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

CONTINUED: Government BarBQ

We bought a new gas grill in 2011 when we moved south and dealt with its flame baffle for over a year.

Because the baffle prevented the flames from searing the food, meat cooked up just like indoors in our oven.  This incensed Mrs. Dave, marking the first time I'd ever seen her so upset with a government policy regarding the environment.

After a year of un-blackened meat, she brazenly ripped the baffle out of the stove one night as she prepared to cook a steak.

"I threw it in the pond," she said.

"Did anyone from another back yard see you do that?" I asked.

"Who cares?" she said.

"Well, hon, I'm sure this is a breach of a federal statute."

"Who cares?" she repeated.

"Well, hon, it could be a felony to remove a government sanctioned safety device, surely at least a misdemeanor."

"A safety device, huh?" she said.

"Yes, the baffle prevents the burner flames from igniting the steak," I said.

"I like my steak ignited," she said.

"But that's dangerous. It could start a fire and burn the house down."

"I'm not dumb enough to use the cooker so close to the house. That's why the cooker has wheels on it," she said.

"Not only is there a fire hazard," I said, "but burning the meat’s fat can produce carcinogens."

"That must be what tastes so good when the meat gets flamed." she said.

"I think you should give more thought to what you're doing here," I said. "The breaking of the penal code, the sullying of your debt to society by refusing to fall in line and do what everyone else should be doing, even if they're not doing it."

"Are you serious?" she asked.

"I’m always serious,” I said, “… on weekdays.  What day is this?”

“Monday,” she said.

“Do I sound convincing?"

"Not really."

"I'll take mine medium rare," I said. “Burn the hell out of it.”

copyright 2015, David Griffin

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

www.windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: Gifts

Maggie doesn’t see much difference between herself and humans, except she can run faster.  And she would never waste all that energy standing on two legs.  It’s nice to drop down on all fours and take it easy and enjoy life. Her nose is closer to her world.  She looks ever so cool on all fours. And she can run faster.

Maggie is served only the food she likes and laps it up with gusto, feeling blessed to be fed so well by her servants.  The dry dog food on special this week at the supermarket is the best she’s ever had.  Of course Maggie forgets what she eats from meal to meal and can’t recall her last.  There is a hazy memory, however, of the time she feasted on a hot juicy pork chop stolen from the kitchen counter.

Maggie does remember  she cannot take telephone messages and so she never tries.  A classic lady, she waits patiently for doors to be opened for her.

She’s proud of her special talent for keeping the ball when it’s thrown to her.   Most pets return the ball to whoever threw it so the game might continue, but this dog understands that a gift is a gift.  And besides, keeping the ball leads to another game called tug-of-war, which feels good to her teeth.  When the old man she chose as her servant tells her a turtle could  play catch better, she takes it as a compliment.  She takes anything said softly to her as a compliment.  She wonders what a turtle could be, but is nevertheless impressed anyone can do it better than her.

The old man who waits on Maggie is pretty pleased with himself, too, just like his dog.  He thinks he has always made the right decisions and done well.  He can’t run as fast as he used to but he believes he still looks pretty cool.  He has many misconceptions.  Like his dog, he has trouble appreciating someone has watched over him and coaxed his circumstances to bear fruit. 

It’s easy to see life as a series of accomplishments, more difficult to see it as a long line of gifts. The old man sometimes camps out in the center of his own universe,  minimizing the Author of all that is good and not recalling the free gifts bestowed.  Or forgetting everyone who ever helped him or was patient with his stupidity.  Or encouraged him with their praise.

When he forgets these things, he might as well drop down on all fours, harking back to the distant past he came from.   Before he first stood up on two legs long ago and began to act like he knew what he was doing.  Or could figure it out if he had to.  As if such were possible. 

Maggie would never act like that.  She may think highly of herself, but she knows her limits and knows to wait for help when she needs it. She’s never tried to figure it all out. She may be smarter than we think. 

David Griffin, copyright 2013

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

dave@windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: Hoot

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.

On the front of the shirt was a pretty girl standing next to a huge cigar.  A stylized owl perched on the cigar leered at the young lady, his huge eyes devouring her.  “You’re a HOOT!” was emblazoned in large letters across the scene.  The word “Hoot” stood out much larger than the rest.  Mom had at first said No when I asked if I could buy it with money I’d been given for vacation.  After my whining and carrying on she finally relented and said I could have it if I promised to never wear it in the vicinity of the nuns and our Catholic school.

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

dave@windsweptpress.com