Hoot was two
years older than I, but only when we were boys did our age difference matter
much. I naturally acceded to his
leadership when I was ten years old, but I was beginning to question why his
two year head start in life allowed him the respect he demanded of me.
“If he can go,
I should be able to,” I persisted. “He’s
no one special.”
“He’s twelve, and your older brother,” she said,
looking up at the ceiling, exasperation showing on her face.
“So? I won’t
bother them. I probably won’t catch up
with them anyway.”
She turned from me to the kitchen window. On tiptoe, she leaned in over the sink and
tilted her head up to see how much light was left in the patch of sky between
the houses.
“Can you get up there and back in a hour?” she said.
“Sure, yeah.” I ran out the back door of the
house. I flew down the driveway on my
bike and turned up the street, pedaling like mad. I sure as heck would catch up with the boys.
And then thumb my nose while I zoomed past like they were standing
still. That would annoy them and allow me to feel just as special as them.
My parents never called my brother Hoot, of course,
but out of their hearing I did. He
insisted his friends call him Hoot and he carried the name all through his life
without ever explaining where it came from.
Hoot’s life was beginning to puzzle me at that
age. He was the smartest kid I ever met,
until we ended our boyhood years and the world’s measurement system took
over. He could take down a bicycle to
its hundreds of parts, but never did very well in school. He would eventually memorize the words to
every song ever recorded by Bill Haley And His Comets, but flunked a grade at
school when he did horribly in English. He was a loyal friend and advisor to
many of the neighborhood kids, but he could not accept authority and would
never get along very well with employers.
I was the family whiz kid who succeeded, and I think
he sometimes resented it. But at home
when we were boys he was able to answer all the questions of a little brother
when he had the time for me, which as we grew toward our teens wasn’t
often. He even taught me my first
prayers, and I can’t imagine how that happened.
To get to me before my overly religious parents must have been pure
luck.
As a younger brother I sought his approval most of the
time and although we often wrangled over one thing or another, in the end he
was the brother with the biggest heart.
And that continued into his manhood.
Quite simply, even when I didn’t like him, I loved him.
Despite what I told my mother, I would have trouble
catching up with Hoot and his friends.
Their paper routes had made the older boys independently wealthy, enough
to purchase their new bikes. The kid’s
bicycle given to me a few years before was an old Columbia
of the style popular in the 1940’s and early 1950’s, before the lightweight
“English” bikes became popular in America. It weighed twice as much as the new bikes
that Hoot and his friends had bought with their earnings earlier in the
summer. The lightweights had three
speeds, including a high gear that allowed the rider to pedal in a slow
luxurious manner while the bike sped along at over twenty miles per hour. I could barely reach 10 mph while my legs furiously pumped
as though I was trying to escape from a swarm of killer bees.
Hoot and his friends’ new bikes had a low gear that
allowed them to pedal up the steep hill through the cemetery on the road that
led to the statue of the Eagle.. Even when I stood on the pedals of my old Columbia,
the road was too steep and the bike too heavy to pedal up to the top. I had to get off and push the old bike.
Terribly out of breath.,
I got the bike up the hill. I jumped
back on and rode along until I reached the little circle of pavement where the monument
to the Eagle stood. The three boys were
nowhere in sight. As the sun dropped
toward the horizon in the west I felt a twinge of disappointment in my
chest. The trio would have just enough
time to get down the other road and arrive home before dark. Even if I flew down the hill at top speed,
I’d never catch up with them.
Unless.
I knew of a short cut that would allow me to beat them to
the boulder by the side of the road where the park ended at the edge of the
city. It might even put me in front of
them, in which case I planned to be casually lounging on the grass next to the huge
rock
when
they came around the turn. They’d be
shocked to see me, like I’d come out of nowhere to beat them to the bottom of
the hill. It never occurred to me they
might not care at all and would ignore me, even had I descended from the sky in
a balloon.
I looked out over the city from the hilltop and considered
my shortcut. I had tried it only once
with poor results, but I was quite sure I could sail down the grassy slope of
the hill without killing myself and barrel into the trees beyond the field.
Once inside the woods I’d follow a narrow deer path through the trees,
slowing my descent down the hill only slightly as I weaved between the pines
and spruces. On an earlier attempt my
front tire slipped on a tree root crossing the trail and sent me headlong into
a bushy young hemlock. I sustained cuts
and scratches, but at least my head wasn’t slammed into the trunk of a tall
pine.
I began to fervently recite a Hail Mary. When I realized I was stalling more than
praying, I launched the old Columbia
off the road into the field and headed downhill.
The evening dew had settled on the grass and the bike
tires slid to the left and right. I held
on and rode the foot brake as I sat high in the saddle. There!
I could see the slight break in the tree line coming fast toward me and
at an ungodly speed I steered between two trees into the gloomy woods. It was darker than I had anticipated. I slowed, very afraid I would hit a tree and
crack my skull open and lay all night
dying while my family wondered where the hell I was.
I lost the deer
trail in the darkness and was soon crashing over rocks and debris on the forest
floor. I’ve never had a great sense of
direction and could easily get lost in the woods, but I was capable of telling
which direction was uphill and which was down, even in the dark. I got off the bike and walked it
downhill. After what seemed an eternity
I came out of the woods into the open to see that wonderful pink glow from a
summer evening sky. Another expanse of
grass lay before me with a narrow old cow path meandering down to where I would
intercept Hoot and his friends.
I stood still and held my breath, listening for the
boys. I heard nothing. They had either not yet arrived at the boulder
or had been there and gone. In the
latter case, I might have a chance to catch up with them from behind.
The pink and blue sky began to darken and for an instant I
wished I was home on the front porch sipping a cool glass of lemonade, enjoying
the sunset. Later I’d go inside and continue reading my Boy Scout
Handbook. I would have most of the 400
pages all but memorized by the time I was old enough to join them in the fall.
I was now unsure why I wanted to be with the three boys
who surely didn’t want my company. And I felt Hoot’s friends were complete
idiots, frankly. But I wanted to impress my older brother and to show him .... something. I think I wanted to show him I was better
than him. Finally, competitiveness was
winning out over brotherly love. I knew
I could take care of myself, and I didn’t want to ask him questions all the
time or depend on his approval of me. I
resented him being older, though it made no sense.
I heard the boys coming and I got going. On my way to the boulder, I passed beside a
reedy marsh that separated the cow path from the park road by about fifty
feet. Pedaling like crazy I drew up even
with the boys across the marsh. They
didn’t notice me through the tall grass as they laughed and joked among
themselves. They rode slowly as they
talked, and I furiously pedaled toward the boulder to beat them. I moved ahead
and looked back over my shoulder to see how far behind they were and drove my
bike right off the cow path into the
marsh.
I don’t know which laws of physics were in play that
evening, but somehow I wound up flat on my back in about three inches of water
with the old Columbia completely
upside down on top of me, perfectly upright, as if someone had decided to
change a tire and to hold me captive at the same time. The old-style wide handle bars spanned my
chest and pinned me to the wet ground.
With all the strength I had left, I pushed the bike over on its side and
crawled out of the marsh, sopping wet in a T-Shirt now torn completely down the
front. The boys kept going and may not
have even noticed me.
I sat crying. My heart was broken. I had owned the T-shirt only a week, a
souvenir from an amusement park we visited on vacation. I loved that T-shirt. I still think of it. If it had survived my childhood, today my
seventy year old wife would come across it from time to time in my dresser and
ask if we had a ten year old living with us she hadn’t noticed.
I pulled my bike out of the marsh and rode off,
dejected. The trio had to cross the
lower part of the cemetery again to get home and maybe they would stop
there. I might catch up with them after
all. When I reached the cemetery the
boys were not there. I got off my bike and sat down on a convenient
headstone. I tried to repair my special
t-shirt by tediously tying some of the loose threads together.
At ten years of age I wanted my older brother and I to always
be close, and I’d planned to have the T-shirt with his name on it for the rest
of my life. But any closeness we had would not outlast the summer of our
youth. As Hoot and I grew older we saw
each other dimly, like colors fading away in the sunset, leaving only shadows. We
kept in touch but we were never confidantes.
We were too different.
We would have a disjointed relationship all through our
lives. He would never acknowledge my worth and I would never ask his
advice. His life did not go well. We loved each other and visited, but we could
never bridge the divide that began to widen as we entered our teens.
On that evening long ago, as the
sky darkened to black and the stars came out, I continued to sit on the
headstone, not far from where we stood in the same cemetery last year when we
buried Hoot. I will always feel the
loss.
Soft summer evenings don’t come
often enough. At night I sit out back and
watch the sky darken to indigo and then
black. I feel the warm breeze hug me
with memories of days long ago. I try to
remember the feeling of a full heart, when love could hurt, but hope allowed
that more love would heal.
Tonight I think of all the summer evenings that went by
and the relatively few times Hoot and I had the opportunity to share them. Nothing special prevented us, just a lack of
awareness their number would be limited.
We regrettably walked through our lives on different sides
of the marsh. I remember there were
reasons for that, but I can no longer bring them to mind. In a way we were
quite different. But in other ways we
were quite the same. We were, after all,
brothers.
Rest In Peace, Paul
G. Griffin,
May 18, 1941 – September 13, 2013
Copyright 2013,
David Griffin
The Windswept Press
Murrells Inlet, South
Carolina
