing hopscotch diagrams on sidewalks and boys darting in and out of driveways and down the sidewalks on their bikes.

The man finally spoke.  "What do you want?”

Under his breath Bouncer said, “Gun, Jesse.”

"Uh huh,” I answered.  Then louder to the man on the porch, “Nothing, Thank You." I was watching where the man’s hand had disappeared under his jacket and I didn't plan to take my eyes off that spot.

"Well, Thanks," I said. “We’ll be going now.” 

It was then I heard the tractor trailer engine roar to life down the street, and an air horn begin to blast.

“Take this with you!” screamed the man on the porch. I could see something in his hand glinting in the sunlight that I assumed was a gun.  Bouncer and I stood frozen as the truck pulled up behind us.

The man on the porch got up and swung his arm around behind him as if he was winding up for the greatest baseball pitch of his life.  When his arm came down he caught his gun hand with the other and stood in the classic firing pose, slightly crouched, arms extended out in front of him, aiming at us.

A terrible sadness crept over me as I watched the agent of my destruction prepare my death and I could not tear my eyes away. Behind me air exploded out of the brake cylinders and the pads slammed down inside the wheels.  Bouncer stood slightly ahead of me and I could see he had turned to look at the truck.

“Holy Shit,” was all he said.

The man on the porch fired off three shots in quick succession and I heard at least one of them strike metal behind me.

“Oh, Jesus, Jesus,” Bouncer was murmuring.  We were both still standing and I didn’t think either of us was hit. The man on the porch turned and ran in the front door of the house.

The sound of a truck door slamming behind me brought me back to earth. The tractor trailer crunched into first gear as I turned around and watched it slowly begin to move away down the street.

“Did you see her?  Is she OK?”  I asked Bouncer.

“Was it a woman?”  he asked.

“What did you see, Bouncer?”  I asked  as I grabbed his arm and turned him toward me.

“I don’t know,” was his reply.

CONTINUED: Heaven

I just love fly fishing.  Getting down in the water and matching wits with a dumb trout  who almost always wins the contest.  When I step out on the water, I quickly say the age-old Fisherman’s Prayer: “Please don’t let me do something stupid and drown.”  Carefulness is more important as I age, because dumb mistakes seem more common now.  In the Post Office the other day, instead of a twenty I mistakenly handed the clerk a prayer card from a recent funeral service.  She passed it back, saying, “We can’t pray on government property.”

“Of all places,” I replied.

Myself, I need all the help I can get.  And so I often envision with me a guardian angel.  I’m convinced she is a fine looking woman….cute, capable and skilled in heroic water rescues.  And more than once I’m sure I’ve heard her say, “why don’t you cast over there, under that tree branch?”

I wasn’t always a fly fisherman.  I used to have a job.  No, of course we’re not all unemployed, but many of us are retired.   And certainly most of us who fish on weekday mornings are jobless, for one reason or another.  As for myself,  shortly before retirement I took up fly fishing to help the transition.  

Toward the end of my career, I had a sense there was something more important to do in life than work, but I was damned if I knew what it might be.  Forty years hard at the task made me the best worker I ever met.  I did it so well I forgot how to do anything else.  So one day I decided to hand in my retirement papers, buy a fly rod and go stand in the creek for a while.  Cool my heels, so to speak …. literally.  I’d let my inner child and  my guardian angel sort it all out.  I hadn’t  played in the water since I was eleven.  

I used to fish for hours, moving about from place to place on the stream.  I’d try one spot for a while, then pick another likely location and move upstream or down, working my way through different pools, runs and riffles.   I’d catch a decent amount of fish if I applied a modest degree of effort.

But today I move around less and stay longer in one spot.  And I really don’t care if I catch anything.  I never worry about how many fish I catch.  In his book, “Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis,” Howell Raines's fishing partner advised him, “If you're going to keep score, you might as well be on a golf course.”
So instead of applying myself to the task, I watch a blue heron as he stands on a rock in the middle of the creek, seemingly bored, but ever ready to pounce down on a trout.  Or I’ll pause while a brace of 6 or 7 ducks fly by me only 3 feet off the water, veering slightly out of my way.  They don’t get excited.  I’m just another object to fly around.  I love it when they do that; I feel like a part of the stream, a piece of nature.  To me, the birds are saying I’m welcome.

Later, as I travel home,  I have to admit that driving all this way to not catch any fish and to sit on a rock eating a sandwich might not sound appealing to many people.  But I’ve seen the most beautiful sights in the world and spent an hour or two in heaven.

copyright 2012, David Griffin

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

www.windsweptpress.com

CONTNIUED: Flight 405

At 8:47 and a half,  Sandra, a recently married 24 year old flight attendant,  told the passengers to get ready to land in a few minutes.   But the plane would meet the earth in only seconds,  almost four miles short of the runway.  The captain and co-pilot would realize their mistake just  3 seconds before their lives ended.

Much too low, Flight 405 continued to descend  through the night, rushing forward at almost 200 miles an hour.    It swooped down  over the Normanskill  Golf Club, then above New Scotland Avenue and St. Peter’s Hospital,   where some of the injured and dying would arrive in less than an hour.  As the small urban pond known as Buckingham Lake rose  like the moon up from  the plane’s port side wing tip and the maple  branches below began to feel the bite of the churning propellers,  Flight 405….a 45,000 pound behemoth of  aluminum and steel and gears and cables and wires and grandmas and fathers and Moms and sons and daughters and sweethearts … with an awful tearing screech and chest-pressing thud, slammed into 50 Edgewood Avenue at Albany, NY.

The plane hit low enough to dig out its own cellar, had one not existed, and the house collapsed on top of the wreckage.  Nothing exploded or caught fire.  Fuel doesn’t readily burn; the vapors do, but an outdoor temperature of 13 degrees Fahrenheit that night minimized any vaporization.  The fuel-laden right wing separated from the plane but miraculously remained intact, even though enough aviation fuel leaked out to turn the crash site into a potential inferno.  All of the injuries were from the plane’s  impact.   Passengers were catapulted to the front of the plane and into the forward cargo compartment.  Such G forces can cause irreparable damage to a body’s organs.  In some air crashes, victims’ hearts have burst out of their chests.   Cargo disintegrates.  In the case of Flight 405, passengers were hurled forward like human cannon balls, along with their seats, smashing into luggage and freight.  Only one of the plane’s occupants got out on his own and he didn’t remember how.  The rest, dead or  alive,  had to be pried out.

According to the NTSB report, Accident Investigation Report NTSB-AAR-73-08,  complete with charts, photos and maps,  (ignore the Wiki entry on the web; it is far too forgiving of the pilots)  the plane’s crash into  the very bottom of the house was extremely fortunate for the nearby homes.  Frankly, it was incredible no fire erupted and only one house was obliterated in the densely built-up neighborhood.  Most of the houses were only twenty five feet apart.  Of course, it was miraculous Sandra and 31 of the passengers lived.  Likewise, 5 out of 6 in the house survived.   The family of four  watching  “The Partridge Family” on television was spared any serious injuries, even though the parents were blown out through  the family room window and landed in a side yard as the plane ripped into an adjacent room.  In the tossed up wreckage of the home, their two young sons were found in a closet, just beneath a pool of leaking jet fuel.

A man out walking his dog reported the plane came in over the neighborhood and at the last second dipped its left wing, catching it in the street. The man stood in shock as the plane slammed into the ground, just where the street rises up a small hill to 50 Edgewood Ave. The left wing disintegrated. The fuselage shot through No. 50’s living room to the basement and the fuel-laden right wing, still attached to the plane, flopped over on the next lot, No. 54, where a tree stopped it from sliding into the backs of homes on the next street. There was no house at No. 54. Thirty-five years later there is still none. If you look at Google Maps, it is the only empty lot anywhere in the area. Had a home existed at No. 54, it would have been hit broadside with a wing full of aviation fuel.

A graduate student in an upstairs apartment of No. 50 was in the shower when the plane swooped down out of the sky and took his life.  His young wife, Hannah, the friend of a woman with whom I worked in Syracuse,  was watching television in the next room.  She remembered nothing about the moment of impact except for the loudest sound she had heard in her life and the last one she would hear for a  while.  The world turned upside down and the lights went out and.  She found herself in a pile of rubble, ears ringing and hurting terribly, her bathrobe up under her armpits and caught on debris so at first she couldn’t stand up.  The smell of what she thought was kerosene almost overpowered her. 

Suddenly cold in the frigid March air, she decided their house had blown up and she had landed down the block.  Hannah threw off a piece of furniture and began to walk home before she realized she was already there.  The street was quiet.  Deaf from the crash, she couldn’t hear anything anyway.   She began to look for Peter, her husband.  As the moments ticked by, neighbors came out of their homes and soon the street was crawling with police, firemen and even a reporter with a backpack and a microphone down at the end of the block.  With the strong stench of aviation fuel permeating the scene, firemen worked frantically to free the survivors and to suppress their own personal terror of an instant immolation had the fuel ignited. 

Survivors were rushed to area hospitals.  In 1980 I met a man who tirelessly worked through the night to comfort the injured and their relatives and friends who searched the hospitals for their loved ones.  He was the pastor of the Reformed Church near St. Peter’s Hospital at the time.  Bruce and I are old friends today and we sometimes talk about his experience that night and my own from a different time.  This story brings inquires from time to time and a passenger on the plane wrote me not long ago looking for the minister who had attended his parents that night as their family shook with the tragedy of the death of a sibling he had been flying with in the wreckage  I was able to connect the man with Bruce. 

Less happy was a reader who wrote to say she was related to the Captain and that he should have been portrayed as a hero.  I had to respond that I published only what I read in the NTSB report.  I offered to consider an addendum to the story with a  paragraph written by her, but she never responded.

Not long ago, I parked my car on Edgewood Avenue, got out and looked around.  It’s a quiet street just south of  Washington Avenue and not far from the University of Albany’s campus, where my daughter spent four years in the late 1980’s.   The demolished house has been replaced.  I felt a bit self-conscious, knowing adults seldom  walk around anymore on a residential street in the middle of a weekday  afternoon.  

How strange it was to hear the birds chirp and an airplane pass overhead as if nothing unusual had ever happened in this neighborhood of  families and students.   I looked around at the well-kept homes and wondered if any of the people living in them today were here on that night in 1972.  Had an airliner landed on my street, I would have moved out and never looked back.

I got back in my car and sat for another five minutes.  I wanted to pray, or somehow offer condolences … or something.  Probably, I wanted to know this couldn’t happen again.  But tragedies happen every day, when and where we least expect them.  On a bright and sunny afternoon or a sleepy winter evening as the snow falls gently on the neighborhood.

                    Copyright 2010, 2015 by David Griffin

There have been two Flight 405 accidents in the United States.  In March of 1992, US Air, the successor to Mohawk Airlines, crashed another Flight 405 into Flushing Bay at LaGuardia Airport in New York City.  The plane stalled on take off because of wing icing.

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

www.windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: Hope

I was about to say to an older man one day, “Tell me about your childhood.”  But  I guessed his answer would be, “Oh, it was fine,”  telling me nothing.  So instead I asked about a time when he had been deliriously happy as a child.  He spoke of Christmas and a brightly colored toy long ago, before his father died.  And then I asked about any other time when he may have been very, very sad.  His response was unforgettable.

“Looking for my mother’s teeth,” said the man.

“Her dentures?” I said, hopefully.

“No, her teeth.  My stepfather beat her awful, knocked them out.  I was still quite young,” he said, “but  I remember I saw a bunch of them go flying. I got down on the floor when all the commotion was over and tried to find as many as I could.  I wondered if teeth could be put back in.  I found three or four and brought them to her.” 

He sat there quiet, and after a few moments I asked, “Did she take them?”

“No,” he said.  “I guess she was dead by then.”

There wasn’t anything I could think to say to him.  When we listen to ourselves try to comfort a person, we hear phrases like, “it’ll be all right, time will heal, there’s nothing to be afraid of …..”   We speak words of hope, because hope is what heals us.  But often we can find nothing to say.

An older woman dressed in terrifically bright colors once told me, “I’m seventy three years old, and they won’t give me another mortgage.  How am I supposed to live?”

“An apartment?” I asked, carefully.

“What about all of my art, my tools, my workspace?” she said.  “ How will I paint?”

I had no answer for her.  But I remember thinking that all of her creativity and her sense for the beautiful would not solve the crushing reality of getting old and being broke.  I will face separations one day, myself.  My wife and I brought up children while living not far from here on what’s left of an old mountain farm.  We put our hearts and souls into the place over the years, makng it just what we wanted.  I’ve lived there more than half my life and I don’t want to leave.  One day soon I will go, but it will tear at my heart.

A young man and I walked about the parking lot one morning when he felt too antsy to sit inside our little building.  It was in the spring and temperatures had just warmed up. 

"I've felt for years that I am missing something from my life,” he said.

"What?" I asked.

 “I have lots of stuff,” he said, “even lots of friends, but I don’t have any hope.”

“What do you mean by hope?” I asked.

“You know,” he said, “like when I was a kid, the future felt exciting.  I didn’t have to know what it held, but I somehow knew it would be wonderful.”

“And you don’t know the future now, either,” I said.

 “But now I find myself yearning for something and I don’t know what it is,” he said

“I suppose,” I said, “that yearning for the indefinable is like a spiritual journey.”

“Please,” he said, “no God stuff.”

“Fair enough,”  I replied.  “But there are those who think yearning represents a need to fill something in the soul.”

I didn’t tell him, but I often have the same feelings.  And the same questions. 

A middle aged woman sat opposite me on a snowy afternoon, her mood somber.  Outside the window a naked tree, now dark and wet and leafless, grabbed the falling snowflakes to cover itself with a coat of innocent white.

“He kicked me out!” she said, “my own father.  Called me a whore and dragged me out the front door and slammed it shut.  And locked it!  I was only 16, for god’s sake.  My idiot mother stood there frozen like a statue.

“That’s pretty awful,” I said.

“It was snowing, for god’s sake, and I looked behind me on the sidewalk and saw my stuff coming down from the upstairs window.  He’s up there throwing my clothes and my dolls and my makeup and all my stuff out the fucking window like a crazy man.  I went nuts.  I started banging on the front door and I kept it up until my hands bled and I screamed into the windows and I cursed them and I threw up and I choked and I cried until I thought I’d die, for Chrissake.”

She became quiet as she stared out the window at the falling snow.

“What happened?”” I said, after a while.

She pulled her eyes away from the window and looked down at her hands.

“I died,” she said quietly.  “I think I died.”

All I ever wanted from my father was his hope for me.  Had he withheld it, I would have been devastated.  A child of any age needs a parent to stand by her side, wishing for success and happiness.  A man or a woman needs a woman or a man who loves them unconditionally and hopes only for the best.

The mountain above the village reminds me how solid we feel when we know someone is on our side. When we know they can’t be moved in their devotion to us, perhaps even when we are roiling in the agony of our self doubt.  The mountain inspires hope that there are people who won’t budge when we want to push them away.  They stand there and love us anyway.

When I first began to meet with people in the village, I told my friend Julia that sometimes I felt I wasn’t of much help to them.

  “You should have more hope,” she said.

“Sometimes I don’t,” I replied.

She looked up at me and said, “You have friends who will do your hoping for you.”

Julia is an elderly Irish woman and a “solitary,” as she is called by the order of Episcopal nuns she retired from.  I call her a hermit.  She is an artist and lives with her paints and pastels and chickens and a cat and a dog on the backside of the same mountain we see in the village.  She is also a companion on my journey and I travel up to see her each month, even in winter if the road to her cabin isn’t blocked with snow.  We call the time we spend together spiritual direction.

“What’s your hope, Julia? Or are you too old to care?”  I said, just to needle her.

She looked up from scratching the head of her cat who sat comfortably in her lap. 

“There’s a scripture,” she said, “that says my name has been called and I belong to Him.” *

“I’m not very religious, as you know,” I replied.

She snorted, knowing me well enough.

“Maybe hope isn’t always natural to me,” I said.”

She turned fully toward me and the cat jumped from her lap to the floor.

“Did you love a girl so much your arms ached?” she asked. 

I smiled. “Or a woman so much my head ached?”. 

 “Did you love a child so much your chest hurt?” she asked

“Yes,” I said, “yes to both.”

“Then you know what it is to hope with all of your being,” she said.

When I left her that day and had walked a short distance from the porch, she called, “David.”

I turned around and looked back at her quizzically.

“I can’t do it as well as the Big Guy,” she said, “but that’s the sound of your name being called. You shouldn’t forget what it sounds like.”

copyright David Griffin, 2010

Obviously, for confidentiality reasons, the above are compilations, not real people.  I’ve changed enough so that even those I had in mind might not recognize themselves.  Except for my friend Julia, who with a name change played herself.

*"Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.”  Isaiah 43:1, RSV

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

dave@windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: What Will They Think?

     I must have been about three and a half years old the first time my grandmother asked me to sing in her church.  Mother and I had come in one of the two big doors that opened onto the back of the sanctuary where Mama was sitting, talking to some of her friends.  Like all good grandmothers, she was eager to show off her precious little granddaughter.  “Oh, she can sing real purty,” Mama said.  “Let her sing something for us, Ruth.”  So Mother obligingly stood me up on one of the pews and I started to sing.  Mother said judging from the looks on those women’s faces, they were somewhat surprised by my selection.  I’m sure they must have expected that such a sweet looking little girl would sing  a song like “Jesus Loves Me”.  So you can imagine their consternation upon hearing this curly headed three-year-old belting out “I’m Looking over a Four Leaf Clover”.  I managed to get through the whole thing and would have started over had Mother not put a stop to it!

     Well, that was quite a debut; it kept tongues busy for a long time.  Poor Mama – she probably heard about that for years.  It’s a wonder she ever got up her nerve to ask me to sing again.  But then, it did take a few years and a desperate situation before she broke down and did it.  I remember it well.

     It was the summer I was ten years old.  My cousin Barbara and I were spending a week or two in Dellrose and we’d been having a good time singing and playing the piano in Mama’s front room.  Barbara was good on the piano; she could play just about all the hymns in the old, brown Cokesbury Hymnal we borrowed from the church.

     One day while we were there, the Women’s Missionary Society was to have their regular monthly meeting and Mama was in charge.  Everything was going fine till Miss Carlene called to say she couldn’t make it and she was supposed to have done the special music.  “Don’t worry,” Mama said, “I have an idea.”  That’s when she looked over at the two of us girls and asked if we’d help her out.  We were more than happy to accommodate; after all, we’d been practicing all week.  Quickly flipping through the hymnal, we decided on hymn number 173, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”.  We went over it a time or two, changed into our dresses and walked next door to the church.  Mama was looking mighty proud to have two of her granddaughters accompanying her that afternoon.

     Barbara and I took our seats up front, along the side wall, in the pews reserved for the choir on Sunday mornings and sat waiting.  The meeting started right on time.  All the members, with the exception of Miss Carlene were present.  There were a few details to be dealt with before Barbara and I were to perform so we amused ourselves as best we could while, at the same time, trying to keep quiet.

     Before long we saw Mama stand up and say how happy she was to have two of her granddaughters who were going to do a special song for them.  “Barbara will play the piano for us,” she said, “and Jackie will sing.”  Then she announced the name of the selection we’d do and sat down.  Barbara began with an introduction, just as we had rehearsed.  I was waiting for my cue to start.  I looked at her, she looked at me and we both broke out giggling.  We tried to start over.  Barbara played the introduction once again and again the same thing happened.  When we looked at each other, we just couldn’t help ourselves.  The giggles erupted into full-blown laughter and there we stood before God and the entire Women’s Missionary Society of the First Methodist Church unable to do a thing but laugh!  By then we were so embarrassed, tears were rolling down our cheeks.  I think it was by the grace of God that we finally managed to get ourselves under control and actually make it through all four stanzas of that song!

     Poor, poor Mama -- how she ever showed her face again at the church, I don’t know.  Maybe she just chose the lesser of two evils and went on.  After all, sooner or later they’d all forget about two silly girls but if Mama didn’t show up, they’d be sure to say she was being plumb ornery.  And nothing could have been farther from the truth.

copyright 2015, Jackie Welsh

    

CONTINUED: Tiger Story

"That's an unusual name for something so cruel," I said.

"He was a  very religious man," she said.

The circus loaded up and headed north in the spring.  At their first set-up north of the Florida border, on a wonderfully warm Friday evening as she recalled, the alpha tiger attacked Wesley and bit off his head in front of the entire student population of the Ellabell, Georgia Elementary School. All the kids had a good laugh, thinking it was a neat trick.

I stopped her at this point and said this was just too much.

"Well," she said, "maybe only half of the school's children."

I looked at her intently. "I mean, did the tiger really bite off Wesley's head?"

"Of course it did," she said.

"OK, then go ahead.  What happened next?"
"The tiger spit his head back out," she said.

"I hope you're kidding me," I said

"Oh no.  Spit it right out and it rolled on the ground."

“Really?”

“You didn’t think he was going to swallow it, did you?”

“I never considered whether a tiger would swallow a head,” I said.

“Well, certainly not Wesley’s head,” she said.  “He was a smoker.”

“What about the kids?”

“Even though there were no violent video games back then,” she said, “kids have always refused to believe what they don’t want to believe.”

“That just can’t be,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course, I speak only of the first few seconds after Wesley was chomped.  Then the teachers and a few parents screamed.”

I nodded.  “I’m glad somebody got it, the gravity of the situation.”

“You mean other than Wesley?”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“And me.”

“Yes, I’m sorry.  That must have been traumatic.”

“I prayed so hard to St. Francis for Wesley.”

“Yes, I understand,” I said.

“He couldn’t pray for himself,”

“No, of course not,” I said.

“I’m not a very religious woman, but I picked up that whip and started praying to it.”

“I admire you,” I said. “I would have run as far away as possible.”

“But I was prepared for it,” she said.  “Wesley always told me it was a  ‘Hazard of the trade.’ He’d say. ‘No gold fillings for me. Not when they’ll wind up in Bunnie’s stomach.’”

“Bunnie?” I said.

“The alpha tiger,” she said. “She was one nasty tiger.  She’d bite your head off … so to speak.”

“I understand.”

“Or your arm. Two years before, Bunnie jumped through the hoop of fire as Wesley stood holding it up wearing the asbestos glove up to his armpit. Bunnie took his arm with her as she flew through the hoop.”

I was incredulous.  “She bit his arm off?”

“To his shoulder, asbestos and all.”

“So, before he lost his head he was a one-armed tiger tamer?”

“Pretty much.  With a prosthetic left foot.”

“That’s hard to—“

“Kind of balanced him up … no left foot, no right arm.”

“Wait a minute,” I said in protest.  “This killer tiger bites off your lover’s foot, then his arm, and he gets back in the ring and she bites off his head?”

“No, no.” she said. “He lost his foot when the elephant stepped on it.  That’s when he gave up elephant training and took up tigers.”

“I don’t believe—“

“And that’s when he bought St.  Francis.”

“—who didn’t help him keep his head,” I said.

“He never learned to use it correctly,” she said. “You never actually hit a tiger with the whip.”

“You don’t?”

“Of course not.  Are you kidding me?  You’re standing in front of a 500 pound killing machine and you’re gonna hit  it with a whip?  It would bite your head off.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

“You snap the whip to the side of the tiger.  Scares ‘em.”

“I’ll bet,” I said.

“Wesley never got it right.  He hit Bunnie in the eye a few times.  Even took off a piece of her ear.”

“No wonder ….”  I said.

“Yeah, I warned him.  ‘Wesley,’ I said, ‘you gotta stop antagonizing that tiger.’”

“With St. Francis,” I said.

“He said he’d pray about it.  He was a  very religious guy.”

A man approached us wearing a dark grey suit, a black shirt and Roman collar.  Crystal said to me, “Meet Wesley, my husband.”

“Thank God you’re alive, Wesley,” I said.

Crystal smiled broadly.  “I was telling him about your life as a tiger trainer, dear.”

“I’m a miracle,” the man said.

I laughed. :”I’d say so, what with your head bitten off.”

“Took almost an hour for them to sew it back on,” he said.

“Is this an act you two practice on unsuspecting strangers?” I asked.

“I’m actually an Anglican priest,” said Wesley, “and  I’ve never even met a tiger.”

I looked at Crystal and she responded.

“The most exciting thing I ever did in my life was to become a part time court stenographer,” she said.

“Why are you here?” I said.

“I’m a new volunteer,” said Crystal, “just like you.”

“She used to dress up as a clown to entertain people,” said Wesley,  “but these days we’re retired and can no longer afford the expensive makeup.”

“So, instead,” said the woman, “I tell wild stories.  It’s cheaper, easier and far more fun.”

“Except for that time in Albany when you tried playing an old hooker,” said Wesley.

“Who knew I’d get so many offers?” she said.

“Like the John who kidnapped you before I came in to drive you home.”

“I was gone only for six months, Wesley.”

“Leaving me to put up with Bunnie,” he said.

“I was taken overseas on a tramp steamer,” she said to me, “ to ride sea turtles in a carnival that traveled across the Baltic states.”

“You took St. Francis and left me defenseless with a tiger,” he said.

They stopped their conversation abruptly.  Both turned to look at me.

“I’m not a very religious man,” I said.

They continued to stare at me.

“And I’ve never used a whip,” I said.

They said not a word, but continued to look at me.

“Of course,” I said, “there was the time when I mapped the side of a Himalayan mountain and lived with the Sherpa alpine guides for a season.”

“Yes,” said Crystal.  “Yes, go on.”

“I had to learn to fly a helicopter all by myself and …..”

copyright 2015 by David Griffin

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

Write to me.  www.windsweptpress.com