CONTINUED: Genius

When I was a young man my fellow Spark Plugs in the Jaycees were infatuated with what I think they called Thought Patterning.  The technique discouraged negative thinking, and there was far more emphasis on positive thoughts as a route to success.  You kept your mind on getting a great job, for example, and it somehow came your way, because imagining success motivated you to accomplish little deeds that added up to big results.  Of course,  we were young and had a narrow understanding of success.  We wanted money, frankly,  more than we wanted to find a purpose or  to build a life upon our strengths.  I was nearly forty years of age before I began to see that real success could happen only when I dug deep in order to know myself, then set reasonable goals and worked toward them.   What I labored for was just as important.  My goals weren't always  worthwhile.  Sometimes they were selfish and benefited no one else.

I'll admit Thought Patterning made some sense to me in those years.  That was before I learned I couldn't control the future.  I might  try to accomplish many things, but the results were often out of my control.  That took a while to sink in.

Of course, the idea of thinking your way to success is fraught with controversy.  You may not be surprised to learn that billions of people don't believe you can have what you want by simply imagining it. 

On Amazon's website, a book that promised astounding career results was dealt this comment by an unhappy buyer: "The publisher of this book should have their right to publish revoked. A colossal waste of money."  But anyone has a right to empty dreams, both publishers and those who would try to achieve their dreams by reading a book.

 

Somewhere in my young adulthood I also discovered that native ability trumped wishes every time.  There are people walking the earth with amazing special talents and I am not one of them. When I finally came across true genius, I was stunned to see how it overshadowed my ordinary abilities.  I got over my disappointment, however, and was relieved to finally understand why some men and women comprehended so much more than me and understood ideas  so much faster. They are the brilliant ones who see concepts in their mind's eye as clear and bright as jelly beans in a crystal wine glass, while I squint to see meaning as if peering through a glass of day old tea.

Grateful to know my role on earth was not to explain everything to everyone,  I settled down to live with my comparative dullness.  I began to ask questions, instead of always assuming I knew the answers. That's when I began to get a tiny bit more intelligent. It's been going slowly.  I'll never be a real genius,  but if I live to be about 112, I might get pretty smart and become a Life Coach.

CONTINUED: Little Lie

“I will when I can verify you’re actually at the North exit.  You get your directions mixed up, come out the wrong exit  and I drive around wondering where the hell you …” 

“It says ‘North Exit’ in big letters,” she said, “in English, right over the door.  Which I’m walking through now.”

“I don’t see  you,”  I said from my perch up at the end of the parking lot.  “You should carry the Boy Scout compass I gave you for these occasions.”

“I am at the north parking lot exit,” she said heatedly.  “I’m not carrying that thing.  I’d look like a surveyor.”

“With the flip-up mirror, anyone would think you’re just checking your make-up with a compact.”

“Who carries a brass compact mirror as big as a hockey puck?  I’m holding up my shopping bag.” she said.  “You can’t miss it.  It’s bright pink. Can you see me?”

“No,” I said, “wave it back and forth.”

“Oh, for … I can’t,” she said, “it’s too heavy.”

“Set down the bag and just raise both hands and wave,” I said.  “Like a cheerleader,” I added.

I got no answer.  Perhaps I needed to explain further.

“You’re too short,” I said.  “Can you get some height?  Remember jumping jacks,  where you jump up and clap your hands together over your head?  Or is there a bench or something you can climb up on?”

Still no answer.

“Are you there?”  I asked.  “Are you listening?”

“I stopped listening to you the first year we were married,” she replied.  “I’m busy looking for a nice young man to buy a drink for a soon-to-be widow.”

You know, it’s simply amazing how we can miss the little things in life.  I’d been sitting there up at the end of the North parking lot for almost an hour without noticing that the sign on the mall building I was watching  plainly read “South Entrance.”  I guess that meant I was in the South parking lot.

“OK I see you!”  I hurriedly shouted into the cell phone as I turned the key and ripped the shift lever down into Drive.

I lied. “Yes, that’s you.  Gee you’re just as pretty from a distance as the day I married you,” I added.

“Then remind me to keep my distance from you,” she said.

The car in front of me stopped abruptly and waited to take the place of an SUV backing out.  This annoys me.  I stopped in time only a foot from her rear bumper.  The SUV driver couldn’t see traffic in either direction and he inched out backwards a tiny bit at a time

“Where are you?” asked my wife. 

“I’m in motion,”  I said.

“Uh huh,” she said, “don’t hurt yourself.”

The SUV driver was now out far enough to see up and down the traffic lane.  He accelerated and  swooped backward, crashing into the driver waiting in front of me.  Her car lurched backward and hit my bumper.

I got out to inspect the damage to my car… only a slight scratch.  

“What’s going on?” asked my wife.

“I’m caught in traffic.” I lied again.

The woman ahead of me was taking a long look at the front of her car while the other driver stepped from his SUV and apologized.

“No problem with my car,”  I said as I approached the two, holding the cell phone away from me with my finger over what I thought was the tiny voice pickup on the device.

They didn’t seem to notice me.  “And your back bumper looks OK,” I said to the woman. 

“It’s my husband’s new car,” she said to no one in particular.  “He will absolutely kill me!”

“I gotta go,” I said to her, with my hand up in the air, the cell phone held as far away from me as possible.  Some day I’ll find the mute button.  The last time I held my hand that high was in the third grade the day I almost wet my pants before getting the teacher’s attention. 

A policeman materialized to my right. 
”Sir, I’ll need your license and registration,” he said.  “You can put your hand down now.”

“Honey, I’ve been involved in a minor accident,” I said into the phone.

“Well, you look OK to me,” said my wife, standing now to my left.

“I brought her with me,” said the policeman. 

“I heard the crash on the phone,” she said.

“While you were standing on the bench, lady,” said the policeman.

“He said he was arresting me,” my wife said, glancing at me with what might have been a proud look on her face.

“I said I was rescuing you, Ma’am.” said the policeman.

“Well, I was only standing there, young man, and this is America!” said my wife.  “You’re lucky I hadn’t started my jumping jacks.”

copyright David Griffin, 2011

CONTINUED: Escort

“I was embarrassed to ask,” he told me later.

“Why?” I said, “A colonoscopy is a common procedure these days.”

“Well, I never heard of it,” said Willard. “It sounded scary and if I asked a neighbor I was sure word would get back to the Missus and she’d worry over it.”

“Gee, Willard,” I said, “why didn’t you call me? I would have given you a ride.”

“Like I said,” he replied, “you’ve got a big mouth.”

Willard said the hospital refused to consider a taxi for the ride home. Few cab drivers would come up to the second floor and sign the documentation as a designated driver.  Senior Citizen organizations weren’t of any help. With the high price of gas these days, few people could afford to ferry patients back and forth to their appointments.

 “So I called an Escort Service,” said Willard.

“You didn't!” I said. "Did you know what they do?”

 “I do now,” he said, shaking his head.      

Willard found the telephone number in the yellow pages under Personal Services, but put off calling until the afternoon before his hospital appointment. He finally dialed the number and a woman at Layla’s Carpet Cleaning and Escort Service picked up after ten rings. He hemmed and hawed, as usual, and she probably guessed Willard was an aging amateur who was naive in the ways of the world.

“Are you ready for a woman who’ll knock your socks off?” said Layla.

Willard told her he never takes his socks off in company.

 “Do you have a safe driving record?” he asked.

“Oh, c’mon you old goat,” Layla said.

“Well,” said Willard, “safety is very important, as I used to tell my boys in the Scout troop.

"Look, honey," she said "I’m a certified carpet cleaner whose business is a little slow this time of year. You’re dealing with a professional in every sense of the word. You just forget your merit badges and remember you’re in safe hands with Lady Layla.”

"I guess you’ll be OK,” said Willard. “How much?"

“I call my specialty the Ride Of Your Life,” said Layla. “It'll cost you thirteen hundred dollars, and I’ll have you back home by Thursday."

Willard gulped. "I just want a ride to the hospital at nine in the morning," he cried. "And a ride back at noon."

"Anywhere you want,” she said. “If you’re short on time, elevators are OK.”

“It’s only up two floors,” he said.

“Just don’t choose a busy office building,” she said, not listening..

“I guess I’ll need you for about three hours,” Willard said.

 “That time of day you can have my $99.95 Morning Matinee Special.” She yawned loudly. "And I'll include my famous Feast of Many Dishes."

"No thanks," he said, "I can't eat anything after midnight."

Willard gave me a blow by blow description of his trip to the hospital with Layla.  She picked him up at his house the next morning. When he saw the old pink Cadillac coming down the street, he asked his wife to please look in the back hall for his umbrella, and he quickly ran out the front door. Jumping into what looked like a super sized serving of pink cotton candy, he landed next to a buxom lady whose scanty clothing caused Willard to hope she'd had her pneumonia shot. As they drove away, Layla chattered on about nothing in particular while she snapped chewing gum between the words of her incomplete sentences.

Each time the well endowed woman turned on to one street or another, she leaned back to lift herself off the steering wheel and Willard tried to stare elsewhere. Layla slowly made her way through traffic, waving to one man after another along their route through downtown.

“I cleaned his carpet real good,” she said after a man coming out of the bank returned her wave with an enthusiasm unbecoming a banker. Willard slid lower and lower in his seat.

"Why the hospital?" asked Layla.

"I guess what I need is too complicated for the doctor's office," he replied.

"It ain't complicated, honey," she said. "You just let Layla-girl be your nurse."

Willard sincerely hoped she would stay in the waiting room and not talk to the medical folks. "Don't worry," he said, "there'll be plenty of nurses for this job."

"Kinky," she said.

At the hospital Willard stayed a few steps ahead of Layla as they walked down the hall to a renovated part of the building an undergraduate intern from the architectural design school had named Gastro Intestinal Plaza. While the crowd of hospital workers and visitors were dressed for a normal morning of work, Willard's escort appeared to have borrowed her outfit from Tina Turner’s wardrobe.  

They checked in under a sign that read, "You Brought Your Colon To The Right Place!" A look of shock  crossed the matronly clerk's face when Layla bent over to sign the required paper.  Her halter just wasn’t up to the task.

“I don’t have enough hands to hold the pen and everything,” said Layla, as she unsuccessfully attempted to do so.

Willard tried to cover his embarrassment by explaining Layla as “my cousin Esther from Omaha. I'm lucky she just happened to be in town this week."

"Working a convention, no doubt," said the older woman through pursed lips.

A gentleman in the waiting room who had to be eighty looked up as Willard and Layla were finding a seat.

"Wow,” he said. “All I could find was my nephew to drive me here."

Layla turned to the old timer with a big smile and said, "I'm available this afternoon, my man."

"Do you give an AARP discount?" he said. "I'm on a fixed income.”

Layla put her palms on her thighs and slid them up the front of her body. "I have a very sliding scale," she said with lascivious wink.

Willard said at that point he'd had enough. He grabbed Layla's arm and pulled her down to sit beside him and told her to please behave herself. By now Layla realized the obvious. Willard would not be a big tipper.

The procedure went well, as far as Willard could tell. One minute they were rolling him over on the gurney and the next thing he remembered the nurse was telling Layla he should not engage in any strenuous activity for the rest of the day.

"I don't give refunds," she answered.

When Willard dressed and found his way back to the family waiting area, he found Layla getting a signature on a carpet cleaning job from a red-faced hospital administrator. She practically hung on the man, whispering words in his ear he probably hadn’t heard from most of the hospital’s independent contractors.

“It’s those little personal touches,” she told Willard as they left the hospital, “that always close the sale.”

"I was pretty woozy," he told me later, "when that Layla woman brought me home. The Missus came out on the porch when the pink Cadillac pulled in the driveway. I don't think she ever imagined I'd come home pot-eyed and be dragged up the steps by a show girl."

"How did you explain it?" I said.

"I didn't explain nothin'," he said. "Layla gave her the meds we must have picked up on the way home. She told my wife she'd found me wandering around the drug store, asking for Winston Churchill."

"That's a believable story," I said.

"Didn't work," said Willard. "The hospital had already called to ask if my wife was a rock musician or I'd gone off with the wrong driver."

"Uh-oh," I said. "You could have avoided all that trouble if you'd simply asked me to drive you."

"I know," he said, looking off in the distance and smiling. "But I would have missed the Feast of Many Dishes ... even though I can't remember any of them."

copyright, 2012  David Griffin

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

www.windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: Retirement

Eventually there was marriage, housekeeping, children and a career. Scheduling became more and more complicated. My husband was on the road for weeks at a time so the bulk of responsibility for keeping with ‘the program’ fell to me.

As my daughters Sara and Emily entered their teenage years, with school, extracurricular activities and part time jobs I had to juggle my time to meet their needs. When my daughter Sara received her drivers’ license most of my scheduling issues disappeared. I got her an old car, mechanically sound, serviceable and quite ugly. Sara had to agree to transport Emily to her after school activities since I worked two evenings per week. It was a beautiful arrangement.

I found myself looking forward to not having to plan for every day. As it turned out, with moving to South Carolina I had much to do and slogged from one day to another. After a few weeks, all moving tasks were completed, boxes emptied, contents in their new locations and final trips to Goodwill accomplished.

Reality set in. What in the world was I going to do without a schedule?

I became the human version of a slug. I didn’t write and I didn’t exercise. I did the bare minimum to keep the household running, watched a lot of television and wondered what I was going to do for the rest of my life. Fortunately this human imposed misery didn’t last long.

I became a member of a local advisory committee, spent time visiting my children and grandchildren, started golfing, or shall I say, oh, never mind. Suffice it to say I am a terrible golfer, even after lessons.

I do fairly well on the driving range. I don’t know what happens on the golf course. It’s like I forget everything I have ever learned. The ball has a mind of its’ own, traveling in every imaginable direction but the one where I was aiming. Sometimes I actually miss the ball altogether.

I found my writers’ group in October, 2014. While I continue to procrastinate I am energized when I leave the meetings.

I learned I need to have a daily plan. My life prior to retirement would look like chaos to many people. I thrived on deadlines and crises. The lesson I learned: schedule my days, incorporate time for writing, exercise and multiple household chores. Once in awhile I even get a crisis to deal with.

 

CONTINUED: Pride

Besides, Dad  wasn’t upset about the butter.  The two of us were groaning under the weight of something neither could bring ourselves to discuss.  Two days before I had insulted and hurt him.

Lost in thought,  I missed a throw onto the platen and messed up the ticket sequence.  I didn’t notice Al come up behind me.

“God dammit,” he shouted at me, “you screwed up the counter.  We gotta go back to 2972 and print them all over again!”

“I’m sorry,  Al,” I said, “I was …

“You was staring out the God dammed window at the sky is what you were doin!  What’re you gonna be when you grow up, a weatherman?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to be,”  I said.  “Maybe I’ll be a bum.” I said it seriously, feeling down on myself.

“You ain’t gonna be no bum, youngster.  I get a feelin’ about people, ya know?  Yer one of those lucky bastards that God takes care of.  Me, I gotta work for a livin’, so get outta my way while I reset the counters.”

I was soon back pumping the press trying to stay alert and not get the counters out of sync again.

But my mind drifted back to when I was younger.  Although my father and I were often at odds in my teen years, I couldn’t deny that he had meant the world to me when I was a little kid.

Dad was a newspaper pressman and an expert at his trade.  When I was six or seven years old I thought he was the smartest man in the world.  I can’t count  the number of times I told anyone who would listen  that my father printed the newspapers that went all over the city and even down the valley to the small mill towns along the river. 

Imagine me, a seven year old kid brought down to the newspaper and walked into the pressroom to watch the men mount the heavy stereotype plates and thread the huge rolls of newsprint up from the basement into the gargantuan Hoe presses.  Wrenches clanged and after a few minutes it grew quiet. Someone called, “All Clear.”  Lights began to blink in warning and a sharp staccato buzzer blared out from somewhere above, echoing up and down the line of presses.  It reminded me of a submarine’s dive alarm I’d heard at the movies when the crew filled the tanks and dove beneath the waves.  Soon I was dragged below the surface of the noise as the presses clunked and groaned and quickly got up to speed with a roar that was deafening.  I wanted to hold my hands over my ears, but none of the men seemed impressed, so I kept my arms at my side and suppressed the urge to scream in delight over the thundering machinery.   The presses began to spit out the afternoon edition and sent a stream of miraculously folded newspapers of 54-pages each along a conveyor contraption that went up and across the ceiling and over to the waiting men who bundled them up in the mailroom.

When I left the newspaper that day with my father I was the proudest seven year old one could imagine.  Only a few years later I was a teenager when I stopped by the pressroom one afternoon to get the keys and borrow his car.  When his boss asked me to pose with Dad in a photo for the company in-house newsletter, I refused.  I didn’t want to be seen in public with my father in his coveralls and printers cap.  I had said only, “I can’t,” and Dad had laughed it off, but I could see he was hurt.

That night when we got home I ate the food he provided and went out in the evening wearing a new jacket he had bought me with the money he earned working in his coveralls. 

The next day I sat in math class up the street in an old brick high school building with roots down to the sub strata of rock.  My soles could just feel the vibration of the presses start up for the Valley Edition at 10:30 in the morning.  I felt exactly like the person Al told me I wasn’t, a bum.

“God dammit, Davey,” I heard Al shout in my ear.  “The counters are off again!  What the hell’s the matter with you this morning?”

I mumbled something.

“Here,” he said.  “Get over here and take the glue pot and make up this order of pads.  You’re not good for anything else this morning!”

I did as I was told.

“What’s buggin’ you, huh?”  Al asked, and he seemed to mean it.

“My father and I had a fight,” I said.  I told him about my refusal to be in the photo, hoping he would take my side, although I knew no one would agree with me.

“So you’re not proud of your old man?”  Al asked.

“I just didn’t want to be in the photo,” I said.

How come you’re not too proud to work here with me in this shit hole garage?” he asked.

I’d never thought of that.

“I know what your problem is,” he said.   “You don’t know how to apologize.”

“Sure I do!” I said.

“Not to your father.  Have you ever done that?” he asked.

“Well, I’ve never had any reason to,” I replied.

Al glanced across the work table at me.  He looked stunned. I remembered he was a father and for a moment something about his countenance reminded me of my Dad.  Then he leaned back and laughed.  And he kept laughing.  All morning.  Every ten minutes or so he’d look over at me and start laughing again.  Eventually he got me laughing and told me all the dumb things his kids did when they were teens.  He told me he loved them more than the air he breathed. 

That night I went home and apologized to my father.  He nodded.  He never said, “You’re a good son,” or reached out to give me an affectionate hug.  He wasn’t capable of those actions, but something in his eyes told me he loved me.  I can still see it and I have treasured it over fifty years. 

It has since occurred to me I never did anything to earn his love.  That may be the first great lesson of fatherhood.

copyright 2011, 2015,  David Griffin

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

CONTINUED: Beer Battered PBJ

   Uncle Jack opened the very first (and last) BBPBJ Stand in the garage behind his house on Mortimer  Street. I can’t tell you how much he spent on a splendid sign, constructed with replaceable numbers. It read, “O’Dooley’s Beer Battered PBJ - 0000003 SOLD.” He placed it out in front of his house near the curb and hoped  to siphon Mortimer Street traffic to his business.

     The neighbors were excited to have an entrepreneur amongst them… excited, not pleased.

After a month of very few sales , Jack became convinced he needed more publicity. He called me up one night to discuss the problem.  At the time I was the only member of our family crazy enough to listen to him. He had worked his way down through the family’s age groups before he found my sympathetic ear. I thought Uncle Jack  was interested in my entrepreneurial skills.  I’d had some business success with my paper route in high school. I recommended he move his sign down the street to the corner of a busier thoroughfare. The next afternoon I helped him drag it to a new location next to the dry cleaner on South Street. Two days later it was gone.

“Taken by someone who is going to steal my idea,” he moaned over the phone when he called.

Not really. While Jack was out, the dry cleaner had called Jack’s house to complain, intimidating my Aunt Alice.  She telephoned me with an offer of $5 to take the sign in my father’s car to the dump. In truth, I transported the sign to behind our house. It seemed too nice to just throw away.

“Don’t say a word about this,” my aunt whispered over the phone when I called to say the deed was done. “Maybe he’ll forget about the damned thing.” I didn’t tell her I had the sign in my back yard.

Uncle Jack was inconsolable. I felt so bad I was the cause of his sorrow, especially when on the third call to me that evening he was close to tears.

“Without that sign,” he sniffled, “no one will ever know of my creation.”

“You could have another sign made,” I said.

“That sign cost me all the spare cash I’ll have for months,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “why not put an ad in the paper? Offer a reward and maybe the culprit will put the sign back on the corner.”  And hopefully farther away from the dry cleaner.

The ad appeared the next day in the newspaper. “Reward: For the return of my sign ‘O’Dooley’s Beer Battered PBJ Emporium – 0000009 SOLD.”  I put the sign back on the corner late that night. No one collected the reward, of course.

Because of the ad, a local reporter showed up two days later with a photographer in tow and the result was a big spread in the Sunday newspaper’s Neighbors section.  000009 almost immediately zoomed up to 0000187.

Uncle Jack was back in business. Practically everyone knew of him and his sandwich now, including the City Health Department, the State Business Practices Board, the Alcohol Board of Control, the Internal Revenue Service , the nearby Third Avenue Baptist Church and even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. More than one of them offered him a deal he couldn’t refuse.  No one ever heard of his sandwich again.

Years passed before Aunt Alice would have anything nice to say about me. At my wedding she told my new wife, “Don’t believe a word he says.  You never know what he’s hiding in the back yard.”

“I guess I’ll find out,” said my new wife.

“And he never gave me back my five dollars,” she said, shaking her head.

copyright 2013, David Griffin

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

dave@windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: Trestle

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.

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.”

    On that afternoon 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 legs more 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