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