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Just A Small Town Girl

She was a small-town girl from a dirty industrial city in the north. Her dad worked in the factories and drank too much. He’d get drunk and mad and tell her she’d better get the hell out of there first chance she got and make a life for herself and not to expect much from him or the family or that grimy town. The only time she saw her dad cry was when her uncle, dad’s older brother, came home from Vietnam in a box. Dad was 4F, blind in one eye from a farming accident as a child. She could never tell what hurt him worse, losing the eye or the fact he couldn’t go be a soldier like his big brother.

Elementary school was pretty simple. She grew up in the Cold War era and spent more than her fair share of time huddled under her desk during air-raid drills wondering what good a piece of plywood would do her against a nuke. She was often equally scared and sad that some men had the power to blow up her world when she hadn’t even kissed a boy yet, but she would. She sang in the school chorus and didn’t like to sweat and may have liked a boy or two, but for the most part found them dirty and smelly and annoying.

That changed a bit by the time she got to high school. She was tall and thin and pretty and someone, a girlfriend, suggested and pushed her to be a cheerleader. She hated it and the whole idea of girls in really short dresses on the sidelines of any event, as fluff or eye candy.

She was forced to read in her younger grades but came to love the works of Steinbeck in her late teens. Perhaps she saw a tie back to her battered down father and the characters in The Grapes of Wrath. She was comfortable and grateful for her humble and middle-class upbringing of the northern town.

In the eleventh grade, she dated a boy. A tall handsome boy, quarterback of the high school football team. He was black; she was white. It caused a lot of problems for her and the boy. She didn’t understand it, still doesn’t to this day. He seemed to understand it fully. She wondered out loud to him on their last night together if their love was as big a crime to his family as it was to hers. He said sadly it was. Since kindergarten, the grimy little town was to her always something of a melting pot. The kids all played together and fought with each other and made up and ran off and broke laws and rules together. But she learned there were lines that were not to be crossed. An unspoken set of rules that were not to be broken. These weren’t just her father’s rules, it seemed they were everyone’s rules. She may have actually loved her football player. It may have broken her heart. She read The Scarlet Letter and Catcher In The Rye and those books made more sense to her than the little town she called home.

After high school and with little direction, she quickly tired of jobs in grocery stores and bars and getting high on weed and drunk and riding around in cars and sex on back roads and packed up her things one day and said goodbye to her father and the life he hated and the grimy town and left for Florida.

She didn’t find much better work in Florida than what she’d left behind, but the weather was better, and boys were tan, and she loved the beach. She met a young man; he seemed ambitious and before long they married and he bought a fishing boat, a big boat and he’d be out at sea with his crew for weeks on end and she didn’t really mind. Perhaps it was Florida and that vibe, but she discovered Ernest Hemingway and fell in love with his work. Soon she had a son and soon after another and the joy of the beach and the life on the coast faded as she succumbed to loneliness and took a lover. A boy who worked on the docks who was as unthreatening as he was lazy. Her husband seemed to not notice, or care, and she lost herself in her boys and her books and the lazy dock boy. Her husband reminded her in ways she didn’t find pleasant of her father, now dead back home in the north. She learned to hate fish, and anything related to fish and fishing.

Often, when her husband was out to sea, she’d find herself wishing he’d not return, that the ocean take him. But the sea was a fickle co-conspirator and one day she loaded up the Chevy station wagon and her sons and her books and left, somehow landing in Lawrence, Kansas. A place that was neither north nor south or east or west, just a place that was different from South Florida and her grimy hometown.

Needing income for herself and her boys, she put herself through school and worked three jobs to become an RN. It wasn’t easy, but she was strong and proud and for the first time in her life, fully in charge of her life. She liked that. She watched her boys grow, and she liked her life and time was finally her own. She didn’t like Kansas much, but her sons settled there and married, and she became a grandma and she didn’t dislike Kansas enough to leave.

Still working now in hospital administration, pondering retirement, she enjoys her time alone with her books and words. She watches the world unfold now in a horror she can’t explain, enjoys movies and TV shows that don’t make her think. She spends her free time alone, no longer trusting those who run things. No longer able to understand the things people see as just. She thinks about the football quarterback and how much the world has changed and how much it’s stayed the same, or maybe gotten a bit worse. She still hates fish.

Summer

Then there’s not so much we take with us from those days into these days.

The flashes of fireflies an hour after sunset. The battle against inevitable darkness, a summer evening’s fading light; sweat still running as the sun sets in an explosion of fire in a bank of clouds. The bone deep exhaustion and the toll taken by the days heat.

I’m taken to hayfields in moonlight when the measure of the days success was the number of deadly vipers avoided and the sweet memory smell of cut grass.

The painful acceptance there are many more of these days behind me than in front of me, and the very real need to make all of them that remain last until I’m all used up and gone.

Priorities…

Jlo married some actor in Vegas… in other news Congress approved adding another $140 BILLION to the military budget. Closing in on $1 TRILLION a year.

Can’t feed the 17 MILLION kids who go to bed hungry every night. It will bankrupt the nation.

Can’t end student loan debt. Why should they get a handout. We didn’t.

Can’t have universal health care. Thats socialism.

Eight-thousand dollar hammers and five-hundred dollar screwdrivers for the military? We need that to keep us safe from the ISIS Air Force.

This should outrage everyone. This should be even bigger news than Jlo and what’s his name.

It isn’t.

It’s tragic.

The Flower of Youth

Dragging my stone-age ass up a ladder, the wise-ass young stud asked me if I needed a hand. My first reaction was to climb back down and lay him out. He didn’t look like much.

But I didn’t, i didn’t say nothing, I just quietly climbed the ladder. I thought about how I can hardly sleep now, what with the arthritis and the carpal tunnel and the pain in my arms. How many well placed shots are left in these hands and how many times they were bathed in ice to kill the pain of another broken bone, and the weakness of my back that makes it hard to stand.

His question took me back to my last time in the ring. Those young boys, fast and light, and elegant were kind to me. As kind as a man can be when he’s trying to beat you onto your back, but there was a kindness bestowed on the old man—maybe the blows were not so hard and maybe those boys didn’t dance quite so fast so my ancient arms and old eyes had a chance to catch them.

I still hear Luis say, “Yeah man, that dude wasn’t shit, but he sure beat your ass!”

But this boy here, by the ladder, I could tell he never stepped in the ring, he never smelled that sweaty moldy canvas face down. He never saw his vision close in from the sides to that pinspot, fine as a star’s light before conciousness fades from view. I doubt he ever tasted his own blood running down his throat from him nose or a split lip. I’m sure the boy was amused by my creaking knees and the slow pace my surgically repaired spine allowed me.

There is a kindness in the roundhouse punch that’s pulled and delivered maybe not quite so hard or the cut to the ribcage that doesnt break the bone. There is an honesty in and about the ring I don’t know that young stud will ever know, an honesty in trying to beat a man face to face and spit to spit. I fear taking a shot at the boy might result in a clumsy miss, and pretty sure he was the type to call a cop, not swing back.

I know the flower of youth has long ago died on the vine, but just let me pretend it’s still lush and vibrant for a few more rounds.

Junkyard Boys

Yesterday I took the grandboy picking in a junk yard. It’s one of the yards that still allow you to go pick and pull your own parts. Specht’s Recycling in Warwick.

Out amongst the ruins we found gold. First find was a B-61 Thermodyne Mack. I told him I used to drive one and he spent some time fascinated and confused as I tried to explain how to shift the compound shifter and the main, and compound split and low-split and all that old Mack transmission voodoo. He asked me if I thought he’d learn to work a clutch and a stick shift and I promised him he would.

We stumbled across some big old rusted excavators and he sat in the bucket and laughed. Finally, we came to a nest of twenty-five to thirty year old Mustangs, and I told him if there’s a heaven I hope it’s like this, and he said he got what I meant.

We picked junk parts and worked pretty hard as the near ninty degree heat baked the dust and old cars and me and the boy. He didn’t complain because he said, ‘We are Ford men,” and I almost cried thinking about my dad and me a million years ago working on his ’51 flatty.

Out there with the broken glass and the leaking crankcases and transmissions and the occasional snake and weeds and the boy I had one of the best days of my life.

I think boys need junkyards as much as old men do.