Reach For The Taut Rope 1m2s44

Reach for the Taut Rope

Delbert Martin

Copyright © 2021 by Delbert Martin All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below. Christian Faith Publishing, Inc. 832 Park Avenue Meadville, PA 16335 www.christianfaithpublishing.com Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Dodie’s Talk with Lola

Bob Visits Roy

New Family/text>

First Grade “Show-and-Tell”

Wild Ponies

Grape Soda

Annie Annie Over

Spring Rain

Candy

First Jake, Then Roy

Uncle Smitty

Aunt Delpha

A Night Out

News from Missouri

Job Offer

The Chubb Family

Surfer Wannabe

The Rambler

Freight Train Ride in Missouri

Carefully Torn and Stacked

Super Foods

Three Brothers

My First Trip West: Mom’s New Venture

My First Trip East

Aunt Dodie

My Second Trip West: Santa Cruz Surfers

My Second Trip East

Pickens’s Grandma

My Third Trip West: First Year of College

Dennis and Connie

The Madrone Avenue Garage

The Hound Approached

My Third Trip East

My Fourth Trip West: The Bible Tote

The Hound Staggered Me

Aftermath

I’m reminded of a poet’s question. “Why do men then and now not reck his rod?” By Gerald Manley Hopkins, circa 1877, in his poem “God’s Grandeur”

This book is dedicated to Deborah, used by God beyond her reckoning, and to our kids, and to their kids, in hope they will reck his rod.

Good morning, America. How are you? Say, don’t you know me? I am your native son.

—“The City of New Orleans” (Arlo Guthrie)

Preface

Lola Dye, one

of the seven daughters of Ramey Dye, an itinerant Arkansas laborer, was raised on copious amounts of Arkansas pork, collard greens, corn bread, buttermilk, and curbed amounts of corn whisky. Delpha, Ramey’s oldest daughter of the seven, led the family until Lola was a teenager. She anchored them the best she could. They were loosely parented, discreetly reckless, seemly tough. Yet they were fragile as glass. Lola and her two sisters, Dodie, and Shirley, followed Delpha to Michigan, where they found husbands. Lola’s family was wondrously complicated because her grandfather, Henry Clay Dye, who was already married with other kids, ran off with his kid’s nanny, Amanda. Young, beautiful Amanda gave Henry five more sons as his second family. Ramey, their eldest son, was born, and then eighteen years later, their youngest son, Delbert, arrived when Henry Clay Dye was seventy-years-old! (See Figure 1.) Lola and her uncle Delbert Dye were near to the same age, and she adored him. Delbert was my namesake, and Lola was my mother.

Figure 1. Henry Clay Dye, Delbert Dye, and His Wife, Sylvia

Mom married, divorced, then married another man, Glade Martin, who was my father. Prompted to talk about her life growing up in Arkansas, Mom shook her head. “We had our troubles,” she said, “but Uncle Delbert was good to us. That’s why Skipp got his name.” I never met Delbert or my grandpa Ramey, so I looked them up on digital ancestry records to confirm what little information Mom told me. I found mention of them there, along with Benton Harbor’s Herald-Palladium newspaper articles about Mom and Aunt Shirley. Wounded, Mom hid her feelings, buried them deep, and she couldn’t be coaxed to talk about her past. She also hid bottles of vodka in the house, and she drank alone. If questioned about her drinking, she denied it. Conversely, she was a diligent mother who kept her four kids housed, clothed, clean, and fed. She either worked the farm, or if we were in town, she worked in the school cafeteria or a restaurant job as a cook or a waitress. Though I sometimes went to bed worried about her drinking, I’d see her in the morning spirited and determined. Some pious writers, like the honorable Clive Staples Lewis, asserted that heaven and hell worked in both directions, past and future. When you chose hell in whatever moment of time and then when you looked back, you’d think you have always been in hell. If you chose heaven and when you looked back, you’d know that he was always with you. Together and separately, Mom and I traveled all over America. Unbeknown to both of us, we were both chased, as Francis Thompson described in his 182lined poem entitled, “The Hound of Heaven,” excerpt, circa 1890.

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days, I fled Him, down the arches of the years, I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways, Of my own mind, and in the midst of tears. I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

* * * * *

Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue. Across the margent of the world I fled, And troubled the gold gateways of the stars, Still with unhurrying chase, And unperturbed pace, Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, Come on the following Feet, And a Voice above their beat— Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.

As a young man, I turned away from all family memories, rejecting them, perhaps to my own hurt. I learned to be thankful for the present, but I disregarded my past. In the last few years, I considered memories as I tried to write some stories from

my past. Startled, I felt a renewed sense of failure. I turned away from those feelings many years before, but now they were back. I was still susceptible to what the writer of Hebrews 12 warned us, “Lest any root of bitterness spring up causing trouble, and by this many become defiled.” Buried bitterness defiles and stinks when it’s uncovered. Even worse, like pneumonia, if you get it once, it is easier to get a second time. If I wasn’t to remain sullied, as mentioned in Hebrews 12, what was I do? Mom and Dad were both dead, twice buried, first in the earth and then in my memory. I needed a strategy to redeem the past and it with content, not with regret. If I could do that, then with God’s help, maybe writing these stories would help my soul too. Psalm 23 subscribes, “He restores my soul.” What clues did I get to restore my soul and redeem the past? Well, I began by being thankful for every moment, both good and bad. “Never look back” sounded brave, and maybe it worked for a short time. But if I actively and intentionally buried child and youth memories my whole adult life, then the memoir writing stops. And without a path through the muddled silence, I would sit blotted, fretful, and diminished. My review of our past self-afflicted hurts and failures conversely pointed to my rescue. Gratitude was the path to my redemption. “In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thessalonians). May all who see their way to read this story see how God, as the Hound of heaven, guides us into his kingdom that cannot be shaken.

In the rash lustihead of my young powers, I shook the pillaring hours And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears, I stand amid the dust o’ the mounded years—

My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap. My days have crackled and gone up in smoke (For though I knew His love Who followed, Yet was I sore adread Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside)

Part 1

Missouri Bound

Dodie’s Talk with Lola

“So what are you going to do?” Dodie asked. Hesitant, she spoke faintly, just above a whisper. Biting the inside of her cheek, Dodie sat at Lola’s pink Formica kitchen table. Rubbing her knees, she then moved her finger across her eyebrow like she had an itch. She looked at her sister, praying to herself, “O God, help us.” Lola paced, her angular pretty face looking about, unsettled. Her open fingers moved through her curly brown hair. Stopping abruptly, she squeezed the top of her head with one hand while she pulled on the front of her blouse with the other. “I can’t stand this,” Lola said. “I am so mad, I’m sick, and I just don’t know what to do yet. Maybe we can go to Delpha’s place, but maybe not. She found out about me getting arrested.” Staring fixedly at the floor, Dodie said, “In her letter, she sounded okay. She did invite us to visit.” Dodie didn’t tell Lola that she had cut the news article out of the Herald-Palladium and sent it to Delpha with a note, “Pray for us. We are having trouble here.” Then she said, “But how would that work for you? Delpha can’t take care of the boy.” “We will get by. If I could leave tomorrow, I would. I am done with Glade. Completely done,” Lola said, and then she turned on her southern accent. “I am so sick of his horse ‘maa-new-aah.’” Pausing, then she repeated, speaking aloud to herself as she turned away, “Delpha might help us.” With that, she left the kitchen for a quick search and find. Then she had a quick swig alone. Fortified, Lola came back. “Speaking of ideas. Did you want to come with me? Together we could do it.” Lola tried to smile, but just a flutter reached her eyes. She stretched her arms out with an edgy stab, then touched her cheek and rubbed her mouth. She reached out for Dodie but then stopped and dropped her arms.

Interrupted, they heard the little boy holler. They had left him asleep in the bedroom in his playpen. Now he was up and about. Dodie stood up, raising his hands straight over his head. “Hold you, Doe-Doe. Hold you, Doe-Doe,” repeated the boy as he ran toward her full tilt. Dodie bent over and scooped him up, looked at Lola and looked at the boy, and then she nodded to herself, “Okay, if he goes, I am going too. Find out from Delpha what she thinks about both of us coming to stay with her for a while.” Hearing this, Lola gave a small yelp and sat down. Gently shaking her head, Dodie forced herself to smile. “Sister, you got troubles with Glade, and I can’t help you there. What if he wants our boy to stay here and he gets a lawyer? He could maybe try to stop you. Chase us down to Paducah.” “He won’t. I will deal with him or what’s left of him. He doesn’t want a family with me. He has found someone better.” Lola called Delpha. She was proud of her little boy, but she was ashamed to it she had another failed marriage. “He’s a jabber box,” said Lola. “He mimics every word Dodie says. She plays with him like no one else, and she is his favorite. You will like seeing them together. They will make you laugh.” “Hmmm,” Delpha said. “If Dodie comes, then she’ll be a big help. She calls him Skipper?” “Yeah, that’s right. Mr. Hippedity Hop, Mr. Jabber Box, all of the those.” “Lola, you do know that we need Dodie to come with you for this to work out. My job keeps me busy, and you will have to work too.” Lola knew that Delpha and Dodie used to go to church together. Delpha trusted Dodie. Lola stood up, and she took a deep breath, exhaled, and flexed her fingers, then touched her jaw, rubbed it, and said, “Yes, she said she’d come.” “And no crazy fights like I heard about. For heaven’s sake, your little boy is just a year old!” (See Figure 2.)

“Okay, I know, I know,” said Lola. She held her breath, gripped the phone, and sat down slowly. She held the phone to her chest for a moment, then put the receiver back to her ear, and then she spoke softly, “Delpha, I am sorry about this, this…confusion. So very sorry. I am a good mother. So help me, God. I’ll do better.” “Okay, Lola, don’t worry. God help us. Sounds like Dodie will help us too,” answered Delpha, “Come to Paducah.” Lola sighed, stood up, shook her head slightly, still not smiling, and then said, “I know that we will be intruding on you. Oh, Delpha, this will help us so much.” Lola told Dodie the good news. “Delpha said we could come if you come with us.” “What about Glade? Maybe you could get child ,” said Dodie, “that could help.” “Forget it,” Lola said. “He is a charming, conniving lying SOB, and he wouldn’t send us any money no matter what the court ordered. All I want is for him to stay the hell away from me and leave us alone.”

Figure 2. May 31, 1952, News-Palladium, Benton Harbor Used by Permission, The Herald-Palladium

Glade gave her a car and some cash. She and Aunt Dodie had some money and a 1948 Pontiac four-door sedan. She and Dodie loaded up the Pontiac and put the boy in the back seat. They took turns driving the five hundred miles to their sister Delpha’s house. They spent the night in a motel room in Terre Haute, Indiana, about halfway, and then drove into Kentucky the next day. Delpha met them at the Baptist Health Paducah hospital late that night. Dodie tried to tell her what happened. “We were coming into Paducah late in the day. Little Delbert was in the back seat, packed in there with our suitcases. Two days, over twelve hours cramped up in the car, he cried most of the second day. We stopped for gas just outside of Paducah, and he was fed up with riding in the car. Somehow, he figured out how to unlock the door after we pulled out of the gas station. Maybe we left the door unlocked, I don’t know. Oh God, I hope not. Anyway, Lola was driving, accelerating out of the gas station when he opened the back door and fell out. Less than two years old, and he was bouncing on the side of the road at twenty miles per hour.” Dodie burst into tears but kept talking. “We got out, and he was laying on the side of the road like a rag doll. I was afraid to touch him.”

* * * * *

Four hundred miles west of Delpha’s house lived two families, the Nolands and the Trumans. These were two famous farming families going back to the mid1800s who first began in Kentucky and then migrated to Independence, Missouri.

While Dodie and Lola were driving south to Paducah in 1952, the president Harry Truman was finishing up his last year, having served as United States president from 1945 to 1953. After Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration, January 10, 1953, Harry Truman rode a train from Washington, DC, to his house in Independence. He met his first cousin Ethel Noland there and walked her to her house. Their houses were across the street from each other. Years before, the Noland clan moved their families from their nearby farms to those houses inside of town for the better schools. There were still several Noland families and their descendants running large farms near Paducah, Kentucky, and Independence, Missouri. Soon to be of interest to Lola and Dodie was a sheet metal worker who had just moved to Paducah to work on the hospital; his name was Roy Noland.

Bob Visits Roy

Bob and Roy entered through the bright metal front doors of the Old Towne Diner in Downtown Paducah, Kentucky. They walked past farmers sitting on round red stools, eating breakfast at the diner’s stainless steel counter. Roy was treating his brother Bob. Roy led to a booth, and he sat opposite Bob. The sound of crackling bacon called out from the kitchen. The smell of frying eggs and sausage was in the air. Two women hurried about with coffeepots held high. A third waitress suddenly appeared, and she came up behind Roy. Roy was talking. “Paducah is a decent town. You’ve heard, I think—” He was interrupted when she stopped at their table. Flashing her smile, she said, “Well, gents, what is it going to be this morning?” She had nice brown eyes with curly hair framing her pretty face. Bob and Roy placed their orders. She nodded as each one spoke while making friendly eye . She was maybe flirting or maybe not. Roy made his order, and then he said to her, “You are not writing anything down.” She laughed. “No, buster, I don’t need to write it down.” She amped up her smile, tilted her head, and looked at his hands. “Don’t worry, I won’t mix ’em up,” she said and then spun away. Bob watched her poised, purposeful walk as she disappeared into the kitchen. Directly, she came back in a no-nonsense manner, and she plopped their orders down on the table. No mix-up, as she said. As they walked to their parked car, Bob commented, “Hey, she is a humdinger, Roy. I think she likes you.”

These two Irishmen, Roy and Bob, were burly, heavyset, with strong big hands, and black hair. They had been raised on farms, smelled of cows, hay, and tilled sod. Bob had married one of two sisters from a neighboring family, and he and his other brother, Jake, owned ading farms near Harrisonville, Missouri. Bob had come to Paducah to see Roy at his new job, leaving Jake behind to take care of the farms. Roy went back to the Old Towne the next morning alone. He had looked at her hands, and he did not see a wedding ring. He invited her for coffee, and they talked. She told him she had been married before but was now divorced and that she had a two-year-old toddler. They hit it off in that first conversation. He told her about his construction job, which was nearby and about to start. She invited him to dinner. “If you can, why not come to dinner tomorrow night? You could meet my two sisters and the Skipper.” Roy’s thoughts froze for a second. “Are you sure?” he said. “I mean…” His voice trailed off. “Are you really okay with me coming to your house?” His hand reached up and touched his throat, then he saw she was looking at him with a smile and with a quizzical look in her bright eyes, just waiting for him to answer. He sighed, grinned, and spoke directly. “Of course, I would love to come to dinner tomorrow night. What time do you think?”

* * * * *

“We are pleased to meet you, Mr. Noland,” Delpha said, ing him the bowl of mashed potatoes. “I understand you are from Independence, Missouri?” Shyly smiling, he nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Near Independence. I was raised on some farmland on both sides of the Missouri River. My dad and my uncle inherited some of the land near Harrisonville, and they kept it in corn, barley, and alfalfa with a few dozen dairy cows. My two brothers still work the farms, but I don’t.” “Why don’t you?” asked Dodie.

Warming to his subject, Roy continued. “They are working my share, but the farm isn’t big enough for the three of us. Instead, I work as a journeyman sheet metal worker.” He stopped talking. Lola was tilting her head, puzzled about something, her mind adrift. “Lately I have been working mostly hospital construction. I’ll be at the Mercy Hospital project site during the week. I’ll have some long days.” “We are glad to hear that,” Dodie said. “I-I mean that’s not what I meant,” she stuttered, her cheeks flushed. “Ha, we are glad you will be close, not that you will have to work long days.” She liked him. She could see he was a little nervous. Maybe that’s good if he was a little worried. Lord, help us, keep us from evil men. “I should be able to get weekends off. The job will run for about six months, maybe longer. I didn’t tell you yet that I have a daughter. She lives with my brother Bob’s family. Roy looked directly at Lola. “I could visit you again?” Lola was looking at Dodie, then she nodded at Roy. “You bet, we’d like that,” said Lola. “What’s your daughter’s name?” “Peggy Sue. She turns thirteen this year. She is my wife’s daughter. Was my wife’s,” said Roy. Again, he was feeling self-conscious, his hands gripped together. “Relax, Mr. Noland, relax, we like you,” interjected Delpha. “We are sorry to hear about your wife. We too had some troubles when our little Delbert fell out of a moving car his first day in Paducah. Knocked him out cold, messed up his right ear, and scared us to death! He’s okay now. The doctor said ‘two-year-old boys are made to bounce.’ I say more likely they are made to keep the angels busy. It was a miracle he didn’t get hurt worse than he did.” Roy glanced quickly at Lola, and then he rolled his shoulders. He took a deep breath and said, “Funny how we sometimes get nervous for no reason, huh?”

All was quiet, then they heard a loud thud upstairs. “You bet, that’s him.” Lola said, “He should be sleeping, but he knows we are down here.” She flashed her hundred-dollar smile, raised one shoulder, almost mirroring Roy’s shoulder moves. Then her legs moved under the table, her foot touched his, maybe by mistake. Seemly vexed, he pushed back his chair. “I should head out now. Lots to do with the new job coming up. You’re all are so kind.” He got up and nodded slowly to each of them, and he put his hand out. Lola said, “Bye. Y’all come back now. We’d like to see you again.” She reached out and took his hand and squeezed it. He nodded. “I will. Count on it.” Out the door, he went. Generally, Lola itted nothing about her feelings. Dodie asked her, “Well?” “Complicated situation. He has a teenager in Missouri. He has a temporary construction job here. This is probably it. I doubt we will see him again.” “But do you like him?” “Doesn’t matter if he doesn’t come back.” She shook her head, swallowing hard. She heard herself, dropped her chin, and closed her eyes. “That was a mean way to talk.” She could hear herself. Dodie deserved better. She turned, faced Dodie, grabbed her hand with both hands, squeezed hard, and said, “I’m sorry. Yes, I like him. I hope he comes back.” Self-reliant, if Lola prayed, she prayed alone. Smart and responsible, she worked full-time. She went to church with Delpha and Dodie, but she was quiet about everything she heard. If she drank, whether it was much or little, she always tried to hide it. Dodie, devout, convinced in her own beliefs and considered Lola in her prayers. She told her, “Lola, you shouldn’t say that you are not important to God, you

are.” “Yeah, I know, and I believe we’re all important,” Lola countered. “I’m sure he knows me. He knows I want to do it my way. Maybe he’ll help me, and maybe he won’t. Either way, I’ve got to keep going.” Delpha opened her house to them. In a pinch, she would sit with the boy in his bedroom and follow him through the house. She read stories to him and sang to him. After two months, he was just getting settled in. She would be sorry to see him go. “I can take care of him for a few hours on weekends if that helps you, Lola.” Quiet and self-reliant like her sisters, Dodie was pretty but with less flash. She was more reserved, and she wouldn’t drink. In Michigan, Lola had trouble, and Dodie stepped up and moved to Kentucky so she could help take care of Skipper. She and Lola planned to move out of Delpha’s place, but what would happen if Lola were to marry again? The burden of the little boy’s connection with Dodie flooded her mind, and she grieved just thinking about it. He called for her in the night, ran to her in the day. Balloons and balls bounced between them in midst of shrieks of laughter. They drew pretend dragon fire on poster paper. They held their cookies over the dragon fire and soberly ate them together. “Hmm, aren’t these good? Don’t let the dragon fire burn your fingers,” she told him. He repeated every word she spoke. “That boy is a word whizz.” Three weeks after his first dinner with them, Roy did come back to see Lola. He saw her Pontiac parked in the back of the Old Towne, so he pulled into the parking lot. Sitting in the same booth, where they first met, he looked up, and there she stood. “So you did come back,” she said. “You’ve been on my mind,” he said. (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3. Roy, Lola, and Skipper

New Family

I started calling him Dad because Lola was my mom. Kentucky and his sheet metal hospital construction job were a good start for our new family. Mom stayed home with Maude and I, and we were there at the same Paducah house for a few years. (See Figure 4.)

Figure 4. Mom Makes a Pie in Paducah

Then his job location was changed to Ohio, and Dad bought a single-wide trailer for us to live in. I soon had a baby brother, Todd, and a baby sister, Aless. We lived in that trailer for about a year, including one Christmas, and Dad moved it to be near a couple of Ohio construction jobs. “Wait until morning,” Mom said. “No peeking.” Wide awake on the top bunk in our trailer, I could hear Maude stirring. She tried to crawl past us, between the two bunk beds to the living room. Christmas presents were in there, and she could not wait until morning. I stopped her again. She had to wait like the rest of us. Aless got an emerald green stuffed doll with white polka dots. We called it the “alien doll.” Its head was as big as her own, its body was smaller than its head, and each of its two skinny legs were almost two feet long. She dragged the doll by one foot, with the back foot dragging nearly halfway down the hall behind her, with its head bouncing in-between. Back and forth in the trailer for a day until Todd grabbed the tangling back foot as it ed him in the hall. Aless yelled, and she kept pulling. Together they yanked the leg off. That was the end of her doll. “O Lord, give me strength.” Mom would yell from her bed before she got up. Most mornings, those words and her voice woke me. As an Arkansas farm girl used to making do with little enough, she hit her limit with making do in that single-wide trailer. “Roy, get us out of here.”

Note 1: The Mystery of Maude

Mom was pregnant with Maude soon after she met Roy but by another man. Roy knew that Maude was not his daughter. Growing up with Maude, I did not know any of this. It was never mentioned. Unsung, Roy raised us both as if we were his own.

* * * * *

We were thrilled when Dad moved us into a big rented Ohio farmhouse with acres of open fields, a fenced-in chicken house, and a barn. Even more surprising, his adopted daughter, Peggy Sue, showed up. A year before he met my mom, Dad’s first wife had died of cancer, and so Peggy Sue had stayed with his brother, Bob. Because we now had a big house, Peggy Sue left Uncle Bob’s and moved in with us. She was in her last few years of high school, and I was six years old. We had chickens, pigs, and some long-necked geese. Dad bought a little black lamb named Pamper. Mom would let little Pamper come in to the enclosed back porch, which opened to the kitchen. “She doesn’t come into the kitchen.” “Yes, Mom,” we said. Yeah, right. Easy to agree but hard to comply. The porch was cold in the winter. Pamper soon grew too big for both kitchen and porch. We wouldn’t let her in, so she stood on the backstep, waiting for the door to open. “Skipp, get Pamper off the back step and put her in the barn.” Pamper was lonely. Sometimes, I would sit with her in the barn to keep her company, but full-grown sheep are boring companions. Pamper didn’t know how to play. (See Figure 5.)

Figure 5. Skipp, Mom, and Peggy Sue, Pamper by the Screen Door

The long-necked geese were not boring, but they didn’t play either. Instead, they stretched their necks out, squawking as they chased us, and they tried to bite us. They were always grumpy and never friendly. One Sunday afternoon, exploring the open fields behind our house, I fell into a deep construction ditch way beyond sight of the house, and I couldn’t get out. When I didn’t show up on time, Mom sent Peggy Sue out to look for me. Peggy Sue found me but lost her footing, and she fell in too. She couldn’t get out either. Missing the Sunday evening Walt Disney Show weighed heavy on my mind as we waited. “We are missing it,” I repeated again to Peggy Sue. “Well, your mom will come to find us,” she muttered and then yelled, “Help! Hey, someone out there?” It took about an hour, and we heard Mom hollering, and she found us. She went back to the barn to fetch a long piece of lumber and some rope. After dark, we made it home again. Too late, no Walt Disney for us that night. The TV, circa 1956, was a magic box for us. I saw the words Network difficulties, please stand by flash on the TV screen as the picture disappeared and was replaced by a mishmash of blinking white flashes scrolling across the screen. No more voices, just static. Anxious, I was missing My Friend Flicka, so I got up and stood by the blinking box. I asked Peggy Sue to help. “If we stand up, it will come back on quicker,” I pleaded. “Don’t be stupid, they just mean we have to wait. The TV doesn’t know you are standing by it.” Peggy Sue laughed at me. Okay, maybe I believed her, though not readily. I still felt uneasy, just sitting there, when the TV screen requested action. The pigs were cheerful eaters and had dazzling smells. They liked to run, so I

would let them out of their pen. Peggy Sue, helping Mom, watched me. She lifted me with her shouted laughter as we chased those pigs around. “Skipp, you are quick,” she would yell. “But that pig is quicker!” It was during the first year with Peggy Sue that I noticed Mom hid bottles of vodka. When I asked Mom about them, she would say in a grim voice that I had not heard before, “Never you mind, that’s not your business.” Meanwhile, Peggy Sue stood clear-eyed in the kitchen when Mom could not. Peggy Sue’s hands would be hidden in soapsuds, washing pots, and she would have my hands drying the dishes. She cracked nonsense lyrics for fun, and her kindness anchored me some.

First Grade “Show-and-Tell”

I took a dozen baby chickens in a cardboard box to school. I was proud with the box sitting on my lap on the long bus ride to school. The chicks and I were a hit at school too. All day long, the kids came over to the box of chicks, scooped one up, and carried it around for a bit. Then they brought it back and put it in the box. Riding home, all the chicks, except for two, keeled over and died one at a time. Some of the kids on the bus still wanted to hold one, but I closed the box lid. “Go away, no more holding the chicks,” I said. I arrived home, but Dad was not there that week. He was working in the city. Carrying the cardboard box with the ten dead chicks, I called out as I entered the kitchen, “Hey, Mom, I am home.” She came into the kitchen from the bedroom with an unsteady gait. I sat the box down on the floor. In a loud voice, she said, “My Skipper.” She hugged me. Up close to her face, I winced and tried to pull away because I smelled her breath. She’d been drinking. “The baby chickens are dead,” I said. Still talking loudly, she said, “Oh my po-ah, dah-lin’.” Mom affected with her southern accent. I dropped my chin and looked at the floor. Hollowed out, I retreated from the kitchen, looking for Peggy Sue. Walking down the hallway, I pressed my fist hard against my chest, rubbing it. I felt pressure in my chest, so I tried to push it out. I couldn’t find Peggy Sue in the house.

Silent, I ran to the barn and climbed up to the hay loft. High up in the loft, I saw her walking along the gravel road from mailbox, so I waved. She saw me, shouted, and waved back. Just seeing her wave from afar settled me some. Climbing down, I found her and abruptly asked, “Why does Mom drink?” Peggy Sue squinted like I had poked her. She looked away, took a deep breath, looked at me, and then looked away again. Looking out over my head, she stuck out her bottom lip. She squeezed it and pulled on it. She dropped her hand and said, “Look, Skipp, she cares for us. I know she loves you especially. Maybe she’s sad about something.” Peggy Sue stopped, held her breath, and looked me full in the face. “But don’t tell her I said that.” I mulled over what Peggy Sue told me. Was Mom sad because of us? What could we do to make her so she didn’t wanna drink? Her favorite breakfast was a glass of cold buttermilk with a piece of corn bread crumbled up inside the glass. She ate it with a spoon, pensive and quiet like in the mornings before we got up. When we entered the kitchen, she set it aside and jumped up and cooked our pancakes and eggs. Sometimes, just milk and cereal, but we always had something, and she was there to prepare it for us. We kids didn’t drink buttermilk. It was her private thing as was her solitary drinking. The next morning, sober again, Mom asked about the chickens, “What happened to them?” Looking at me, Peggy Sue answered, “They died on the bus ride home.” I looked out the window. Mom couldn’t ? “Are you okay, Skipp?” Mom asked, “I am so sorry.” She was sorry about what? Nodding yes but feeling lost, I left the table. “Come back, Skipp, your breakfast.”

* * * * *

Third grade, we moved two times. I went to three different schools that year. I a morning at one of three schools. Alone, I pushed open the heavy school doors but saw no one and heard nothing. I stopped in the intersection of two wide hallways. I was lost, and then I heard the bell ring. I was going to be late, but which way? Hurry? But where? I sometimes dreamed about being lost or chased or flying away. The flying dreams briefly pleased me, but then when I realized I couldn’t control my speed or my altitude, it became a nightmare. During those moves, Peggy Sue stayed with us. We ended up in a rented house in Ohio with a detached garage, and her bedroom was above the garage. One Saturday, she and the rest of family left for the day. “We will be back by midnight,” Mom said. “You are on your own today. Make us proud.” “Don’t let Jerome in the house. If he comes over, tell him he has to leave,” Dad said. He was a year older than me. Peggy Sue complained about him, “He takes our stuff.” “Jerome is a bad egg.” I heard Dad say to Mom. Even so, I liked to play with Jerome. I had no closer friends, and we had some fun together. Instead of telling him, “No, I have to stay home today, and you can’t be here,” he and I ended up in the garage with candles. “So what happens when a candle burns down to nothing?” we wondered. He brought candles over, and we set them on newspaper and watched them burning for a while. Slow melting wax was too slow to watch for long, so we left them burning.

“We will come back later.” Jerome went home, and I went upstairs to my room. Later that day, I heard banging on the front door. “Your garage is on fire!” yelled our neighbor, Mr. Olfax. Shocked, I ran outside and saw the flames licking through the garage windows. “I called the fire department. They should be here in a minute,” he continued. They rolled in, broke down doors, and put the fire out. The garage exterior was still standing, but I could see all was black inside. Peggy Sue, Dad, and Mom came in late. I heard their voices from my bedroom. “My god, Roy, what do you think happened?” “It’s too late to worry about it now. Let’s go to bed. We will deal with it in the morning.” “Peggy Sue, I will get you some blankets. You will sleep on the couch tonight.” The next morning, before anyone was up, I went outside to look at the charred remains of the garage. The stairs to Peggy Sue’s room were burnt. Her room and everything in it were destroyed. I tried to be quiet, but Dad heard me moving about, and he followed me out to the garage. “So what happened?” he asked. “I lit some candles. I wanted to see what happened when they burned down to nothing,” I answered. “then I left them burning.” Sick feelings rumbled in my stomach and rose in my throat. I couldn’t say Jerome’s name, not to Dad’s face. Shaking his head, Dad said nothing, then he turned away, and muttered, “What a mess.” He walked back into the house, and I stood awhile longer in garage. I saw Mr. Olfax crossing the street to our house, so I ran over and met him. They were on the front porch, and he had just started talking to Dad. As I walked up, Mr. Olfax put his hand on my shoulder. “It was Jerome, not Skipp. I saw Jerome going in and out of garage.”

Dad wasn’t buying it, not even for a second. “No, Clyde, this was Skipp’s fault. He was in charge here.” Suddenly, I had a glimmer of hope. I noticed Dad didn’t mention that I disobeyed his direct order to not play with Jerome. Dad did not ridicule me in front of Mr. Olfax, which was something. That Sunday, I got a formal beating with a belt without emotion, and it was without drama. It was for show. Dad knew I was punished with Peggy Sue’s loss. She would have her reasons to leave us and move away.

Wild Ponies

On occasion when Dad was home, he would drive his blue 1955 Chevy station wagon with us to see the countryside. Looking up to the front of the car, I could see the side of Mom’s face, puffing on her Pall Mall cigarette, sometimes laughing at Dad’s observations. Her favorite travel posture was with her back to the enger door with her feet on the seat next to Dad. She faced him as he drove. From the backseat, I could see his eyes in the rearview mirror. He glanced at me, looked at her, and turned his eyes back to the road. Suddenly, he looked to the right. “Hey, Skipp,” he exclaimed as if he had just seen something. “See that large grove of trees? It is separate from the farmer’s land. Sometimes wild ponies hide in there.” He gently pushed on the car’s brake, slowed down, and pulled over to the side of the road. “Let’s sit and watch here for a few minutes, maybe we will see some,” he said. Mom turned around and put her feet on the floor, stubbed out her cigarette and nodded her head at Dad. She looked out the window too. After waiting and looking for a few minutes, we pulled back on to the road. “I don’t see any right now,” he said. “We will keep our eyes out.” In those earlier years, when I was about four years old, I really believed it. He’d stop the car, and he’d climb out and hold my hand. He and I would walk into the woods, leaving Mom in the car. “Walk softly, don’t step on any branches. We don’t want to spook them.” Back in the car, after we walked around and didn’t see any, he would explain just how he was going to catch one wild pony and put it in a horse trailer. “It will be your horse, Skipper. You’ll have to name it, and then we’ll take it to Uncle Bob’s farm, and he’ll keep it for us until we get our own place.”

We drove onto a long gravel driveway leading to the vacant farmhouse for rent. This one had a dilapidated barn and a fenced-in field. Our car arrived, chomping on the gravel, and in a cloud of dust, we all piled out. “Skipp, go check out the barn. Your mom and I will check out the house,” Dad said. Maude walked alongside Dad, reaching up to grab his hand. I went inside the vacant barn, climbed the hayloft ladder, and stood high up in the loft facing the field. I looked out and breathed deep. No one actually had to be down below. I hollered out to field and to the world below. “Hey, did you know that we might live here?” I shouted. I didn’t know how dangerous these sights and smells would be. Like a nomad receiving a magic elixir, I was heightened by the age-old farm sites and smells of yellow-colored hayfields, herds of black-and-white cows, steaming piles of manure, nickering horses, squealing pigs, and oozing mud. I was beguiled with the idea that if we could just spot a herd of ponies, Dad would catch one, and we would take it home. As I got older, I knew that catching wild ponies was not real, but it was Dad’s heart reaching for mine. Mom and Dad’s shared joy in those searching trips nurtured me. They sent me to look at the barns, the sheds, and the fields. I saw the miles of flat cornfields in Ohio, the rolling hills and horse ranches of Kentucky, and the state of Missouri peppered with dairy farms, and BurmaShave signs and the Burma-Shave missives along the road. “Skipp, what did you think of that barn?” asked Dad. “Could we get a cow and a pony in there? Honey, what did you think of that house?” “No plumbing, just an outhouse,” Mom said. “Flush toilets in the bathroom? What about that?”

Grape Soda

Fourth grade, we rented a two-story house in Garden City, Missouri, with an outhouse in the back alley and a large persimmon tree in the backyard. An outhouse meant we had white porcelain pots in the corner of our bedrooms. We used them to pee in during the night, and then we emptied them the next day. Mom would remind us to go back upstairs and get them if she didn’t see us walk through the kitchen, carrying the pots. “I didn’t have to go last night.” “Don’t matter. Go get it. Wash it out anyway.” “Oh, Mom,” I complained but headed back upstairs. I lost track of Peggy Sue. She wasn’t with us when we moved to Garden City. Of course, I had burned up her belongings in the garage fire, and she probably moved to one of Dad’s relatives. I lost track of that too because he had four brothers and three sisters. Peggy Sue was not in Harrisonville when we visited Uncle Jake and Uncle Bob. These two brothers had married the two McGuire sisters, Charlene and Harriett. Together they worked the Harrisonville “Noland Farm” that Dad so loved, and by moving back to Garden City, we were close enough to visit. I was short for my age, with big ears, cross-eyed, wore glasses, unless I had lost them, which I did most summers. I had a bunch of half cousins, but it was the two girls, Susan and Starlyn, prompted by Aunt Harriett, who took an interest in me. “Let’s take him to the B&B,” she told them, so we piled into the backseat of her car, and she drove us to the ramshackle movie theatre. I sat between them. Starlyn gave me a sidelong look and a slow smile. “Hey, don’t look at her.” Susan leaned toward me and pulled on my shirtsleeve.

We walked into the Harrisonville B&B movie theater. Summer heat radiated up from the parking lot asphalt, and the back of my shirt was damp from sitting in cars with no air-conditioning. My hands were sweating too, but not from the heat. I kept rubbing them on my pant legs. “Here, sit next to me.” Susan grabbed my sleeve again and pulled it, so I sat down between them. Starlyn handed me a cold soda bottle in the dark movie room. “Grape,” she whispered as she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Hey, leave him alone,” Susan said. “I’m gonna tell your mom.” “Tell her what? I just handed him a bottle of pop.” I was really thirsty. I hadn’t had anything all morning, so it tasted wonderful. The good feeling of holding that cold bottle next to my chest stayed with me. I seldom drink grape soda pop now, but when I do, it puts me right back there in that cool, dark theatre, sitting between those two girls. (See Figure 6.)

Figure 6. Skipp and His Cousins, Harrisonville, Missouri

One day, in the Garden City grade school, a teacher saw me hobbling into the bathroom. “Why are you limping? What happened to your face?” he asked. “I pulled a chimney down on me.” “How so?” “I grabbed the chimney wire when I climbed up onto the church roof. We had kicked our ball up there.” “Scratches on your face too, huh? “Bad week. I fell out our persimmon tree. Almost gouged my eye.” I was limping because just the day before I had peeled off my big toenail riding my bicycle barefoot. I didn’t mention that. “Tough guy. What’s your mom think about all this?” “She told me to be more careful.” “No kidding. You look beat up.” “I’m okay. I told her I’d be more careful.”

* * * * *

Mom and Dad talked of Lone Tree. I entered Cub Scouts, and I made my first “best friend,” Larry Davis, and it worried me that we were going to move again.

“We’ll be only ten miles away. You’ll see Larry whenever you want.” Mom signaled. “We’ll have a good place, and Larry can come visit you too.” Dad talked about an overnight camping trip. He ordered a tent by mail order from Montgomery Wards and set a date. Larry and I would earn our Cub Scout camping badge, and we were overjoyed. We had Swiss army knives and hatchets. We imagined heroic deeds. “When the bear enters our camp, I will take care of him,” Larry told me. “My hatchet throw is deadly.” “Mine too,” I said. “I’ll wake Dad, then get out there to help you.” “Our two hatchets will take him out for sure,” Larry agreed, “or he’ll be hurt and run.” The tent came in the mail and sat in its box because Dad was away, working in Kansas City. The day of the camping trip, Larry and I had our gear ready. We sat with it in the yard waiting for Dad. He came in late, pulled in at dusk, hurriedly loaded up the car, and we headed out. It was pitch-dark at the campground when Dad opened the tent box for the first time. We held flashlights so he could see. We heard thunder in the distance. “Oh damn, what is wrong with this thing?” he muttered to himself. He crossed his arms, held himself like he was cold. “Damn, damn, damn,” he said with clenched teeth, and my stomach tightened. We stood close to him and held our flashlights. The tent seemed to be broken, so he threw it down hard. I couldn’t see his face, but I heard his edgy laugh although there was nothing funny here. “Oh shit, boys, this is awful,” he said. “Where are those goddamned instructions?” We brought him the box, shined our flashlights inside the box, and he found them. He smiled, seemed relaxed, and he gave us a glimpse of his true laugh. It felt like a great victory. I could breathe again. I looked at Larry, and I nodded at him without speaking. He nodded back.

“Okay, let’s go sit in the car,” Dad told us. “I’ve got to figure this out.” We went back to the car and waited. We watched as he knelt by tent box, shining his flashlight back and forth, first on the instructions in his hand, then at what was in the tent box. I heard raindrops start a slow pitter-patter on the car. After a few minutes, Dad came back, sat in car, pressed his lips together, and dropped his chin just for moment. Then he turned his head around and looked at us sitting together in the back seat. Thunder cracked and rain suddenly pounded the car. “Well, we could have been in our tent hearing this,” he said. “It won’t last long.” “Are we gonna stay? Get out after it stops?” I asked. A glimmer of crazy hope flashed in my mind along with a roll of thunder outside. “No, we don’t have a tent.” He sighed and said, “No tent because I didn’t check it out first. That’s my fault, and I’m so sorry, boys.” The rain stopped shortly, and we got out of the car and packed up our now wet gear. We laid our forlorn hatchets in the trunk. Dad’s regret sitting there in car touched me again with something I didn’t understand. His absence left us hurting some whether or not Mom was drunk. Conversely, each moment of caring he showed to me, whether it was disappointment or regret or whether it was joy, I cherished it. (See Figure 7.)

Figure 7. Garden City School, Skipp, Fourth Grade, Age Ten

Dad got another new tent. He set it up at the Harrisonville “Noland Farm” one Saturday afternoon. Susan watched Larry and me from afar. “She’s your girlfriend.” Larry baited me. “No, she’s my cousin,” I bristled. “She’s okay.” He picked up on my new found tone, so he repeated a few more times. “Kissing cousin, kissing cousins, oh yeah.” He tried to keep it up, but I ignored him, and so he stopped. Then Susan hollered, “Hey, you,” and she waved to us, and I waved back. She stood for a second like we were going to invite her or something. I gave her a goodbye wave and turned around away from her so she would know we weren’t, and then she went back in the house. Her wave made me feel like something grand. Larry noticed what happened, her wave and its effect on me, and for some reason, he was quiet about it. After all, he was my friend too, wasn’t he? Yeah, I had a crush on her. The parents, both mine and hers, noticed it, and they were careful not to tease us about it. We were only about ten years old. For me, I was living with my mom’s drinking, and I was adrift with my own self-doubt. I was surprised by these two friendly girl cousins and their cheery waves and sidelong looks. On our trips to Harrisonville, I seeing Dad’s face shine and his energy as he talked with Uncle Jake. I liked hearing their laughter. He had brought his family back to his home state of Missouri. I liked seeing Mom standing with Aunt Harriett in the kitchen. Dad either bought a used tractor, or Uncle Bob gave it to him. We were about to move to a small farming community called Lone Tree about ten miles from Garden City. The Lone Tree house had plumbing with an indoor bathroom. Dad’s choices were still shaping our lives. He had chosen Mom, and then he

worked away from home on construction jobs for years, and she had worked at restaurants. They had saved money to buy a farm. And they had stayed together even though she drank. He depended on her to care of his kids. She got help from Peggy Sue for a few years, but now Peggy Sue was gone. I never saw Dad drink, though I did see him angry.

* * * * *

Dad was out of town, working. We were still in Garden City. He called, and I answered the phone. He asked how we were doing. “Not so good. Mom is drunk.” “How long?” he asked. “Today, yesterday.” He hung up on me and came home a few hours later. It was the first and only time I ever saw him beat her. She fled to the stairs to escape. He grabbed her and stopped her, smacked her in the face and then pulled her up the stairs. I didn’t follow them. I bolted in fear and sorrow. Dad was gone when I returned, and Mom was not speaking. Not that I tried to say anything to her. The next morning, Mom was quiet at first, not speaking. Setting toast in front of me, she asked, “What did you tell him?” Before I could answer her, she said, “What did I ever do to you?” It was just me and her in the kitchen. “What did you tell him?” she repeated, closing her fingers on a dish towel, then swinging it, hitting the air. I couldn’t look at her. I stuttered, “Huh, huh, drunk. I told him you were drunk, and that we weren’t doing so good.” I heard her groan, so I looked up. “Oh, that’s shit.” Her face went red, and she took a step toward me.

“And what did you mean? A few drinks or no? Laundry done, meals cooked, clean house, and you say, ‘We are not doing so good?’” She stomped her foot, her voice cracked. “Were you hungry? Didn’t you have clean clothes?” She continued, “No, all of you are taken care of.” She stopped talking. She shook her head again, turned her face away from me, sweat and tears in her eyes, and then said, “Go away, go away…” She looked directly at me. “I mean it.” My mouth was dry. Tugging at my clothes, I left the kitchen. Nothing more was said, but it was in my mind, because I knew these descriptions… Cotton picker, chickenshit traitor. What is that white stuff on top of yellow chickenshit? I don’t know. Well, it is more chickenshit, just like you. Not said, but those words were in my mind.

Note 2: I Don’t Know What Set Dad Off.

This exchange between Mom and Dad and then between Mom and I was never mentioned or talked about. Mulling over this years later, as I wrote this scene, I his question, “How you doing?” I answered his question simply with “Not so good. Mom’s drunk.” “How long?” “Today, yesterday.” That’s all I said to him, and then he came home and beat her.

* * * * *

Only God knows why I answered as I did because she had been drunk before, she was no worse that day than other times, and I could have said okay, not mentioned the drinking, and there would have been no beating. I felt like it was my fault. Peggy Sue called me on the telephone a few days later after Mom and I had our terrible talk, and Peggy asked me questions about Mom. “Is she drinking more now?” Though I liked Peggy Sue, I didn’t like her questions, and I told her I didn’t want to talk about it and hung up the phone. When Mom was sober, which was more often than not, she treated me like we were best of friends. I was her confidant, her helper. She encouraged me and, in some ways, inspired me. One of her favorite sayings to me was—“Hustle today, we are counting on you.” A hug and kiss in the morning and then out the door to school. I yearned for her to stay sober. With Peggy Sue gone, maybe Dad was afraid Mom could not do it all on her own? I didn’t know, but Mom and Dad didn’t split, and we kept going. Mom could have left him, she had left other men before, Dad was her third husband, but she didn’t leave him. We lived with her drinking. We had no more violence, and we lived together in the same house. It was then in Garden City I turned away from Mom toward a vague indifference. I’d pretend all was well and immerse myself in “I don’t care.” If I could, I left the house when I saw her drinking. I became less brave and less honest. I had something to hide.

Annie Annie Over

Dad’s dream of working his own farm came true in Lone Tree. All those years of moving from place to place were coming to an end. We moved from Garden City to the Lone Tree farmhouse. Todd, Maude, and I attended a one-room schoolhouse with one teacher. Todd was in the first grade, Maude was in the third grade, and I was in the fifth grade. Mrs. Horn taught all eight grades. About twenty-five students attended with about two to four students in each grade. (See Figure 8.)

Figure 8. Lone Tree, Eight Grades, One-Room Schoolhouse

The school had a small barn with a metal roof next to the outhouses behind the school. It was a perfect size for “Annie, Annie Over.” American children played this game since 1840. Walking to school, I heard the screaming girls as we neared the school house. Turning to Maude, I said, “I will see you in class.” Then I took off running toward the school. Maybe there was still time to play. Turning in the gravel driveway, I saw Mrs. Horn and Rebecca standing together on the school’s back porch. Mrs. Horn had stopped the game, and Rebecca was talking to her. I ran over to the group of fifteen schoolkids, bouncing around, waiting. About half of them had come around from the back of the small barn. They were all looking eagerly at Rebecca and Mrs. Horn. Rebecca ran over to us. “Okay, we have got a few minutes. Let’s go,” she said. Then she noticed me. “Skipp, you are on our side.” At her feet was a slightly deflated rubber ball about four inches in diameter. She bent over and picked it up and tossed it to Sheila. Even a fifth-grader could hold it in one hand. When thrown hard at point-blank range it was generally harmless. And the older kids, the seventh and eighth graders, knew better than to hurt younger ones. They would have to answer to Mrs. Horn. Sheila, holding the ball, ran with her team to the other side of the barn. All was quiet for few seconds. My eyes searched the barn roof end to end. We were excited, moving foot to foot. Then I heard it. “Annie, Annie Over!” hollered Sheila’s team from the other side of the barn. The ball appeared over the roofline, bounced once on our side of the metal roof, and then fell in an arc off the roof toward the ground, and I caught it before it hit the ground. I looked at Rebecca.

Smiling, she crinkled her eyes and nodded and mouthed silently, “Good catch.” We ran around the barn, chasing Sheila’s team. The school bell rang. We stopped the game and made our way to our desks. During the morning lessons, Mrs. Horn touched each of us in some way, saying our names, “I saw you make that catch, Skipp.” “No one could catch you today, Sally, you ran like lightning.” Mrs. Horn guided the twenty-five students with the help of her older students. Rebecca sat with the fourth- and fifth-graders on a math lesson in the morning. Sheila sat with the first- and third-graders on their reading. It varied from day to day. The older boys helped too. Rebecca’s eyes crinkled again when she looked at us. “So you finished that page already. Mrs. Horn, these kids are hard workers,” she said. “Good to hear. Keep it up, and we will have an extra fifteen minutes for recess today,” said Mrs. Horn. “What do you think about that?” Walking home, I chased a young possum down over the ridge and caught it with my bare hands. I gripped behind its head and near its back legs and held it tight and carried it home and put in a box. I showed it to Dad, and he asked me if the possum was happy in that box. “Probably not,” I said, so I let it go. Dad bought a calf; we named it Corky. Dad told us not to name the calf because we were going to eat it, but we named him anyway. I fed that calf for over six months, then he was gone. “ me a piece of Corky, please?” Dad asked Mom. He smiled with a lively expression, then he glanced at Maude with a chuckle. “Okay, I’m not eating any,” Maude said as she pushed away her plate and put down her fork.

“Roy, stop, that’s not funny,” Mom remonstrated. An eighth-grade boy named Adam befriended me after I fought with his younger brother, Russell, in the school yard. I was the new kid, small for my age, but I must have had some qualities that some other boys saw as competition. They’d push me around or try to and ask me why I was so short. “Hey, we don’t like you, so get lost.” It would never stop if I didn’t stand up to them. Mrs. Horn stopped our fistfight and put Russell and I on time-out in the classroom. Russell had started it, and then he got the worst of it, and he had his head down on his desk. Lunchtime was over, and Adam shuffled into the schoolroom ahead of the others. “It’s your own fault, Russell, you deserved it,” he spoke loudly from across the room. Public humiliation by his big brother has got to be one of the worst things that can happen to anyone in a one-room schoolhouse. I felt sick and sorry for Russell as he put his hands over his ears when he heard Adam’s words. Russell got up and went outside. “I don’t know where he’s going,” Adam commented to everyone in the room. “It’s not like he can go home.” “Adam, please stop,” said Mr. Horn. “Quiet. That’s not helping.” I asked Mrs. Horn if I could go to the outhouse. We had no plumbing in that schoolhouse. She nodded okay. She was quiet and sober because Russell was still outside somewhere. I tracked him down in the little barn we used for our “Annie, Annie Over” games. “Hey, Russell, I’m sorry we had our fight. Can we be friends?” I asked and put out my hand toward him. “Maybe we could shake?” I felt sad for him; I felt like crying too.

He sniffed his nose and wiped it with his sleeve and then looked at me. When he nodded, relief flooded us both. I smiled broadly, and we shook hands. No one in the class said a word when we entered the classroom. All talk stopped, and the clomp, clomp, clomp of our shoes on the wood floor sounded loud to my ears. “Okay, Rebecca, keep those third-graders reading,” onished Mrs. Horn. After I sat down, Adam walked by my desk, tapped his finger on it, nodded to me, and said “Thanks.” So now I had two friends, Adam and Russell. I told Mom about it. She nodded, “You’re growing up. I am glad to hear it.”

* * * * *

Walking along our gravel road from school, I topped the small hill and saw Dad’s car parked in our driveway. He wasn’t due home until Friday, and it was midweek. Some weeks he came home early, so I didn’t think much of it until I got into the house. Mom looked at me intently, quiet like with no greeting. She came over, stood beside me, and put her hand on my shoulder. “Uncle Jake died today, and Dad came home from work,” she said. Where’s Dad?” “He outside somewhere. He’s really upset.” What happened? “Heart attack.”

* * * * *

Uncle Jake’s sudden death at age thirty-seven shocked us. Little Susan Alma Noland was Uncle Jake’s youngest daughter; she was six months older than I. She’d waved to me when Larry and I were “camping” on her father’s farm a few months before. I stayed home during Uncle Jake’s funeral. Only Dad went to the funeral while Mom stayed home with the kids. Uncle Donald stopped by our house in Lone Tree after the funeral. In our kitchen, I was glad to see Starlyn, who was standing with her mom. “You want to see our barn? We have a cow,” I asked her. She looked up at her mom, who nodded yes. “We can’t stay. Go look at the cow. You’ve got fifteen minutes,” her mom said. Starlyn followed me out the back door to the barn. “I saw Susan this morning,” she said. “Do you like her?” “Sure, I do.” “Do you like me?” “Sure, I like both of you.” “Do you think we’ll get married?” “What?” “Do you think you might marry me?” “If you want, we could.” “Good. I think we will someday.” “Okay, let’s go see the chickens,” I said.

I needed to stop this conversation, so I took her to the chicken pen, and we looked at our Rhode Island Reds and Leghorns. We even had some little Booted Bantams that Dad bought on a whim. Starlyn’s mom called her from the back porch, and they headed back to Independence.

Note 3: Uncle Jake’s Obituary Provided Context

J. D. Noland, Independence, and Roy Noland, Lone Tree, are both mentioned in the obituary. J. D. was James Donald Noland, who was Starlyn’s father, and it was Starlyn who handed me a cold soda and whispered “grape” in my ear.

Spring Rain

On the back porch, I pulled on my knee-high rubber boots. They were muddy from my early morning trips to the barn and the chicken house. It had been pouring rain all night. I was ready to go to school. We usually would walk the mile or so, but not today. “Hurry up,” Mom said. “Maude and Todd are in the car.” Moving quicker, I put on my coat. “Okay, I am coming.” I pushed open the back door and ran down the steps, and then I heard Butch, our black-and-white collie. He was whining on the back porch. He wanted outside, so I went back and opened the screen door for him and then slammed it shut. “Skipp, are you coming?” Mom hollered again from the front driveway. We were new to this farm, so Mom paid attention when Mrs. Horn told her to keep an eye on the creeks. “Your farm could be an island for a few days if this rain keeps up,” said Mrs. Horn. Mom was worried about it, so she was driving us to school. I ran around to the side of our one-story ranch house. Next to Dad’s old John Deere tractor, Mom waited in her four-year-old 1956 Ford Fairlane sedan. I opened the enger door and got into the front seat. She backed up the car and turned on to the gravel road. I saw the swollen creek waters as we drove over the wooden bridge on our way to school. She dropped us off at school. That morning, we saw only half of the twenty-five students. Some had emergencies at home as they lived near the Grand River with flooded fields. Two hours later, the schoolhouse back door opened. Mom had come back to fetch us. “Mrs. Horn, I need to take them home now,” she said. “The creek is nearly

coming over the road.” Mrs. Horn nodded and said, “Take care crossing that creek bridge. If it is under water, stay off it.” We jumped up and got our coats, and we pulled on our boots. Back in the car, we approached the creek from the school side. Two hours ago, floodwaters were below the bridge. Now we couldn’t see the bridge; it was under fast flowing creek water. Mom drove up to the flooded creek water’s edge, and she stopped the car. “Skipp, get out and see if that bridge is still there,” she said. Without a word, I got out and walked up to the edge of the water. I gingerly put one foot out and felt my way forward with one foot on the solid ground and the other foot confronting the rushing water. I pushed my boot under the water, down, down. A few inches under the water surface, my rubber boot touched the wooden bridge deck. I took another step, and now both boots were in the rushing water. Edgy, I was seriously alerted and set to walk across the submerged bridge. “Wait, Skipp, wait,” Mom called out. “Stop! Stop! Come back.” I heard her voice, but I wasn’t listening. Her words didn’t because I was focused on the next step and the next step and so on. I walked across the bridge. “Okay, Mom,” I yelled, excited. She drove slowly across, and I got in the car. “Oh, that was awful,” she said. “Huh? What?” I was animated and eager. I felt useful and proud, and I had no idea what she was saying. “You could have been washed away. If the water had been deeper, it could have knocked you over!” “I was careful, Mom. If the water had been deeper on that first step, I would have stopped.”

“Well, I know that you did good, but I didn’t,” she said. Later that evening, she was talking to Dad on the phone. I heard her say, “I sent Skipp to check on the flooded creek bridge today before I drove over it. That could’ve drowned him. He walked across it with the water swirling around his boots. It was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done.” So we never talked about it when Dad came home. I still had this vague notion that maybe I could persuade Mom to stay sober if I could just help her more, maybe impress her some. I knew she had told me to “check the bridge,” not walk across it. But we needed to know if the bridge was whole, so I made sure. Mrs. Horn was right, the rain continued, and our farm became an island surrounded by the flooded Grand River and a couple of flooded creeks. After a few days, floodwaters abated, and I found a massive hole along the big creek bank behind our property, left by an uprooted tree. The tree had fallen over the creek. At the roots end of the tree, I looked down in the hole, and I saw a tangled swirl of black water snakes. Fascinated, I went to the hole the next day, and I saw the swirling snakes again. Our collie, Butch, barked at the hole the first time and then stayed away from it. I talked about the snakes at school. Were they water moccasins?

Candy

By the time I showed the uprooted tree to Dad, the snakes were gone. “Never mind,” he said, “I have got something better to show you.” “Like what?” “Let’s take a drive,” he said. He was making a mystery out of it. It was just the two of us in the car. He wouldn’t talk about it. “You will see when we get there,” smiling as he talked. He was uncommonly pleased. About an hour later, I walked with him inside a barn. “Here she is,” said Dad. “Candy is her name, and she is coming to our place.” He bought a pinto, a spotted horse. A so-called “Indian paint,” all white except for large black or brown blotches. She looked like Tonto’s horse, Scout. “She is yours. We will bring her home next week,” he said. “What do you think?” He astonished me. A fifth-grader with a horse? Was this really happening? I would lay on my bed and wonder how was it possible that I was really there. What about the rocks? Why was I a person instead of a rock or bug? “Why was I there at all? How is it that I have fingers? Here they are. See them? Hey, did you know that I have a horse? Just like I have fingers? See them!” I would get up in the night, sneak out, and go look at this horse. “Why me, God? She is so beautiful. I feel sick and wonderful in my stomach, every part of me.” In the beginning, I was too timid, and Candy learned to balk. If she didn’t want to go, she’d stop and twist her head around and try to bite me. Dad saw her do this a couple of times, and he was worried about it. He told me I had to be firm

with her. “Don’t let her get away with anything.” One morning, she and I were circling the big oak tree in field. Obstinate, she stopped and twisted her head back to bite me. Dad hollered from the barn, “Don’t let her do that!” He came running across the field with a six-foot-long two-by-four piece of lumber. He pulled me off the horse. I watched him take hold of her bridle and hit her on hind quarters with the board. She whinnied and spun around. He yanked on the bridle, followed her, and hit her again. I watched them whirl around together while he hit her with the board a few more times. I don’t think beating her did much to train her not to bite. Dad showed me how to pull hard on the reins so the steel bit in her mouth would pinch her hard and stop her from twisting her head. I got tougher with her, pulling hard on the reins and keeping them tight, and she stopped doing that. Dad lopped off all of big limbs on the fallen tree, and now we had a bridge tree to walk across the creek. I saw the tree and ed trying to show Dad the snakes, but they weren’t there. That was the day I became a boy with a horse.

* * * * *

Mom got into the swing of managing her very own farm. She drank less, or I like to think she did, and she wore her bandanas, always red, most every day. Mom made biscuits, dumplings, mashed potatoes, and fried chicken. She ate her corn bread with buttermilk most every morning. She straightened clothes hangers with a hook at the end to catch chickens for the chopping block. She boiled wash tubs of water over an outside backyard fire to dunk the headless chickens so their feathers could be easily pulled off. Maude and Todd plucked the chicken feathers. She planted a vegetable garden with carrots, tomatoes, corn, and pumpkins. Maude was sometimes in the garden, pulling carrots with Mom. Dad drove his tractor to pull plows and sharp discs with dirt scrappers to gouge the earth for planting corn.

I put new straw on the chicken house floor every few days. The straw mixed with fresh chicken manure dried and then layered into thin crusty lopsided ammonia-soaked pieces. The ammonia smell increased daily until it became enough to make our eyes water, so we held our breath when we went in to find the chicken eggs. “Time to clean the chicken house,” Mom told me. “It stinks to high heaven.” That was my job. No questions, no whining. The dry straw spread easy on the chicken house floor, but the chickens peed and pooped, soaking the straw. Stabbing the crusty lopsided pieces with my pitchfork, I lifted up an edge and held my breath and heaved the crusty piece, bending it over on top of itself, releasing the pent-up ammonia gas underneath. Now that was what stunk to high heaven. I’d run outside holding my breath, then stand and wait and let the ammonia gas dissipate some, then reenter. Mom gave me one of her bandanas to tie over my mouth and nose. None of the lopsided pieces would fit into the wheelbarrow without tearing them apart piece by piece by hand, standing on them stabbing them with a shovel and a rake. I was wrestling with straw, soaked and baked in chickenshit. After that, I could always compare any new difficult job with “cleaning the chicken house.” It was the worst job ever, but I was proud when it was done. The chicken house set up a foot or so off the ground on blocks. Sometime headless chickens from Mom’s chopping block would flop around and go underneath the raised chicken house and die there, so I would have to crawl under the chicken house floor to get to them. I was on my hands and knees crawling through straw and fresh chickenshit that fell between the floor slats. “Oh, you reek. Don’t go through the living room smelling like that,” Mom warned me. “Change those pants first.” “Mom, why do we call it chicken manure when it’s mixed with straw, sitting in pile, but it is chickenshit when it’s on my pants?” “Not funny. Get in there and change those pants.” This was our finest time. Mom’s sober look at me, her eyes shining with pride, gave me moments of relief to balance my dread of seeing her drunk. It was there on the Lone Tree farm, Mom’s own diligence taught me the joy of work, and I felt something akin to wonder when I heard her speak of me to Dad.

“That boy’s a worker. Let’s go look at that clean chicken house. It was all his doing.”

* * * * *

One Saturday, I rode Candy to Garden City, and I spent a few hours with Larry. We tied her up in his backyard. We played monopoly and threw our knives at a beech tree in his backyard. If our thrown knife stuck in the tree, we heard thunck! And then it quivered like Jell-O, vibrating sideways. We loved to hear the sound of thunck! Thunck! Two knives stuck in the tree with simultaneous throws. We would stand together back-to-back like Indians. We called it Indian wrestling, and we threw our knife in the dirt. If it stuck, then the other Indian had to reach the knife with his foot and stay there. If he could not reach it, then he was a goner and had to be scalped. Later in the same day, I rode Candy home, ten miles. It was a straight route on gravel roads with only one major paved road to cross. One farmer along the way had a big dog, who ran along his long property fence, barking at us. The dog’s barking spooked Candy, and she snorted, kicked her back legs, and galloped. I held on tightly to the reins and the saddle horn. As she galloped hard along the gravel road next the farmer’s fence, I was so happy I could hardly breathe.

* * * * *

One evening at dinnertime, we gathered around the table. In the next room, the phone rang. Dad got up from the table and picked up the receiver and said hello. “No, I don’t think so. He didn’t say anything about it,” he said. “Really? I think

he is okay. He will be there tomorrow.” In an instant, I knew that was Mrs. Horn calling to find out why I had left school that morning. “Did you know Skipp left school at eleven this morning and never returned? What happened? Was he sick?” I had left school without asking, and I went home. I spent a guilty afternoon wandering along the Grand River carefully out-of-sight. Talking to Dad, I said, “Well, no, I wasn’t sick exactly. I just had to leave.” I told Dad best I could that it was the first warm day after a long Missouri winter. Seeing the sunshine on the hillside, feeling the warmth through the school’s floor-to-ceiling windows, I did feel a kind of sick, and I couldn’t stand being inside. I knew Mrs. Horn wouldn’t understand, so I just left. “Yeah, I get that, but what about Mrs. Horn? She is responsible for you.” Dad was being especially patient with me, but he warned me, “She might give you a swat with that razor strap she uses on the eighth-graders. And she’ll make sure that you don’t do this again.” Mrs. Horn set me straight. She called me in from the morning session of “Annie, Annie Over” before school started. The kids hollered at me, “Now you’re in for it. Don’t cry when you get the strap.” Her kindness was beyond my measure. Most every day of my stay at the Lone Tree school led me to something better than I had before. “No longer what we were, not yet what we’ll be,” she’d reminded us.

First Jake, Then Roy

About a year after Uncle Jake died of a heart attack, Dad had a severe heart attack too. He must have considered the facts. He was fifty-one; Jake had only been thirty-seven, so maybe Dad was living on borrowed time? He and Mom decided to move to Orlando, Florida, where the weather would be warmer and where her sisters, Delpha and Dodie, lived. This was the same Delpha and Dodie who were in Paducah when I was a toddler. It was Aunt Dodie who started calling me “Skipper.” If something happened to Dad, Mom would be close to Delpha and Dodie. I heard the phone ring, and Dad answered the phone. I heard him say, “Okay, did you get McGuire? What are the dates? All right, let’s go with three weeks from Saturday. That will work…the twenty-seventh, right?” It was Uncle Bob calling Dad. He had lined up the auctioneer. Dad was preparing to sell the farm. The day of the auction, Dad showed me a few stacks of “catch all” boxes mixed with pieces of metal, wire, some nails, bolts, nuts, and such. As a sheet metal worker, moving from place to place, Dad had accumulated lots of spares. “Sort out the screws, bolts and their nuts, all the straight nails, and connectors like this, roll up the wire that we want to keep,” he said. “Anything copper, put ’em in these three boxes. Junk, anything rusted, goes in a pile over there.” He paused, looked at me, and then gruffly said, “Hey…listen here. We’ll get through this. We’re gonna be fine.” I thought about his heart attack. We’re selling the farm. Uncle Jake was gone. Maybe Dad. Yeah, maybe. He kneeled down and gave me a one-armed hug, rumpled my hair, and then left. I closed the toolshed door behind him. I heard the sound of a truck’s engine, so I came out of the tool shed to see what

was happening. “McGuire Auction Company, Holstein, Iowa,” said the sign on the trailer. They were backing the trailer around to the side of house. The trailer had the makings of a platform, microphone, speakers, and a sound system. I saw the “auction” sign and went back into shed. I finished sorting the metal and came out and stood by the door. They were setting up the platform for the auctioneer. “Testing, testing.” Someone was getting the sound system ready. I walked over toward the barn. Uncle Bob saw me, changed his course, and walked up to me. “Hey, Skipp, how do you feel about riding Candy?” he asked. “Huh?” “The auctioneer says we can get more money for her if you ride her.” “When?” “Soon, maybe a half hour from now.” “What did Dad say?” “He said it was up to you. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want. That is why I am here, instead of him.” He paused. “Really, you don’t have do it. Your dad can put Maude on Candy, and then he can lead them both around,” he said. “That would show Candy gentle.” I knew that was wrong. No way was Maude going to ride Candy like a carnival pony. “Okay, I’ll do it. Candy’s way better’n that.” “Good. I will meet you in the barn. I’ll be there to help you put a saddle on her.” I knew about the money, and this was something I could do to help. I walked over to the barn and stood next to Candy’s stall. “Get ready, Candy. One more ride.”

She sniffed her hay bale. She had that clean horsey whiff because I brushed her the day before. I breathed deep and felt better just looking at her. Her hoofs shined. I climbed into her stall and put my hand her neck and mane. I thought about her bridle, so I turned around and climbed back out of the stall to retrieve it. I pulled down her bridle and left the saddle for Uncle Bob. He came in and said, “Just ride her out past that big oak and then down by the creek and then come back.” He asked me if I could ride her bareback. “Yes, but not right now.” I couldn’t always control her, especially not in front of a crowd. He picked up the saddle, carried it over to her stall, and opened the gate. He put the bridle on her. He hoisted the saddle and cinched it up. Sitting easy in the saddle, I walked her toward the big oak tree. “Okay, Candy, let’s show them that you can run.” I goosed her sides with my legs, and she started into a bumpy trot. Shaking the reins, I hollered, “Go, Candy, go,” then I kicked her with my heels. She ed the oak tree galloping. We circled the oak tree and then headed for the creek. We neared the creek, and I pulled hard on the reins and turned her near the bridge tree. I stopped her by uprooted tree. “Okay, Candy, this is where it began, but it’s all over now.” In the distance, I heard the auctioneer’s voice over the loud speaker. “Look it, folks, the boy’s last ride.” I reached the barn, and Uncle Bob stood quiet as he grabbed the reins. I climbed down and looked up at him. He smiled broadly, and then just for a second, his eyes glinted with tears before he shook his head and turned his face away. He pulled off Candy’s saddle, and he led her to her stall. I stood silent with heat in my chest, fighting back tears. My throat tightened. I was holding my breath. He turned and looked at me.

“Are you okay? Wait just a minute.” He touched my shoulder and squeezed it. We stood there together until I started breathing easier. “Let’s go face them,” he said. “You did good out there.” A few days later, Dad helped Candy’s new owners put her into their aluminum trailer. The sun reflected bright off the silver trailer as it pulled out onto our gravel road. “That is one pretty horse trailer,” Dad said as he reached for my shoulder. I turned away and took a few steps toward the house and watched the trailer go over the crest of the road. I heard Dad sigh, so I stopped and said, “I’ll be okay.” “Yeah, it hurts though,” he said. I nodded and paused, and he tried to look me in the eye. “I’ll stand with you.” “Yeah,” I muttered as I looked toward the house, stopped, looked at him, and nodded, then I walked back to the house alone. I was eleven years old, but I felt old and tired. What was wrong with me? I was just a kid who didn’t know anything. Within a week or so, our car tires crunched the gravel as we approached the Lone Tree school house, its tall French windows shining silver against the sun, facing the road. “Slow down, Dad, I want to see the school.” I saw our car’s reflection in those windows. He stopped the car. In an instant, as we sat in front of the school, I ed something. I had a good feeling every morning when I lifted the varnished wood top of my school desk, sitting next to those windows. “You’re first up on the chalkboard this morning,” said Mrs. Horn. “Are you ready?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said as I slowly put down desktop lid. I could slam my fingers if I wasn’t careful. I reached into my schoolbag and put my hands on the spelling words practice sheet. The chalkboard session would be either spelling or multiplication. Standing next to her, she handed to me the chalk, and then with both hands, she squeezed my hand just for a second. Without saying the words, her touch told me, “I like you. Let’s laugh, can we?” I would try to that. In front of the blackboard, holding the chalk, I stood sturdy and sure. She was one who cared for us. I was ready to do her bidding. The car was moving again, so I turned my body completely around so I could look out the back window of the car. I looked at the school house until it disappeared as we turned on to the main road. “Goodbye, Mrs. Horn,” I prayed. “I liked your class.” Dad had built a small trailer box for our black-and-white collie, Butch. After about six hours of driving, we stopped and stayed in a motel, and Butch whined and barked from inside the box all night. The next day, we stopped in Paducah, Kentucky, and Dad dropped Butch off at his friend’s house, one who had kids and a barn. “Butch will be happier here in Kentucky. Florida is hot, and we don’t have a place there yet.” So there Butch sat “in his new Kentucky home.” I sat with him, and he licked my face. I hugged him and told him, “You’re the best dog of all. We love you, Butch. That’s why we’re leaving you.” We were back in the car on the road again, heading toward Florida. I saw Burma-Shave signs standing alone on the side of the road. First sign read “Take,” second sign, “Your,” third sign, “Time.” Seven signs, each one set separately alone a few hundred yards apart, so we could see only one at a time. Next three signs read, “Not,” “Your,” “Life.” The seventh sign was “BurmaShave.” Every group of signs was different, and on every road trip, I tried to guess what the next sign would be as we traveled along. Then we ed an old farmhouse with a ramshackle barn with faded-red paint with broken-down front

gate. I saw “for rent” signs here and there. I ed Dad used to say, “Maybe we should turn around. Let’s go check out that place. There was a phone number on that sign.” Not on this trip though. In my mind, I ed he would tell me, “Skipp, go check out the barn.” We were coming up on a grove of trees. I could almost feel the car slowing down. It had been a long time since he had mentioned wild ponies hiding in the trees. I was way too old for that now. The car wasn’t slowing down, and Dad was quiet with his eyes on the road. Maude was staring at me. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Do you miss Butch?” I didn’t answer, so she leaned forward and put her face next to the back of Mom’s head. Mom was sitting in the front seat, her eyes on the road too. We were a quiet bunch, feeling sad about leaving our dog behind. Maude said in a loud whisper, “Mom, Skipp’s cryin’.” “No, I’m not. Don’t bug me.”

End of Part 1

Part 2

Orlando, Florida

Uncle Smitty

“So this is the boy we heard about,” Aunt Delpha said. We had just arrived at her white-framed house set back in a large field of scrub palmetto bushes. We ed a fair-sized lake and park with a sign that read Lake Downey, Union Park, as we drove onto their property. We all stood together hot and tired as Mom introduced us to her oldest sister, Delpha, and her husband, Uncle Smitty. Reaching out his hand, Uncle Smitty asked me, “So do you like dogs?” He stepped toward me, then bent down on one knee. I nodded about liking dogs and said, “Yes, sir.” I didn’t say anything about Butch. He smelled like pipe tobacco, and he was missing a tooth. Aunt Delpha and Mom had married two men that looked similar, both smoked a pipe. But Uncle Smitty was older, a little rougher, with more wrinkles. “Let’s go see those dogs,” he said. I followed him to a fenced dog kennel some distance behind their house. We ed another small house on the way. Talking as he walked along, he pointed to a few orange trees and a garden spot with some green peppers and tomato plants tied to sticks. Florida dirt was way different than Missouri dirt. We were walking on what looked like black ashes and sand. Sweat trickled down my back, so I pulled the sides of my shirt back and forth to stop it. “No oranges or lemons on the trees in August, but we will have some most other times,” he said. “You can pick ’em right off the trees.” We walked in the shade of gnarled oak trees. Gray moss hung low, draped over the branches. Out of the shade, the sun’s hot brilliance bothered my view. I smelled the kennel as we got closer. Whew! What is that stink? I saw four, no, maybe six brown and white dogs, with floppy ears. Each, no bigger than Butch. I saw a patch of unshaded concrete surrounding a small shed. Several piles of dog shit on the concrete. All the dogs were lolling in the shed out of the sun’s glare.

“These are my dogs. Best fox hounds there be,” he said. No shade as we came up to the gate, and I was not going into the kennel, so I turned and ran back to the nearest oak tree. While I watched from there, he grabbed a water hose next the shed and sprayed down the concrete, washing the dog’s waste into a drain. Then he turned the water hose on the dogs and sprayed them. I could see they didn’t mind. Cooled them down and made me feel better too. I couldn’t take it all in. Overheated, sweating, my shirt was sticking to my back. Butch would not have liked this heat. I suddenly noticed my thirst. “Wow, Uncle Smitty, it’s really hot here.” “At first, it is. After a while, your blood will get thinned out. Next year, you won’t even notice.” We walked back to his house. I stood in Aunt Delpha’s kitchen, slugging my second glass of water. I asked him why he called them “foxhounds.” “They chase foxes. We take ’em out late at night, and they will chase a fox around until they lose it. We will get close and try to follow the sound of the baying dogs. We know each of the dogs by their sound, their bay as we call it. They run together as a pack if they all can keep up. Some keep running, some stop and turn around and come back. Eventually, all of the dogs will know where to find us in the woods. I will take you with me some time.” “Do they catch the fox?” “Sometimes, hardly ever. We go several years without killing a fox. The foxes are smart, and they ‘go to ground’ and hide in a hole. The hounds do not follow the foxes into the holes.” “How do you know?” “By the sound of their bay, they whimper and get quiet. Then they come back to us at the campfire.”

Aunt Delpha

The first evening at Aunt Delpha’s house, I started reading her collection of Reader’s Digest magazines. She had all ten issues for every year for at least ten years, sitting on small bookcase. I sat in the hallway, next to her bookcase, and read one after another all day long if they let me. I loved the stories, the jokes, the anecdotes, even the vocabulary page. I read stories about families that lost everything but persevered and were thankful even with less. Say, one such story, there was a daughter’s memory of her dad and his retirement party. She had bought him a new pair of fine leather dress cowboy boots. “It is time for you and Mom to have some fun,” she told him the night before. As they slept in the early morning, fire erupted in his barns, and over the course of the day, fire burned them to the ground, destroyed his tractors, and the ading grain silos. Midday, she came out of the kitchen and saw him weary, his head down, sitting on bench in the hallway, his face smudged black from the smoke from his burned-out barn. “Oh, Dad! Your new boots are ruined,” she started off. “And what a shaa—” But with her mother’s glance, she stopped midsentence. Her dad’s eyes shined as he raised his head, and he pushed his hair back as he stood up. “Not ruined, honey. They are just good and broke-in. God knows I needed a new pair of work boots.” At eleven years old, those hundred or so Reader’s Digest stories gave me a glimpse of courage. Maybe it was the goodness of God and how he helped us? I believed those stories, and they helped me to think about God. If he was with us, really with us, so that we knew it, then we could be a little braver and maybe a little kinder. This could be my hope for the future, even if it was not for right now when I still lived small and mean.

“Is that all you’re going to do today? Sit there? You need to get yourself outside. Do something. Maybe ride your bike down to Lake Downey Park, take your swimming suit,” said Mom, standing next to Dad. “Okay,” I said as I grabbed my Reader’s Digest magazine and headed outside. I could only imagine Aunt Delpha and Mom’s conversation. “Lola, why don’t you all come to church with me this Sunday?” “Hmm, maybe not. I am not sure we want to go. I don’t think I want to go.” “What about your kids? Don’t you want them in church?” “They are too little. I don’t think they’ll get much out of it, except for Skipp. You can take him if he wants to go.” One Sunday morning, I sat next to Aunt Delpha on a padded church bench in a big church, with lots of energy, bright and cheery. A beautiful little girl two rows in front of me turned around and showed me her bright eyes. Peekaboo, she would drop her head, then raise it, and smile at me. She did this a few times until her mother stopped her. Then a little while later, she did again and then again, and her mother gave up. “Pay attention, Skipp. You are in church,” said Aunt Delpha. Toward the end of the service, I heard the singing and the invitation. “Just as I am without one plea. Jesus, I come to thee,” the choir sang. The words and the singing pressed me to think about God. I grabbed my forearm and hunched over. My chest tightened; I let loose of my forearm and pulled on my shirtsleeve. “Listen, church! God’s spirit is urging you to come to him. Accept him now, ‘Today is the day of salvation,’” said the preacher. The preacher was requesting action, and I was just sitting there. “Get up and show God that you mean it. Come forward, and God will meet you

here,” said the preacher. “I mean it, God,” I prayed. “Aren’t we going? We need to go up front,” I said to Aunt Delpha. She intently looked at me and then shook her head. “No, you should wait until your mother is standing with you,” she said. She reached over and held my hand. Huh? Shouldn’t we go forward? She said no, so I stood beside her. No way was I going up there by myself, so I was calmed to a point, but I was still stirred inside, convicted and convinced that God was calling me. The little girl turned around and smiled again. Somehow, in my own limited way, I had just given my heart to God. I didn’t go forward to the front of the church, but maybe God met me there. But what does an eleven-year-old boy know about God? I thought Aunt Delpha might’ve told Mom, but that was the end of my church visits with Aunt Delpha. We were on the move again.

A Night Out

Within a couple of weeks, Dad found us a rental house nearby. We moved from Aunt Delpha’s, and the first time, late at night, when I turned on the kitchen light, I saw dozens of cockroaches run in all directions across the floor. In those first few hot months in Orlando, I noticed the abundance of heat, cockroaches, and fire ants. The fire ants had pinchers on their faces that clamped into your skin. Then they would twist their little bodies to pierce your skin. The piercing clamps, plus, a little poison that went along with the ride. Green-manicured Florida lawns with plush grass felt good on our bare feet. Felt good until you stepped and stood still for a minute on a fire ant’s nest buried in the grass. It was amazing how many ants could run so quickly and so far up your legs before you noticed them. I wasn’t bothered by the mosquitoes because the Orlando urban neighborhoods were sprayed regularly with DDT. I didn’t notice the mosquitoes so much until the night I went “foxhunting” with Uncle Smitty, and we went deep into the Central Florida woods. We drove through acres and acres of palmetto bushes, spruce, and scrub pine trees. He and I were in his truck with some of his dogs caged in the back. We were one of three trucks driving in the Florida wilderness on sandy back roads after dark. Eventually, we stopped. We got out, and Uncle Smitty, like the others, let his dogs out of their cage. Ten or so dogs milled around the trucks barking. Uncle Smitty had a rag with a scent on it. The owners rubbed the face of each dog with the rag. Then the dogs took off running together. We got back into the trucks and chased the dogs best we could on the sand and black ashes through the palmetto bushes. Uncle Smitty could tell by the sound of their howling when they found a fox to chase. Somehow the dogs were chasing something that was circling near us or around us; I couldn’t tell what was going on. Suddenly, we stopped the trucks, got out, and Uncle Smitty and his friends built a campfire. They brought chairs, and they sat around the campfire, listening to their noisy dogs barking in the distance. They talked to each other about their dogs.

“That’s Ringo running in the lead.” “What happened to Bobo? He not out there anymore.” “Now Clacker is leading the pack!” And so on. I stood next to their campfire, no chair for me, for maybe an hour, trying to engage in their conversation but missing it somehow. I didn’t know their dogs, and they seemly didn’t care if I was there or not. I walked back to our truck. If I could maybe go to sleep? As I left the campfire, mosquitoes swarmed around me. Running, waving my arms, I got into the truck, and I rolled up the truck windows tight. I tried to kill all of the mosquitoes inside, and I killed a few. I drifted off and slept some, but buzzing mosquitoes in my ears woke me too often. At dawn, with the sun coming up, Uncle Smitty piled into the truck, woke me up, and we made our way home. That night was a marker for me. “Don’t go foxhuntin’ with Uncle Smitty.”

News from Missouri

The summer of 1963, I was twelve, and our new life in Orlando was a blur. We moved to a little three-bedroom house on Allison Drive in Bonneville Estates. Not a rental, Mom was seriously happy, and Dad was just serious. He gave himself insulin shots in his belly usually in the bathroom with the door shut. We all shared that bathroom, so I could smell the insulin and see the little roundtopped bottles with silver-banded lids. He’d leave the bathroom door open sometimes, and I’d see his belly and smell his sweat. He bought a dinky Datsun pickup truck, a “compact” they called it, and I’d sit with him as we hauled stuff to-and-fro around Orlando, getting situated. He was on the lookout for a small storefront. “Maybe set up a fix-it store, resale used goods, and get a little money coming in.” He was handy, and he had tools he brought with him from Missouri. Junior high school was about to start for me in Orlando, but Dad suddenly left us again. Mom told me at supper-time, “Roy’s not here, he had to go back to Missouri for Bob’s funeral.” Uncle Bob died of a heart attack just like Uncle Jake. They both died at age thirty-seven. The two McGuire sisters, Charlene and Harriett, widowed three years apart with their husband’s dead at the same age. In hindsight, say what? That was the Uncle Bob who helped me saddle Candy one last time? And I didn’t give it a moment’s thought. Susan lost her dad, Uncle Jake, less than three years before, and then Uncle Bob had a heart attack too? Three brothers, three years, three heart attacks. Dad lived through his, but Jake and Bob didn’t live through theirs.

Note 4: Uncle Bob’s Obituary Provided More Context

Bob and Jake were co-owners of the diary farm. Roy Noland of Orlando, Florida was mentioned. The Harrisonville “Noland Farm” was now in the hands of two widows with six kids. Bob and Jake are both buried in the Orient Cemetery, Harrisonville.

* * * * *

After Dad returned home to Orlando, I began to notice his Bible in the living room by his chair. I hardly ever saw him read his Bible. He didn’t make a show of it. He kept his stuff in his bedroom, where he had a small desk and chair. I began to see him in the early mornings or late at night sitting alone in the living room. He’d stop reading when I came into the room. When no one was home, I would stand next to his chair and look through his Bible, looking for any verses he marked. Another new thing began when Dad took us to a little Baptist church. We all went and sat together, Mom and Dad, us four kids. The preacher came over and talked to Dad and Mom and welcomed them, and he told them about Sunday school happening an hour earlier. We sang a few songs and listened to the sermon. I felt strange and out of place, though I thought of sitting with Aunt Delpha at her church a few years before. “I mean it, God.” It did little more than cross my mind from time to time, but I knew or believed that I knew he was there. I believed the preacher when he told us, “He’s always with you. He’ll never leave you.” After a few Sundays, Mom took us in early to church and dropped us off. We split up and went to our Sunday school classes arranged by age. A vibrant middle-aged man named Mr. Cross stood in front of the class, in a suit and tie, and he told the Bible stories while his lavender scented wife sat with us, turning the pages in full-colored booklets. She was quick to laugh, and their son, “CL,” pronounced “See-Ell” was in the Sunday school class with us. I liked saying his name, “CL Cross.” The Cross family made me feel welcome. I visited CL at his house, which was near ours in Bonneville Estates. They had air-conditioning, and he taught me how to play poker. For a while, I was over there a lot because I liked to sit in his air-conditioned kitchen out of the summer

heat, play cards, drink Kool-Aid, and eat his mom’s cookies. He liked baseball, and so did I. We had our gloves and our imaginations. We played Little League, but we were never on the same team. We were not the star players, far from it. My coach told me I was a “natural,” which was ridiculous, but I believed him. He told me the team needed a switch stance hitter, and he wanted me to bat left-handed. I was proud to do what he asked me, but I got only two hits the whole season. I did get walked a lot, so I got to run the bases. I had poor eyesight, but I was good at “pepper talk” playing second base. “Hey, batter, batter, batter, swing batter, swing batter, come on, Pitch, heat it up, fire it past him!” I would singsong those kinds of repeated words. “The little second baseman has got some spunk!” Our coach told us to talk it up out there, so I did. CL and I hit upon the John R. Tunis baseball books together too. Our baseballplaying imaginations were enlightened by his stories and the exploits of Roy Tucker and Spike Russell. I identified with Tunis creation named Joe Nugent, called the Young Razzle, a rookie second baseman starting to work his way up in the majors. Mom and Dad met us at the Baptist church for the sermons after Sunday school, and we’d sit with them. Eventually, maybe it was a few months, Mom and Dad stopped going altogether, and so did we.

Note 5: J. R. Tunis Books, Little League, and a Little Bit of Sunday school

CL and his family helped redirect my thinking to the hope side of things and to the idea that God was looking out for me.

Job Offer

Eighth grade, I attended half-time morning classes in a series of crowded trailers most of the year, while classrooms were constructed nearby. Mom got a part-time job at the Colonial High School cafeteria. I could have ridden with her to another middle school, but my new friend, whose name was Karl, went to Howard, so I rode the school bus to Howard Middle School instead. Middle school, or junior high as we called it, gave us personal lockers for the first time, and we moved from class to class with different teachers for each subject. I missed the simple elementary school with one teacher. “I can’t my locker combination, and the bell is ringing.” “I can’t find my class, and I don’t my teacher’s name. I don’t even know what class it is.” “Okay, it is on your schedule. Where is your schedule?” “I can’t find my schedule. I left my backpack in the lunchroom, and now it’s gone.” “Hey, you. What happened to you? Why are you so short?” At Howard, our science teacher, Mrs. Saboreese was creepy. Saliva strung in the corners of her mouth when she talked, and her hands shook sometimes. She spoke very slowly in a monotone, and her clothes smelled like mothballs. We joked about hearing her bones creak and hearing her neck crackle when she turned her head or when she stood up. At Howard, I ed the difficulties of those first few days at a new school a few years before. I had been the new kid in the Garden City and Lone Tree schools with maybe twenty kids. So as such, I stood lonely for a few days, but I was the one and only new kid, so I wasn’t lost in a crowd of new kids. Everyone

else knew each other. After a few days, I would overhear their comments. “Hey, he is okay.” I had learned to ignore the “shorty” comments, answer directly, and try to make a friend. Schoolwork came easy for me, so that helped too. Not so easy in an overcrowded Central Florida junior high that numbered several hundred kids. This was a bigger pond with a bunch of muddled ducks, who couldn’t their locker combinations. “Hey, shorty, the teacher may like you, but I don’t.” “Man, that kid can box!” I said. Putting on a brave front for Karl, I had just been smacked around in a fistfight. In the boy’s bathroom, Karl grabbed paper towels and wetted them. “Wipe your face,” Karl said. “How did that start?” “I don’t know. He walked up to me, friendly like, and then said, ‘Hey, punk, stay out of my way.’ He shoved me and tried to push me down. I didn’t fall, so then he popped me in the face. So I popped him back.” As we walked back to the classroom, Karl said, “Mom will be picking me up tomorrow. Why don’t you come by our place so you can take a look?” “Huh? What do you mean?” “, we talked about you working with us? You could make some money, pulling weeds and such. Come to our house tomorrow and take a look.” So I went to Chubb’s Nursery on Dean Road the next day after school. Karl and his Swedish mom had the same light skin and blond hair with sunburned faces colored red in the Florida sunshine. Their eyes squinted almost closed when they smiled, and they laughed abruptly and often, looking to make you laugh too. That first afternoon Mrs. Chubb and Karl’s sister, Diane, walked with me through their orange groves to a small field with rows upon rows of spindly peach trees growing in two-pound coffee cans and some larger five-gallon tin

cans. I saw several hundred cans with weeds and baby peach trees growing together in the same can. Most of the cans, large and small, had some grass and ragweed growing taller than the little trees. “This is one of jobs we need your help on,” Mrs. Chubb said, looking at me for a reaction. “Pulling weeds out of these cans and taking care of the trees. We would start you here and see how you do. It’s lonely work out here. We won’t be watching you while you work, but we will count your time and see the cans you finish.” I nodded. “I could do it.” I looked at Diane and her mom. Diane and her dad were serious while Karl and his mom were comics. Though younger by a couple of years, Diane seemed older than Karl and way older than me. She brooked no nonsense from Karl, especially if he tried to act the older brother. She carried herself equal to her mom. Diane’s sober eyes lightened when I nodded, and she said, “I will help you get started, so you will know what to do. If you can do this, then I won’t have to. Ha!” She smiled, and the hefty tone of her voice startled me.

The Chubb Family

Mom drove her faded red, brown Ford Fairlane to the gravel road leading to the Chubb’s farm. “I will drop you here,” she said. “I am already late.” She stopped by the “Oranges U-Pick, Chubb’s Nursery” sign. It was early morning before 7:00 a.m., and I was sitting in the front seat, still waking up. She was animated and cheerful. Then like many times before, she told me, “Hustle today, we are counting on you.” She was heading to a waitress job at the Sunshine Diner, Union Park, near Lake Downey. She worked at the Colonial High School cafeteria during the week and at the diner on weekends. “Bye, Mom,” I said as I closed the car door. She turned the car around, backing it over the scant, yellow-green palmetto bushes growing in the gravel. Across the ditch, I saw a large pink-and-blue hydrangea planted years before. The abandoned corner lot, longtime vacant, had a smattering of green-white leaved hostas and purple iris growing near clumps of green scrub palmetto. Spanish moss hanging on the trees and on the old fallendown fence, fluttered in the early morning breeze. Summertime, purple-black dragonflies, black-yellow bumblebees weaved in and out of the purple-flowered thistles, yellow dandelions, and stinging nettles stood tall in the ditch. Beyond it, I saw fruit trees planted in rows in newly tilled Florida dirt. If you picked up the dirt, it felt like a mixture of smooth black ashes and brown, gray beach sand. The honeysuckle odor swelled as I came near Chubb’s farm. Too early yet, I walked slowly and entered the Chubb’s cyclone fence gate, dragging my fingers across the crisscrossed wire of the fence. When I reached the honeysuckle intertwined in the fence, I touched the blossoms. They were sticky like honey with bumblebees swirling in the air with wings too small for their bodies.

I approached the Chubb’s collection of low-lying buildings sitting inside an oak tree grove. Probably a dozen large oak trees with Spanish moss hanging low to the ground, allowing only a dark, cool shade as no sunshine filtered through the heavy canopy of moss. The moss was like an old man’s beard hanging from the trees. I ed Karl’s cottage on my way to the main house. He was in there, but I didn’t stop. The one-story main house had a screen porch, front and back. Clumps of bamboo planted next to the house had grown taller than the roofline. The Chubb’s had no plush lawn, just Florida gray sand, palmetto bushes with few clumps of untended Bermuda grass under moss-covered trees. I went to the main house screen door, facing the backyard, and knocked. “Rueben!” I heard Mrs. Chubb call out to her husband. “Skipp is here.” I heard scraping of chairs on the floor. I stepped away from the door, turned around, and looked out toward the bright blue sky beyond the house and through the trees. It was warm now, and it would be hot later in the afternoon. Mr. Chubb stood at the screen door. Propping it open with his body, he stood and fumbled with the second shoulder strap on his denim overalls. He pulled it over his shoulder and fastened it. He was a tall burly man, tanned, virile, bald, and brusque in the early morning. “Diane will show you the vines I want you to pull up and put on the wires,” he said. She was right behind him, and I followed her out to where two wires had been strung about three feet off the ground over vertical s like a grape vineyard. Four rows of double wires, thirty feet long, about three feet apart, sitting over prickly vines tangled in the saw grass. Diane was kind enough, but she was usually quiet and reserved with me. She didn’t do small talk, so we walked in silence. The Chubbs were a focused crew —Mom, Dad, brother, and sister. Their combined efforts cultivated fruit trees, orange, lemon, lime, peach trees, green peppers, peanuts, coordinating the U-

Pick customers. She pulled weeds from the peach trees cans, and she showed me what to do on my first Saturday working there. They gave to me tasks, and then they left me alone for hours. When I did good, they told me. When I didn’t do so good, they showed me a better way. As the weeks and months went by, I felt like they treated me better than I deserved. They taught me to recognize that weeding eight to ten small coffee cans of weeds per hour was okay, but could I do a bit more, dawdle, and daydream less? I learned that working focused and alert made the working hours go quicker. That morning with the vines, Diane showed me where the vines were and then left me. Karl checked on me a couple hours later. I was stupidly pulling the vines up out of the ground by their roots and laying them on the wires. For burning, I thought. “Oh no!” he said. “Dad wants these blackberries to grow along the wires. Quick, let’s rebury the roots. Oh boy, he is going kill us.” Together, we worked for another hour replanting what I had pulled up. Karl’s Dad didn’t kill us, and it turned out okay, but I was teased about it from time to time. “Hey, Skipp, would you please me the blackberry jam? Oh, sorry! I forgot you don’t like blackberries, do you?”

* * * * *

“Goddamnit!” I heard a lurid fully vented voice in the distance, coming from somewhere across the farm. The first time I heard it, Karl saw me look up, so he walked over to me. “Dad just hit a sprinkler head with his tractor. He hates that with a ion.” At lunch, I heard Mrs. Chubb comment, “Reuben, the whole county can hear

you.” Some weeks later, I was working next to Diane. We heard her dad yelling his long drawn-out “goddamnit.” She said to me, “Mom told me once that God hears our sighs. They are like prayers, but we just don’t say any words. Dad’s shouts are like really loud sighs.” She was kind of wrinkling her face, and then she gave me a questioning stare. “The cuss words…do they bother you?” “Maybe he broke a pipe with his tractor,” I offered. “I like your dad. His shouts don’t bother me.” She nodded, dropped her curious look. My least favorite job was picking up tree roots from newly tilled fields. Clouds of mites or small bugs would swarm out of the sand as I pulled up large broken roots, shook off the dirt, and carried them to a pile for burning. I hated doing that job because of the swarms of bugs in my face. Alone for hours, I would sometimes daydream about being a mighty warrior overcoming an attack from all sides. I would stand and fight, surrounded by enemies. Swinging my sword, wounded but unafraid, my courage struck fear in their hearts, and my enemies would flee. It was all kind of like “El Cid,” except I was braver. Diane saw me at least once, waving my arms around doing pretend sword fighting, falling down to one knee, getting stabbed but unyielding, staggering to my feet, undaunted. This was pretend sword fighting instead of pulling weeds or picking up roots. “Did you get ’em?” she asked as she walked up behind me. “Are you hurt?” Her face showed mock concern for a second, then she laughed. I had been working with a large tangle of peanut plants all morning, alone for too long. After gently taunting me, she put on her serious face again and told me not to worry. “I won’t say anything.” “Lunch is ready,” she said. “You should head back. Mom is ready for you.” Then she walked away like she had another errand. I walked back to the house, feeling dejected, wondering if my imaginary sword fighting would become a lunchtime topic.

I didn’t see her at lunch. No one teased me about it. I figured I would hear about it later from Karl, but nothing was said. I couldn’t understand how Diane could resist not telling that story. Perhaps it stopped with Karl, or perhaps they were cautioned by their mom. Ridicule for my pretend sword fighting never surfaced.

Note 6: Something Good Happened There, but I Was Oblivious at the Time.

The subtle kindness I received on Chubb’s Farm expanded my hope, and they reinforced work lessons I had learned earlier.

* * * * *

“They finally made it,” Mom told me as I opened the car door and climbed in. She turned the car around in the Chubb’s driveway. I had spent my morning pulling weeds. The adults watching over me limited my time working outside with the Chubb’s to the mornings because of the afternoon summer heat. I worked about four hours most Saturdays. Uncle Don, about twenty years younger than Dad, had driven down from Independence, Missouri. He brought Starlyn and Aunt Loretta. I had overheard Dad say to Mom, “Don’s coming to visit. They will stay for a few days.” Mom was coming down the hall, and Dad was sitting in his chair in our living room. All the rooms in our house were small, but it had three bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen that opened out to a covered carport. They made preparations for their arrival. They put a new hide-a-bed in our living room. Uncle Don and Aunt Loretta would sleep there. They cleared out a space

in the girl’s room and put a pallet in there for Starlyn. But now was the time. “Did Starlyn come too?” I asked. “Of course.” “Just wondering.” “‘Just wondering my eye.” Mom laughed to herself. “She’s a cutie. Loretta’s a good mom.” “You’re a good mom too,” I said back to her, trying to change the subject. Mom blinked her eyes, that’s all. Maybe she gripped the steering wheel tighter for a second. “I mean it, Mom,” I repeated. I was feeling expansive. My pretty cousin had come to visit. Mom’s face flushed and her eyes glistened. I looked out the window. When I looked over again, she’d composed herself. Somehow that exchange of words had made me uneasy. We kept our emotions at bay, buried them. We didn’t like it when they surfaced. Starlyn was standing in the carport when we drove up. “There she is,” Mom said, “waiting for you.” I went into the house, and Loretta gave me a rambunctious hug with a great laugh right next to my ear. What could we do? It was too hot to be outside, unless we were near water, so we got Mom to take us to Lake Downey. They only stayed for a few days, but we made a trip to the Cocoa Beach, got sunburned, and played in the waves. Riding in the car, Starlyn reached over and touched my hand. Shades of grape soda, her touch startled me. Until they left, I held her hand whenever I could, but not openly. We stood apart, acting nonchalant, if we thought anyone might be looking at us.

Surfer Wannabe

In January 1967, I was still out at the Chubb’s most every other weekend, working the fruit tree groves and sometimes walking behind Mr. Chubb’s tractor with Karl driving, tilling the open fields. We were breaking up tree roots, finding rocks, and getting the ground ready to grow something, probably peach and orange trees, though I didn’t know. Diane worked with us and sometimes worked beside me. I had just turned sixteen, gotten my driver’s license, and I was happy to stand next to her. She worked quietly, aloof, and with no complaints. Somehow Mr. and Mrs. Chubb had trained us to work together like a family. I think it was really Mrs. Chubb who guided us, or at least for me, the most. There was always weeding to do, but I loved seeing the new rows of trees planted, though I didn’t help much with the planting. Mr. Chubb had a machine to dig the holes. I think he did most of the tree planting himself with help from Karl. Even so, I felt like I was part of the Chubb family because of the work we had finished together, fields tilled, cans weeded, and tree planted and grown. Not knowing why, barely a teenager, I strived to work with them, to match their cadence, and to match their intent. They both treated me like their own brother, their equal, their coworker. I so ired their kindness, and I did my utmost to work beside them. I held nothing in reserve, I didn’t stop no matter how thirsty or tired I felt until they stopped.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, Peggy Sue had married and moved to Tampa, St. Petersburg. Dad cosigned a loan for her husband to purchase a 1964 American Rambler Station Wagon. We visited Peggy Sue and her husband twice, driving over the 150-foothigh, four-mile-long Skyway Bridge each time. At its highest point, it was a steel grid road crossing the shipping channel. Approaching the grid, you could see

through the steel grids to the water and ships 150 feet below, and the car’s tires suddenly hummed loudly when they hit the grid. Some said it gave them the “jitters” crossing that bridge, but it gave to me the “jitters” multiplied. The first time we visited Peggy’s little house in Pinellas Park, St. Petersburg, Dad drove the Rambler over from Orlando, and Mom and I followed in her car. We didn’t stay long, and it was the first time I had talked to Peggy Sue since Garden City. She was happy, she kissed me, and she told me, “How I’ve missed you!” “I missed you too,” I said, looking away, awkward in my silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say to her. “I am surfing now,” I announced. She turned around and looked at me. “Oh good, is that fun?” Then Mom said something to her, so she turned away. Relieved to get away, I went outside to wait, which was only a few minutes. Dad stepped lightly through Peggy’s screen door. He leaned toward her as he ed her, then stopped, and hugged her. Mom stopped behind them and held the door open. I couldn’t hear what she said, but Peggy and Dad laughed. Back in the car, we headed back to Orlando. “They’re happy, aren’t they?” Mom commented as Dad was humming to himself. “Yeah, I hope that car helps them,” Dad reed. One hand on the steering wheel, he reached over and grabbed Mom’s hand and squeezed it. She gave him a satisfied smile and then said, “Eyes on the road.” “How you doing back there, Skipper?” Dad laughed as we were making our way up over the Skyway Bridge. I closed my eyes, and then I heard the hum of our car tires on the top of the steel grid. Up on top, my stomach turned, so I closed my eyes. I kept my eyes shut until we got down off that bridge.

* * * * *

Dad was worried about Peggy Sue and her husband. “But he’s not keeping the payments up,” Dad commented to Mom. “This the second month, no car payment. I can’t believe a word he says.” In the late afternoon, we made the second trip, and Dad drove over that awful Skyway Bridge with Mom in the enger seat, and I was in the back seat with an earache. I knew why we were going. No one was talking about much of anything. Mom and Dad had argued, and she had been drinking. We pulled into Peggy’s driveway, and Dad said, “Skipp, I want you to drive this car back home. I will be taking the Rambler and following you. Wait until I’m ready to go.” I got out of the car and stood by the driver’s side door. Peggy didn’t come out outside, but I saw her through her kitchen window, so I waved. She waved and then turned away. I watched Peggy’s husband lay under the Rambler’s front dashboard and take out his ham radio. He had some trouble getting the antenna off, so it was dusk by the time we left. Miserable with the earache, I drove Mom’s car back to Orlando. Mom stayed with me in enger seat instead of riding with Dad. Their fight had made her feel mean. She was grumpy, crazy. Whatever I said, or however I said it, made her angry enough to slap me as we drove along. Throw in the earache and the trip over the scary Skyway Bridge with me at the wheel, and “I was all shook up” as Chubby Checker and Elvis would sing about. I wanted out of there, but I was driving the car.

* * * * *

Some weekends, when not at the Chubbs, I went to Cocoa Beach and Sebastian Inlet to surf the ocean waves. Karl wasn’t a surfer, so he didn’t go with me. I had

surfing friends who sometimes rode together in Pickens’s brilliant blue Ford van. His van had surfboard racks on top, four surfboards tied down, two seats up front, wood ing on the walls, speakers blaring, and cushions on a carpeted floor for seating four wave-sick surfers in the back. He had room for six, though it was usually only four us, Pickens, Bill, Jim, and I. From Union Park to the unloading of the surfboards at the Cocoa Beach Pier was an hour’s drive. Halfway there, crossing the Merritt Island bridges, Bill would see smooth water on the Banana River. “Glassy! It’s glassy!” Bill would yell from the front enger seat. No wind if there was a swell, the waves would surface glassy and smooth. They broke cleanly as the swell hit the sandbar off the end of the pier. Zipping wave breaks to left, and the right carried us standing upright on our surfboards just ahead of the white havoc of a folded wave. We read the surf reports and watched for the storms offshore. Big storms east of Cocoa Beach meant bigger waves two or three days later. If we could time it with a “no wind” day, then we rode two- to four-feet glassy waves. In my last two years of high school, surfing was on my mind all the time.

The Rambler

“If you make payments on the Rambler, you can drive it,” said Dad. “After you pay it off, I will sign it over to you.” Dad sat me down and told me the . “The car title is still in my name, and it will stay that way until you pay for the car. Your name is now on the insurance as a backup driver. Insurance rates have gone up because you are only sixteen. Never mind, I will pay for the insurance. Please don’t wreck the car. Clear?” I rode a school bus to and from Colonial High School, twelve miles one way, along East Colonial Drive, Highway 50, a four-lane highway, two lanes eastbound and two lanes westbound, separated by a wide grassy interior meridian. I told my friends, Bill and Karl, that I would be driving soon. Karl already had a car, and he drove in from his dad’s nursery. Bill and I rode the bus together. Monday morning, I drove the Rambler for the first time and picked up Bill at his house, and I drove to the high school parking lot. Driving along that morning, I got an idea for some fun on the way home. After school, we met at the Rambler again. Karl drove up and said he would follow us at least to Dean Road. We pulled out of the parking lot. The bus that Bill and I usually rode had left a few minutes before. I turned on to eastbound Colonial Drive. No bus in sight. Bill asked again, “What about surf racks? Are you going to get some?” “Not right now,” I answered. “It is too soon.” I looked in the rearview mirror. I saw Karl’s car about six cars back. We came up on Dean Road, and the light was green, so I went through it. I accelerated to fifty miles per hour because the bus was somewhere ahead of us, and I didn’t want it

to turn off before I could it. “Hey, look at this!” Bill wanted to show me something. I turned my head to look. We talked about it. I was looking at Bill attentively when I saw him suddenly look up at the windshield. Pointing with his hand, he slid down into the seat. Terrified, he yelled, “Look out!” I looked up and saw a yellow school bus stopped ahead with flashing red lights. We were speeding crazily toward the stopped bus. I slammed on the brakes and jerked the steering wheel to the left, and the Rambler whipped around the back end of bus, barely missing it. The Rambler was now on two wheels, ing the stopped bus. I saw the grass of the center highway meridian rushing toward me through my driver’s side window. If I had put my hand out of the window, I could have almost touched the grass. Wobbling on two wheels, careening around the bus, I jerked the steering wheel to the right, and the Rambler slammed to the highway pavement on all four wheels, spun completely around in front of the bus, and stopped. Then the Rambler’s engine stalled. The Rambler’s front bumper was only a few feet from the bus front bumper. Yep, this was the school bus Bill and I rode every day. “Oh damn, damn,” I cursed as I turned the key in the ignition. “O Lord, help this car to start,” I prayed. My hands were shaking. Bill yelled out, “Holy mother of god,” once, maybe twice. Then he rolled down the window, and he waved at the bus driver. Bill was hysterical, moving around in his seat. The bus driver sat stupidly looking at me. I raised my hand to him. “Heh, I’m moving this thing.” Not that he could hear me. Was the car going to start? Seconds of time felt like minutes. The engine came to life. With Bill still yelling, “Whaahoo,” or whatever loud sounds he could think of, and I backed the car up enough to turn the car away from the bus. I saw no traffic, so I drove the car bouncing across the grassy lane separator and turned it west on to Colonial Drive. At the next turnaround, I saw Karl coming toward me. He had been stopped at the red light. He saw me too, so he slowed down, and I made a U-turn, heading east again, and I got in front of

him. The bus was now moving, continuing its way east on Colonial Drive. I accelerated, caught up to the bus, and then I ed it a second time. Karl was behind me. The kids in the bus were hanging out the windows, waving their arms and screaming. Bill’s upper torso was hanging out the window. He was waving his arms, still shouting incoherently. “Bill! Bill! Get back in car! Cool it,” I yelled. Bill stuttered, “If your dad, if your dad, if he finds out about this, you are, I mean, you are dead.” My hands had quit shaking. “Tell me about it. The last thing he told me was ‘don’t wreck the car.’”

Freight Train Ride in Missouri

I really tore it when I bought a surfboard without talking to Dad first. Though that alone wouldn’t have gotten me kicked out our house. Spring break in my junior year of high school, Pickens had a grand idea to hitchhike to Omaha to visit his older brother. He asked me if I’d be interested in going with him. Starlyn and Aunt Loretta were still on my mind, and they lived in Independence, Missouri, about two hundred miles south of Omaha. I told Pickens that if we could overnight there, maybe I could go with him. I was thinking maybe I could see Starlyn and that’d be fun. Maybe I could hold her hand again? He pulled out a road map, and he showed me both the route, and his responsible pensive side. He was two years older than me, after all. Then he said, “It’s on the way. It’ll give us another stopping point. Let’s do it.” Clutching my hands together, I felt uneasy, and my stomach churned, but I agreed to go with him. I knew better than to mention it to Mom and Dad. Our family couldn’t tolerate startling conversations. Or maybe it was just me that preferred the ill-gotten silence. I could not imagine saying, “Hey, Dad, I am thinking of hitchhiking to Omaha with my friend Pickens. Just letting you know.” Actually, I did imagine it, and I didn’t tell him. Instead, I told a series of whopping lies at McDonald’s, saying I was going on vacation with my family. Pickens and I headed out on the 2,200-mile round trip, and we made our way north. A few days later, we stood on a highway next to a railroad train yard. We were near Joplin, Missouri. We spied a slow-moving engine pushing freight cars backward to connect to waiting empty box cars. We were close enough to hear the “rumble-crunch-bang” as freight cars collided and connected. Suddenly in one motion, Pickens pointed to the train yard and picked up his bag and started running. “They’re making a train. Let’s get on it!” he hollered back to me as he ran toward the train yard.

I grabbed my bag and ran after him. I watched him heave his bag onto the floor of one of the waiting box cars. He waited for me and grabbed my bag and tossed it up and in, so it landed next to his bag. We climbed up into the car, and we moved our bags back out of sight so if anyone walked by, they wouldn’t see us. We waited for the train to move. We heard the “rumble-crunch-bang” a few more times, and then we waited in silence. “If it doesn’t move, maybe we could sleep here tonight,” Pickens said. He wanted to hear it out loud. Maybe he wondered what I thought about it. It didn’t sound that good to me. “I’d rather be out on the highway,” I told him. “Yeah, so would I. We’ll give it a few more minutes. There’s still plenty of daylight.” “We don’t even know where this train is going,” I said. This time, it was me trying out ideas in the open air. “What if it goes south, back toward Florida?” I posed. “I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter,” he said quietly. “Let’s keep our voices low. If it goes south, we’ll jump out.” We felt the lurch of the train. We stayed clear of the open doorway. I still didn’t know what direction it was moving, but Pickens laughed when he looked outside. The creak and clatter of the train increased. “I think we’re going north!” he hollered as trees and houses sped by. Late afternoon, on toward evening, we stood in the open doorway of the rattling freight car and waved at engers sitting in their cars behind railroad crossing Stop signs with lowered bars as the train rolled past each road intersection. In the dark, a few hours later, the train stopped in a railroad yard of a town. Pickens had been looking at his map during the daylight hours. It was pitch dark inside the freight car.

“Let’s get out of here. I think this might be the town called Nevada,” he said as he moved his bag toward the door, and then he tossed it outside. “It’s not too late. Maybe we’ll find a store or restaurant,” I said as I grabbed my bag and did the same.

* * * * *

After being gone for ten days, Pickens and I returned home to Orlando. Dad sat me down in the kitchen. “Your mom has cried most every night. She thought you might be dead. And what was I to say? I didn’t know. You disappeared without telling us. That was a mean thing for you to do. It was terrible thing for us. We didn’t know where you were until the Nevada, Missouri, police called. I was careful with them. I told them I knew you were traveling back to Missouri. Do you know why I did that?” “Maybe because you didn’t want to pick me up,” I said. “Partly. I told the police that I knew you would get yourself home. Your mom and I argued on that. She wanted me send to you some money, put you on a bus. I said no,” said Dad. He paused and let me think about it. “Skipp, if you get yourself in trouble, then you will be the one to get yourself out of trouble. It won’t me or your mom. Whatever you were thinking. I am really fed up with all of this.” “Well, I knew you wouldn’t want me go,” I said. I said nothing about what I was really thinking. I had made it to Uncle Don’s and back okay. Or maybe it wasn’t so okay, but I had other plans now, and I wasn’t listening. I gave him no countenance. “If you ever do anything like this again, you can’t live here anymore,” he said, and I knew he meant it.

* * * * *

The Nevada, Missouri, police had picked up Pickens and I in a public laundry late that night. They were making their rounds and saw us as two strangers in town, so they stopped and talked to us. Reading my Florida driver’s license, the police officers saw I was only sixteen, underage. “Do your parents know where you are?” the police asked. “Yes, of course, they do,” I lied. “We are stopping over a night at to Uncle Don’s in Independence, then we head for Omaha.” The officers took us down to the police station and called my parents. They let us go because of what Dad told them. Pickens was eighteen, so they didn’t question him. After talking to the city of Nevada Police, Dad must have called Uncle Don, told him that we were coming his way and to look for us. Pickens and I made our way another one hundred miles north to Independence. I didn’t it anything ugly to myself. I had lied to my boss at McDonalds and ignored my parents, and I had broken trust with them. We had a civil welcome at Uncle Don’s but just barely. Aunt Loretta, the mom of the house, tried to keep things cheery, though I could see she wasn’t happy with me either. “Your dad says you are good at schoolwork. He can help you if you follow his lead,” Uncle Don said, smoothing his voice to woo me. “Yeah, I know. He bought me a brown suit, and we went to Tallahassee together. I sat for a college interview,” I said. “I think I could do it, but not right now.” “Why? What else there? With a college degree, you will make some money, maybe have a chance for a better life.” “I get that, but I’m moving to Santa Cruz, California.”

“O Lord, what are you thinking? What is in Santa Cruz?” he asked. “Big waves. I surf at Cocoa Beach, but those are dinky waves. In Santa Cruz, I’ll ride Steamer’s Lane.” “Hmmm, that could turn out bad. If you can’t pay for your rent, you will get stuck, be on the street, hungry, no job, no prospects. Your dad is worried about that.” “Yeah, I know,” I said. Uncle Don’s eyes narrowed. Exasperated, he shook his head. “You know what? You’re heading down the wrong road.” Starlyn was on a trip outside of Missouri, so I didn’t see her. I shouldn’t have come. So Pickens and I left Independence the next day. Sitting beside the road, Pickens commented, “I didn’t know that you came, but your parents didn’t know. That could get me in trouble.” Great. It was a pile on. Thanks, Pickens, kick me when I’m down. I stood up ready to hitchhike back to Orlando by myself. He could go on to Omaha without me. When he saw I was serious, he tried to talk me out of it. We split up, and I went to the other side of the road. About thirty minutes later, a car pulled over for him, heading north. Pickens talked to the driver and asked him to wait a minute. He ran across the road to me and said, “Come on, Skipp, this guy’s going all the way Omaha.” I changed my mind and got in the car with them. “You guys should stick together,” said the driver as he pulled back out on to the road. We arrived in Omaha and spent the night in his brother’s apartment, stayed the next day, and then we hitchhiked back to Orlando. I ended up in our Orlando kitchen with Dad telling me he was fed up with my obstinate “I’m gonna do

what I want” attitude. A few weeks later, Dad saw that I had bought a surfboard without even mentioning it to him. Conniving, he called it. But to my way of thinking, I wasn’t hiding it. The board was out on the carport. I just didn’t want to ask him if it was okay with him for me to buy it. I had the money. I had two jobs, Chubbs and McDonalds. It was a used board, not new, cheap. But now, it was out there on the carport. He had to look at it. It was like I had slapped him in the face. As I said, that tore it between us. “Okay, I can’t live like this. You won’t listen to me, you don’t care what I think, then you need to leave,” he told me. “Make it on our own, Mr. Smart-Ass.” In his next breath, he said, “You haven’t paid for the Rambler, so it stays here.” He was really fed up, calling me names. Back home, after the ten-day hitchhiking trip north, I was not in an open rebellion because he scared me some when he was that burned up. I tried to patch it, but it was too late now. He saw me as a conniving liar, and he wanted me out of the house, out of his sight.

Carefully Torn and Stacked

Without conversation, I left the house early the next morning and walked the few blocks to the Bonneville Estates Colonial High School bus stop. First one there, I stood and waited. Soon enough, kids and friends I had known for years showed up. “Hey yo, Skipp, what’cha doin’ here?” “Goin’ to school same as you.” “No car today? Broke down?” “Not exactly. I’m in the doghouse. Can’t drive it.” “Whoa, too bad, so sad.” “Yeah, right.” Thirty-minute ride on the bus, plus the sleepless night before, I was stymied. I pictured a scene in my mind with me standing in the kitchen that night with Dad asking me why I was still there. If it came to that, maybe I’d end up at Aunt Delpha’s for a few days? What’s next? What do I do? Call her and say something like, ‘Dad doesn’t want me here anymore, would it be okay if I spent a few nights at your house?” They’d know already why Dad was angry, and they’d probably agree with him. First period, and still the words, and next steps wouldn’t come to me. I sat muddled at my desk in English class, quietly creasing an eight-by-eleven-inched sheet of paper into strips and squares, then tearing them along the folds, smooth and even. I had finished one sheet, and I was working on tearing up the second piece of paper. I had stacked a small pile of squares in front of me when Mrs. Sampley, the teacher, walked over and stood by my desk. I stopped my hands and, with some conscious effort, held them still. She kindly, yet intently, looked at me. She blinked, the skin around her eyes

crinkled, then she nodded at my carefully stacked pile of hand-torn paper squares. “So that’s what you thought of our lesson today?” she asked. Her eyes twinkled with friendliness. Then she beamed a smile at me. I flinched and squeezed my lips together and sat up straight. I opened my mouth, then closed it, then looked toward my desk, and shook my head slightly. “No, no, the lesson was good,” I said softly, barely above a whisper, then I looked up, and I tried to smile too. The sound of her voice, the rustle of her skirt, the blue-and-red pattern in her blouse, and the smell of her perfume beset me. My throat tightened, and I tried to swallow. “Excuse me, ma’am,” I whispered and turned and scooted out of my desk. I put fingers of one hand toward my forehead, touching it, and then moved them over across my face toward my ear to cover my eyes as I walked out of the classroom. In the hallway, I went directly to my locker and pretended I needed something. I opened the locker and held the locker door open with one hand like a shield from anyone walking by. I moved books around. I reminded myself to breathe. “O God, I need some help here. I don’t know what to do.” Standing there, I thought of Mom’s occasional morning shout, “O Lord, give me strength.” I said that too, quietly in my mind, and then I just stood there, waiting for some semblance of poise to arrive from parts unknown. “What’s up, man?” I heard Karl walking toward me in the hallway. Mrs. Sampley had sent him after me. “Find out what’s happening, see if you can help him.” “Dad told me to find a new place to live,” I told him. “Just happened last night.” “When? Do you mean now? Like today or this week?” Karl asked. “I think that’s what he meant. He’s, uh, he’s, uh…he wants me gone,” I stuttered. I looked away. “I’ll be okay though. I’ll be…I’ll check with my aunts.”

Moments dragged on, I had to look at him, but I crossed my arms and angled away. He smiled and said, “Hey! Hey!” His voice chased after me. “Maybe…I’ll bet you can…you could come to our house if you want.” I nodded, but I wasn’t sure what I heard. I closed my locker door. I just couldn’t name this black feeling. He was immensely serious. In that instant, I felt something flash. Whatever it was, it had words for me like “Stop. Listen.” I stopped and looked at Karl. “I’ll bet you can stay with me at our place. I have room and an extra bed in the cottage,” Karl said. “I’ll call and ask Mom. I’m sure it’ll be okay.” I swallowed again. The black feeling was shame, and I had been afraid. Karl’s words braced me. After school, I rode with Karl to pick up my clothes. He was surprised to hear I didn’t have a car anymore. His eyes widened. “Uh-oh, hmmm…that’ll hurt some,” he said. He showed a momentary grimace on his face. I saw it. Without a car, it wouldn’t be the same. Karl wasn’t expecting that. “Yeah, I know. I think we should forget this move to your place idea,” I said. Lamely, I continued, “I don’t wanna be a problem. I can go to Aunt Delpha’s house because she lives close to school. It’ll be too easy.” “Stop.” Karl shook his head. “No, Skipp, Mom said it was okay, and we’re gonna do it.” Karl turned his face to me. Sternly he said, “I mean it. We’re good with this, car or no car.” As I rode with him, I felt diminished. I was not their equal anymore.

Note 7: The Chubbs and Their Contribution.

After high school, my life theme was “don’t look back,” and I didn’t look back until I almost forgot. Karl and I graduated the same year, 1968. Diane was two years younger. The memories written here were confirmed in the yearbook. I noticed it after I had written the first draft. I discovered the Colonial High School Yearbook in a storage box, and I was surprised to see their pictures and to be reminded of Karl’s note. (See Figure 9.) “I am glad to have known you for the past five years. I will always be glad to help you in future. You can always help us pull up blackberry vines at my house. Sarcastically yours, Karl Chubb.” Seeing their pictures reminded me of a bit more. I never properly thanked him or his mom. Sit-down gratitude with conversations required maturity I didn’t have at that time. Though they were not overtly religious, I’m thinking the Chubb family protected me and influenced me for the good.

Figure 9. Karl’s Note, Signature Page, High School Yearbook

At our Bonneville house, Karl waited in his car while I went inside. I didn’t know what to expect. Maybe the door was going to be locked, I didn’t know. Mom was at work, but Dad was there. I didn’t speak to him, but I went directly to my room to pack the green duffel bag I used for hitchhiking to Omaha. It was still there in the closet. Clean clothes were on the bed. Mom had put them there. Dad walked to the doorway. He saw me stuffing clothes into the duffel bag. I hurried, and I didn’t speak. With Karl sitting in his car out in front of our house, Dad knew without asking that I was moving to the Chubb’s. Dad coughed. “I changed my mind. You can take the Rambler. It’s your car. Keep the payments up,” he said. “Yes, sir.” Whew! What a relief. Oh, Dad, that was a good move. “No need for you to burden the Chubbs. You be sure to give them some money for room and board,” Dad said, still standing in the doorway. “Yes, I know. I will.” I could have stayed with the Chubb’s until school was out. But after a couple of weeks or so, Mom called the Chubbs, and so I returned home.

Super Foods

Those last few weeks of high school, Mom and Dad mostly ignored me. I gave them little choice in that because my thoughts were only on me, my plans to graduate from high school, to find a new job, and to look for a new place to live. I had said no to college. Dad gave up on trying to talk to me about it. He was civil and not unkind. At least on the surface, he’d forgiven me for scaring them. Even so, during those last few weeks at home, we didn’t have much to share. “We’re proud you graduated,” they said. Whoop-de-doo, I thought. Between them, Mom and Dad came up with every possible variation of how to say college “good,” surfing “bad.” I noticed Dad’s extra efforts to be friendly. I understood that he found little comfort or pride in my words or actions. I saw tears and had some of my own. I knew we cared for each other, but it gave me no comfort, and I offered none. I felt only hard-hearted regret flicker between us.

* * * * *

After high school graduation, I followed one of my older surfing companions to downtown Orlando, and we shared a two-bedroom apartment in a grand old house that been converted to a rental. I went to work at the Super Foods IGA Distribution Warehouse near our apartment. Forty-foot semi-tractor trailer trucks backed up to the loading dock, and we would fill the grocery store orders. We walked the warehouse rows, pushing the handheld pallet jacks and stacking the grocery store foodstuff boxes onto the pallets, checking off each item as we stacked it on the pallets. Early morning, first thing, we sometimes unloaded railroad cars and stacked the pallets for the bigger forklifts driven by our

coworkers to pick up and move to the warehouse racks. Thus, the warehouse had row after row of high racks stacked with pallets beyond our reach with a couple of pallets sitting on the floor for filling the truck orders later in the day. I ed the Teamster Union, I paid my union dues, and I listened to Alonzo, the union steward. He gave us lectures to remind us to be at work on time, punch that time clock, and to do our work quickly. “If you boys work hard, help the owners make a profit, then we can get you some pay raises!” I enjoyed filling the grocery orders for the trucks as a competition to see who could do them the fastest without errors. I made a sketch with notes and made filling the orders quickly a game. Sometimes I’d run pushing the empty pallet to get the first load. “Hey, Blossom, slow down boy. Is there a fire somewhere?” hollered Slim if he saw me running. He was one of the several Black men driving the forklifts. We were the loaders, and we couldn’t do our work without the forklifts coming to us and reaching the high stacks. So I listened to Slim and tried to keep him friendly. During the afternoon shift, he’d often be hidden in one of the deep rows, sitting on his forklift, sleeping for a few minutes. He worked two full-time jobs, laboring sixteen hours each day. If I could, I’d find another forklift driver, instead of waking him. Driving forklift was understood to be the best job, next to the union steward job, because forklift drivers didn’t do much lifting with their backs. All the forklift drivers were Black as was Lonzo, and Slim gave most of the White boys’ nicknames, and mine was Blossom because I wore my hair long. Slim was tall, well over six feet, middle-aged, and skinny. Often, he was tired and grumpy, but if you asked him about his daughters, he’d smile and tell you they were “smart, first in their class. My little’un she’s the smartest, why she’s readin’ two levels above her grade.” Lonzo didn’t use Slim’s nickname for me. He called me “Maa-tin.” Standing in the warehouse, I had to hear it a few times before I realized that he meant me. Everyone else, my surfing friends, the Chubbs, they all knew me as “Noland” or

“Skipp.”

Note 8: Name Change

My legal name on my birth certificate was Delbert Martin. I used it to get a Florida driver’s license. I was surprised to find out my surname wasn’t Noland. I asked Dad about it, and he said, “You’re Glade’s only son. I didn’t want be the one to end the Martin name.” As a sixteen-year-old at the time, I didn’t appreciate his reason. He could have adopted me, but he didn’t. I didn’t care so much about continuing the Martin name. For a while, I was sorry not to be a Noland, but I didn’t say much about it. “Probably too much trouble to change it,” I thought. Later, I’d console myself. “It’s okay. I’m not even a Noland.” When I moved out, that regret turned in to a sense of grim satisfaction that the name change led me to new kind of self. Lonzo didn’t know any of that; he just saw my legal name on the job application and called me “Maa-tin.”

* * * * *

Unloading railroad boxcars was hard, way more strenuous than filling orders, because of the Florida heat and humidity. Salt cars were the worst. Salt shipped separately from everything else, so the entire railroad car was filled with boxes and bags of salt, each weighing about one hundred pounds or more. Salt was both heavy and fragile. Salt exposed to open humid air of Florida was ruined. Torn salt boxes and bags had to be thrown away. Lonzo taught us to work like we owned the place.

“When I can tell a good story about you and the owners come in here and see you busting your asses, then they can be talked into giving us a raise. that!” I’d learned at the Chubbs that single-minded labor made the time on difficult work go more quickly. It was almost like sleep or a daydream. Though this did get me into some trouble with one of the older workers. “Hey, boy, you tryin’ to make me look slow? Don’t believe all that rah-rah stuff that Alonzo tells you. Ten cents an hour is all the ‘big raises’ he’s talkin’ about. We get that whether we bust our butts or not.” Midday, moving 125-pound boxes of salt gingerly to the pallets below caused me to what I learned at the Lone Tree Farm. I told my coworker, “I do believe this job is worse than cleaning the chicken house back in Missouri.” Our workday started about 5:00 a.m. and ended about 3:00 p.m. In the apartment, no one was there to fix my meals or clean my clothes. Worn out, I’d come home those first few weeks and fall asleep while listening to Simon & Garfunkel sing about “The Boxer” and “The Sound of Silence,” and then I’d wake up late in the evening hungry with not much food in the house. After I did that a couple of times, I learned to put food in the pantry before taking a nap. Surfing was always on my mind. Weekends, we’d drive to Cocoa Beach, spend the night sleeping on the beach, and walk barefooted everywhere to toughen our feet. Everywhere except sandspurs, we’d watch out for them as we’d carry boards from the van to the shore break. We’d paddle around in the wave line up kneeling on our boards. Big waves would roll through, and we paddled furiously, trying to catch the wave’s momentum. If we felt the wave grab our board as it rolled toward the beach, then we stood up and rode the board with little flair along the shore. Sometimes we’d fall off, sometimes not. In either case, we’d turn our boards around, paddle out to the lineup, and do it again. We studied the surf magazines and read about Santa Cruz and top California surfers like Corky Carroll. “We are going to Santa Cruz one of these days. Got to get there.”

The magazines showed surfers like Corky with calluses on their knees developed from hours and days of paddling, kneeling on their surfboards. The calluses protruded on their knees and the tops of their feet like pieces of leather. We’d see our knees and feet rubbed raw, and we paddled on our knees until they bled, so then we’d give ’em a rest and lay on our stomachs and paddle. We’d learned that weekend surfers didn’t have enough paddling time to develop calluses. In a stormy weather, we’d drive over to Sebastian Inlet, shown on Figure 10, and paddle out in the rough surf and try to catch some big ones.

Figure 10. Sebastian Inlet, Florida East Coast, Near Cocoa Beach

Once I forgot my “baggies,” my surfing shorts, so I paddled out in the heavy surf with my jeans, caught a big wave, lost my board, and almost drowned trying to swim in to the shore, wearing my jeans, so I peeled them off and left them in the ocean. I walked out of the shore break in my long baggie-type underwear, picked up my board, and carried it back to the van. With the board in hand, my friends didn’t notice I was without pants until I was sitting in van. Then they had a hilarious time, especially when we stopped to eat. We kept our attention on the daily surf reports, and we’d look for reports like Figure 11.

Figure 11. Sebastian Inlet, Central Florida Surf Report

Three Brothers

I was stacking Purina Dog Food bags on a pallet when Slim sidled up next to me on his fork lift. “Alonzo wants you pronto in the office,” he said. “Do not know what’s it about?” I asked. It sounded ominous the way he said it. I wracked my brain to try to anything sketchy that I’d done lately that Lonzo could’ve found out about. Slim just shook his head. “You better high tail up there though. I think it might be a phone call.” Lonzo pointed at phone in the office. The handset lay next the phone. I walked over and picked it up and said, “Hello.” It was Mom’s voice. “Your dad died about an hour ago. He had another heart attack. He died here in the house. He was dead before the ambulance arrived.” Her voice was calm, and she was sober. “I need you to come home and stay with us for a while until we sort this out.” “Okay, I’ll finish my shift, and I’ll be there by five,” I said and then hung the handset back on its cradle. I didn’t wait to hear her answer. Lonzo sensed something was wrong. “Okay, what was that?” he asked. “My mother. My dad died about an hour ago. I’ll finish my shift, then head out.” “Like hell. You get home now, hear me?” Lonzo said. “Your family needs you.” “Don’t know if I can come in tomorrow.”

“Union says you got three days off for dying family. Let me know if you need anything.” What we needed, Lonzo couldn’t help us.

* * * * *

The next evening, our Bonneville neighbors came over to our little house to visit Mom and me. We had standing room only in the kitchen and living room with maybe eight or nine couples who patiently talked to each other while they waited to say something to Mom. To my ears, it was a hubbub of noise, and Mom’s bleary eyes showed me she’d had few solid drinks during the day. No one minded or perhaps even noticed, except for me. She smiled as she spoke gallantly, and she was steady on her feet. If I’d considered it and then tried to appreciate Mom’s feelings or our neighbor’s kindness, I would’ve been honored by the gathering too. Instead, I wished to be somewhere else, and I forced a smile when Mrs. Pruitt told me she’d heard I was working in town. “How do you like your job?” she asked. I took a deep breath and held it. “Fine,” I said, exhaling, clenching my fist as I touched my mouth. She looked at me frowning, thinking out loud. “Are you okay?” My glance flicked upward, and then I said, “No, I’m not, maybe you should go home.” She paused, squinted her eyes, and tilted her head. She paused just for a few seconds, then she jumped up. With her face flushed, she pushed past anyone in her way and left through the front door. Mom noticed Mrs. Pruitt’s abrupt departure, but she didn’t hear what I said, so she came over to me and whispered, “What did you say to her?”

My jaw was throbbing. I felt mean and brittle. “Maybe she should go home. Maybe everyone should leave.” Still whispering to me, Mom said, “Oh shit, don’t say that. If you’re feeling so terrible, say goodbye to all and leave.” Exasperated with Mom and all of the rest of the world, I heaved a sigh, walked to the front door, and held it open as I turned toward our visitors. “Goodbye all, thanks for coming. I have to go now.” I closed the door behind me.

* * * * *

I lived in the Bonneville house for a month, and I drove to Super Foods from there. We had Dad’s funeral near Lake Downey at Chapel Hill Cemetery. I had forgotten that he was a Mason, so his Masonic Lodge, based out of Paducah, set up a tent, and they said funeral rites over his grave. He had talked to me once about DeMolay, the youth leadership training group for Masons. Nothing came of it. I don’t know exactly why he only mentioned it once, but I think it was because I was making such poor career choices he gave up on the idea. Uncle Don and Aunt Loretta came down from Kansas City for the funeral. They met with Mom and paid their respects to her as Dad’s widow with three kids at home. I was aimless and without influence, and I didn’t really want to be stuck living with Mom. I just wanted to be left alone, and they hardly spoke to me. I wrote a few words for the Brothers Three.

Brothers Three

Jake, Bob, Roy. Glory be, set free to God.

Each a Missouri farm boy. They worked the Sod or tried to.

Yet too soon taken. Glory be, these Brothers Three. They’re gone; we’re shaken. They captured a boy’s heart in Lone Tree.

Not of their blood, But of their kindness, The boy ed the flood. Brothers Three together in Lone Tree.

Gone now, set on a new course, Left me here, I’m that Boy Not forgotten, they saddled my horse, They taught me to ride in Lone Tree.

Figure 12. In Memory, Brothers Three

After a few weeks ed, Mom didn’t really need me there, so I moved back to

downtown Orlando. She must have gotten some money from Dad’s insurance, but I knew nothing about it. She didn’t share financial information with me, so I had no idea other than she didn’t ask me for any money. I would’ve happily given it to her if I had any. Curiously, she did ask me, “When are you moving to Santa Cruz?” I used to talk about it, so it was a fair question. Truth was, I had no definite plans at all, just a strong notion with a vague plan to save up some money. I had just gotten a girlfriend, and her hands touching mine weakened my resolve to leave Orlando. My new family routine, after Dad died, included an occasional Wednesday night dinner with Mom, Maude, Todd, and Aless. Mom’s always cooked, usually we had fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Mom wasn’t always exactly dry sober all of the time, but I’d seen her worse off. Visiting a few times per month was easier than living there. One Wednesday late afternoon, I drove over to Mom’s, and I was surprised to see Aunt Shirley sitting with Mom in the kitchen. Shirley had flown down from Benton Harbor. Mom kept her own counsel, so I had no advance clues about the whereabouts of Aunt Shirley or why she had come. Aunt Shirley reminded me that I’d met her when Dad put me on a bus trip to Benton Harbor to see Glade. I didn’t recognize her that afternoon. I didn’t her. The bus trip occurred after we arrived in Orlando, just a few years ago. My most vivid memory was seeing Dad openly crying, waving to me, as the bus pulled out the terminal. I knew Shirley had a son about my age. In the kitchen, with Shirley sitting there, Mom told me that Paul, Shirley’s husband, had died six months before Dad in June 1968. So it made sense that the two widowed sisters were getting together for a visit. Though I didn’t see the even bigger surprise coming. We were sitting there at the table, eating our string green beans fried with bacon, along with our mashed potatoes and fried chicken. Mom just dropped it on me without any ing information. “Hey, Shirley and I have been talking. We are planning to move to Santa Cruz,”

Mom told me in a matter-of-fact voice, but I sensed that she was on the verge of a bust-out laugh. “We’re wondering if you want to come with us?” Shirley chimed in. “Timmy’s living in Fort Ord, so I’m heading out that way.” I was shocked, but they were talking seriously, and both of them were sober. “Huh, really? But I don’t understand. You said you’re planning to move to Santa Cruz. Is it just for a visit, and for how long would you be there?” I asked. “Oh, it’ll be permanent. I’m leaving Orlando after I sell this house,” Mom said, with a deadpan face. “I used to hear you talk a lot about Santa Cruz.”

Note 9: Context for Shirley Barker, Orlando, April 1969

Her son, Timothy, was in the army and stationed at Fort Ord in Monterey, California, which was directly across the Monterey Bay from Santa Cruz. It was Mom and Shirley who were arrested on drunk and disorderly charges in Benton Harbor, seventeen years before when their toddlers, Skipper and Timmy, were only one and a half years old and three years old. See Figure 2. When I met Aunt Shirley in Mom’s Florida Kitchen, I didn’t know about their flamboyant arrest. I also didn’t know that Aunt Shirley would drink herself into a stupor, most every day if she could.

My First Trip West: Mom’s New Venture

Three months after Dad died, Mom decided to sell her Orlando house and move three thousand miles to the west coast surfing tourist town, Santa Cruz, California. She knew nothing about the town, and she had no relatives there. Dad and Mom had moved from Missouri to Orlando so she’d be close to her two sisters, Delpha and Dodie. Six years ed with Dad exerting his stable influence on Mom, and the family had been safe in Florida with a house, some income, and food on the table. So why was she moving to Santa Cruz? It dawned on me that Aunt Shirley called her, told her about my cousin Timmy’s location right next to Santa Cruz, and that conversation with Shirley gave Mom the idea. Without Dad there and maybe because she had a little money, she was looking for an excuse to leave? If and when she talked to Delpha, she could tell her that she was helping Shirley and maybe helping me too if I ended up there too. Mom was happy to be the new head of her household, free of Dad’s overriding influence. She seemly managed well enough in those first few months after he died, and she stayed sober enough to get things done. I was the surfer-man-child with the “no looking back” mindset and an unsteady resolve to live independently. I had a high school diploma and few months’ working experience as a warehouseman. I had no long-term moneymaking prospects. My surfing friends and I focused on riding the ocean waves. We walked barefoot in the sand, so proud of carrying our surfboards, wearing our baggie shorts, riding in the van together. We talked nonsense about traveling to Santa Cruz, on the other side of the continent with no real plan or means to do it. Conflicted decisions, here’s one. Living in Santa Cruz had been in my dreams and conversations for years. When Mom made the plan to move there, I was suddenly conflicted. I would lose my independent living in Orlando in exchange for living with my Mom in Santa Cruz. To my surfing buddies and coworkers at Super Foods, I told them, “I am going

to Santa Cruz even if it means bringing Mom and my siblings too.” I actually thought about it that way, even though Mom was paying for everything. I had very little money, and I was in denial about my reliance on her . She wasn’t ing me in Orlando, but she would be in Santa Cruz, but I couldn’t it it. I pretended to be the adult, the wonderful oldest son, who was helping his widowed mother and his siblings to move to Santa Cruz. Yeah, right. Another thing worried me, but I couldn’t put it into words. I didn’t trust Mom to stay sober. Now with Aunt Shirley, what then? But I had fled too often, I had no settled way to talk to Mom about any of my fears. Mom’s plan to move to Santa Cruz was unfolding, and she was committed and seemly capable. Unlike Aunt Shirley, she was at least strong and healthy, and she successfully handled the paperwork of the house sale. As the house sold and dates were set to leave, I gradually understood just how fragile Aunt Shirley had become, and I was uneasy to say the least. Two harddrinking sisters, one in the front seat of the car and one in the backseat? And I had already agreed to make the trip? Somehow Aunt Delpha got through to me with a phone call. “Help your mom, she’ll need it.” I’d wake up in the night, thinking about it. I didn’t see that Mom needed my help because she wasn’t talking to me about anything anyway. So I made a new plan. I’d drive them to Santa Cruz, get them into a rental house there, then I’d hitchhike back to Orlando. I had a new girlfriend, so I had a reason to come back. I wouldn’t be leaving them there alone for too long. I would return to Santa Cruz after I had one last visit with my girlfriend. Plus, one of my surfing buddies owned me some money, so I was coming back to get it. That was my story, the best I could do, and it didn’t sound that great to me either.

* * * * *

We’d driven about two thousand miles from Orlando, and we’d stopped for an overnight in Gallup, New Mexico. This time, Mom stayed sober when she really needed to, and we certainly needed her sober on this drive to Santa Cruz. I was glad she was showing herself dependable. “We’ve got about nine hundred miles to go, probably two more days driving,” Mom said. Just me and her in the restaurant next door to the motel, and it was late afternoon. She’d paid for two double rooms, so Aunt Shirley was in one of them resting. “Hey, Mom, I haven’t told you yet, but after we find a place in Santa Cruz, I’ll need to head back to Orlando for a while,” I said. This was not going to go over well. “What do mean? Why do you need to go back?” Her face flushed red. “I need to sort out my plans. I’m not sure if I want to live in Santa Cruz,” I said. My stomach twisted. “We’re not even there yet.” “I don’t want to live with Aunt Shirley. There’s too much drinking going on.” There I’d said it. I held my breath with my torso was rigid, and I gripped my hands together. That moment would be replayed in hell as a good example of a hurtful thing to say at just the wrong time. Mom crossed her arms, then she brought her hand up to her mouth. I saw the side of her face twitch. I’d never seen that before. Without another word, with tears and an edgy, scary laugh, she scooted out of the booth and hurried out of my sight. The next morning, we headed out toward Santa Cruz, and we made it in two days. Mom acted like we didn’t even have that conversation. No barking, no crying, no yelling, no sullen silence to punish me. She didn’t do any of that. She excelled at burying those bad moments in time.

End of Part 2

Part 3

Unsettled in Santa Cruz

My First Trip East

“We are coming up on Oildale now,” said the driver. “Let me off at the junction,” I said. He made the turn off Highway 99, just north of Bakersfield, California, and he stopped his truck. My olive-colored duffel bag with my travel gear was in the back of the truck. Stepping up on the truck’s running board, I hiked it out and then stepped aside. We were in sunny, Central Valley California, a 450-mile-long agricultural valley, between Bakersfield and Redding, the so-called “Land of a Billion Vegetables.” “Thanks for ride,” I called as he pulled away. August 1969, I had left Santa Cruz the afternoon before, some 250 miles north of Bakersfield. Just north of Paso Robles, I had slept easy that night just off the road, surrounded by almond trees under a hedge. I was out-of-sight with no worry of interruption. I used a decent sleeping bag, so I woke up refreshed, rolled up the bag, and stuffed it into my top-loading duffel bag. I walked the half mile into Paso Robles along Highway 101 to a small roadside café and washed up in their bathroom. The cook was friendly, called me “honey” and “darlin’,” and she made me some eggs, bacon, and pancakes for breakfast. As I finished eating, a guy in a truck offered me a ride to Oildale, so I rode with him. I was making my way back to Florida. At the Oildale turnoff, I crossed the road to the southbound side of Highway 99, stood on the shoulder of road, then turned, and faced the traffic. When a vehicle approached, I held out my right hand with my thumb extended. A 1965 lime-green Ford pickup approached, slowed down when it first came in sight, slowed even more as it got closer, and then it pulled over on to the road’s shoulder just behind me and stopped. Usually, the drivers don’t get out of their vehicles, but this guy jumped out immediately and ran back to me. I was hurrying too because this could be a “ride,” and I needed to be ready to go. All the sudden, he was there beside me before I could even pull the duffel bag strap

over my shoulder. Smiling, he asked, “Hey, what you doing here?” Bit too breezy, his question was a little off. He was in his thirties, fit, sturdy build. With his haircut, he could have been military or police. “What? What do you mean? I am hitchhiking, heading east,” I answered. Pushy question, what I am doing here? I tried to size him up. As a hitchhiker, we usually ran up to the enger door of a potential ride, happy to get it but ever so cautious when we opened the door and looked inside. In an instant, we decided whether this or that driver would be safe enough for us to ride with. If not, we didn’t get into the vehicle. Now this guy was different from the start. He was now standing beside me, acting like he already knew me. “So where you are going?” he asked. “Florida,” I said, “Orlando.” “Whoa. Say what? We need to talk for a minute.” Solemn faced, the tone of his voice dropped. “So if you agree, I need to know if you can drive. Do you have a driver’s license?” Without speaking, I listened and watched his face. Is this guy for real? I handed him my Florida driver’s license. I didn’t like this guy being so friendly. He held my license in his hand. All business, he studied it, looked at the picture, and looked at me. Then he looked at the height and weight and looked at me. “Hmm, eighteen this last December? Are you in high school?” he asked. “Yeah, I am eighteen. No, I am not in high school. I graduated last year.” “Okay, maybe we think about this for a second. I am going to Florida. I think maybe you could come with me,” he said. He spoke to me with a pleasant pitch in his voice, but his sober eyes studied my face. He was sizing me up. Within a few seconds, he said, “Let’s load up if you want to come along. If you

agree, toss your bag in the back of the truck.” His truck had a canopy. I didn’t overthink it; there was no time. I lugged my bag over to the tailgate, dropped the gate, and hefted the bag on top of a pile of horse blankets. I started to get in on the enger side. “No, not there. If you agree, I want you to drive,” he said. “Are you okay with that?” Maybe this made sense, but I was hesitant. “Really?” “Yes, really.” He handed me the keys. “I want to see you drive for a while. Before we take off, let’s talk about it.” He was in a hurry to get to Gainesville, Florida, near Orlando. We would drive nonstop, take turns driving, sleeping, and switching as needed. He reckoned about 2,500 miles, maybe sixty hours driving, probably three days before we pull into Gainesville. I got into the truck and started the engine and then pulled out on to Highway 99 south. He paused the conversation for a moment. It occurred to me if he was in such a hurry, why did he stop for me? So I asked him just that. “Yeah,” he said. “I got this hunch when I saw you. All of a sudden, I got this strong feeling, slow down, then again, slow down. So I did and took a good look at you. What the hell, I might as well talk to you, so I pulled over and jumped out. You seem nice enough, and you are not too scary to look at. Ha! The way I see it, you could be an angel sent by God to help me.” Then he laughed, shook his head, and looked at me. He was joking, but now he was waiting for me to say something. I looked back at the road. I had nothing to say; I wanted him to know I was a good driver. Yeah, and I am angel, right on. “Okay, so maybe you are not an angel,” he said, and he laughed again. Let’s give that a rest, enough already. “Either way, I know something is happening here that could be good for us both. Unless you want to tell me you really are an angel? No?”

He really liked the angel joke. Good grief. I shook my head. Stop, please. “Okay. Sorry. If you agree, tell me something about how much driving you have done?” he asked. “If I get in the back of the truck and sleep for a few hours, will you be okay? Do I need to worry about you getting lost?” I told him about driving my mom and my aunt and my siblings from Orlando to Santa Cruz in July, just a month ago. “We did the trip in about ten days, driving a few hundred miles a day. We had six in the car, three kids, my aunt, my mom, and me. We stayed in motels at night. No, I won’t get lost,” I said. We kept talking. He asked me where I lived. I told him about Missouri and then our move to Florida when I was eleven. “So why are you in California?” he asked. “Wait. Take the next exit, Highway 58 East. In Barstow, we pick up I-40 east, and it will take us all the way to Memphis.” I turned the truck on to 58 East. Watching for the Barstow signs, I was quiet, focused on the driving. I didn’t answer his question. “Hey, I am sorry for the twenty questions. My name is Randy. We might as well talk, yes? It will make the time go faster. I run a plumbing company in San Luis Obispo. My sister is in Florida, and she is in a bind. Your name is Delbert?” I nodded. “Delbert is my legal name, but I go by Skipp.” “Okay, Skipp, I am still jazzed about this, and I am wondering about you. I woke up this morning a little worried. I have got projects, and this trip to my sister’s place is a long one. How was I going to pull it off? I don’t hear voices every day telling me to pull over. But I did today. Now you are sitting here beside me, and we have a plan. I think you are cool.” I had still got nothing say about this. He was turning on the charm. “No mention of your dad?” he asked.

I gave him the short version. “My dad died in Orlando about six months ago. I wasn’t living at home at the time, and my mom knew I wanted to move to Santa Cruz. Because my dad died, she decided to move to Santa Cruz too. She asked me to help her move, so I did.” “Now you are leaving?” “I am going back to Orlando to see some friends. I will return to Santa Cruz in a month or so.” As we drove along, Randy had questions about my past and about what my plans were. Randy and I began our trip along I-40 going on to Flagstaff, then Albuquerque, and then Memphis, which was thirty-six hours of driving. We took turns driving and sleeping. When we hit the cities, he’d be up front with me, making sure we didn’t lose our way. “Tell me about your dad,” asked Randy. “Did you get along?” “Not the last year. He was upset with me for not going to college.” “Hmmm, college helps if you get a degree,” Randy said. “It helped me.” After leaving Memphis, Tennessee, Randy, and I had another fifteen hours of driving to Gainesville, Florida, via Atlanta. We stopped only for gas and some fast-food, which he paid for. When we arrived in Gainesville, he apologized for not taking me on to Orlando, but it was a hundred miles south. That’d be four more hours of driving for him. There was no way that I wanted him to do that, so we talked about it. “You need to get off I-75. Where are you going exactly?” “Umatilla, Aunt Dodie’s house, about an hour north of Orlando. I need to call her.” We looked at the map, and he thought Florida Highway 20 and Highway 26 junction would be a good drop-off location. I walked around his truck and pulled my bag out. I waved to him as he started to pull away. He stopped, rolled down the enger window.

“Hey, thanks for helping me make this trip,” he yelled over the noise of traffic. “When you get back to California, get your butt back to school. that.” The Florida summer heat oppressed me, and I yawned as I nodded to him. His lime-green truck pulled back onto the highway. I checked my bag and found the fifteen dollars I had when I left Paso Robles. I walked over to the Dandy Market, got some quarters and dimes and a bottle of water.

Aunt Dodie

The “Hook Fish and Chicken” restaurant was next door. If I got stuck beside the road, it would be a while before I got to Dodie’s. I went in, sat down, and bought some fried chicken, fries, and a Coke. Hungry and tired, I wolfed it down, bought a couple of cookies, and put them in my bag, and then I went outside to the phone booth. I dialed Aunt Dodie’s number. “Thirty cents for two minutes,” said the voice on the phone, so I dropped three dimes into the coin slot. She’d heard from Mom, so Aunt Dodie wanted to come and pick me up, but it would be a four-hour round-trip drive for her. I told her if I didn’t get a ride within an hour or so, I’d call her back. I walked out and faced the traffic on Florida Highway 20 South. I decided to walk down to the next major intersection. Stopping there, hardly five minutes ed before I saw an open-top Jeep with two guys in the front seats swerve over dramatically to my side of the road and accelerate toward me. The driver pressed hard on the horn while he drove the jeep with two wheels bouncing on the grass and gravel shoulder. I heard the sporadic shriek of the Jeep’s horn. I dragged my bag over to the side of the road and pushed it into the ditch. Then I jumped over it out of their way. They were in line to run me over. I heard their raucous laughter as they sped by me. “Loser!” they shouted. About three hours later, my second ride dropped me off at the Altoona Food Mart, Main Street, Highway 19. It was late, but not yet midnight. I was maybe within five miles of Aunt Dodie’s, so I called her, and she came and picked me up. “Whew! We’ll get you home into a shower and then on to bed,” Aunt Dodie said as she drove back to her house. “I called her today and said you were here. We’re all happy to know you’re safe.”

* * * * *

Dodie was two years older than Mom, and as I mentioned before, she lived with Mom and Delpha in Paducah and took care of me when I was a toddler. In Paducah, after Mom married Dad, Delpha and Dodie moved to Orlando. Dodie settled in Umatilla with Uncle Marv. I stayed with her and Uncle Marv for a weekend when we first arrived from Missouri, when I was about eleven years old. I’d brought my baseball glove with me because I had ed a Little League baseball team. Aunt Dodie sent me down the street. “There’re boys at the end of street. They’ve got a sandlot game going.” I walked down there, past three blocks of small two-bedroom, concrete, contractor-built houses, butted up next to each other, each separated by a chain-link fence. No curbs or sidewalks, but the roads were asphalt covered. Some of the houses had a few flowering shrubs scattered about. About six or seven boys were playing baseball on several ading vacant lots. They had a chain-link fence, only four feet high, serving as a poor kind of baseball backstop. Foul balls hit behind them went over the fence, and they had to climb over it to retrieve them. They had a real home plate, made of heavy rubber, but the other bases were small pieces of two-by-six cut lumber. Florida sand with splotches of sputtering Bermuda grass and earnest ragweed and scrub palmetto served as their baseball field. They were taking turns hitting and pitching. I stood shyly on the road, holding my glove in my left hand. Then I put it on, watching them. If they invited me to play, I’d be ready. The pitcher, a sandy-haired boy with a faded-red T-shirt, blue jeans, started his windup to pitch, then stopped and stood still. He tilted his head toward me, looking at the older boy holding the bat. The older boy lowered his bat, then turned around to look at me. He wore a baseball jersey with an oversized number seven printed on the back and a Yankee’s baseball hat just like Mickey Mantle.

“Beat it, kid. You’re not playing here. We don’t play with shrimps. Go away.” I left them. The new kid always gets rejected at first. I knew that. That was the first and last time I saw those boys.

* * * * *

As Aunt Dodie led me through her house, she turned on her back porch light. I could see her backyard looking through the sliding glass door. Headed for bed after the shower, the last thing I saw was the back porch concrete slab. I rolled that “beat it, kid,” scene around in my mind when I woke up the next morning at Aunt Dodie’s house, newly arrived from hitchhiking from Santa Cruz. I ed feeling dejected, holding my baseball glove, sitting on that back porch concrete slab. Aunt Dodie had pushed open her sliding glass door to the outside and walked over and stood next to me. “They didn’t want me to play with them.” “Never mind, we’ll go to the lake instead,” she said. “Don’t be sad.” Uninvited, the memory stayed in my head as I sat on the edge of the bed. It had been a short night’s sleep, and I heard my aunt and uncle in the kitchen. They kept their voices low. I was up but still tired from traveling. I had to let Pickens and Bill know I was back in town. Uncle Marv put down his newspaper and looked quizzically at me. “Morning, Skipp,” he said, and he smiled, and then he kind of reversed it, twitched his cheeks, and sobered his eyes. “Morning, sir,” I said as I tried to match his voice tone. I sat down across from him at the table and nodded hopefully, rousing myself to be cheerful. I pushed down my sense of unease, laid out my hands flat on the table, drumming my fingers on the table, until I heard the tap-tap, pause, tap-tap, and then I

consciously held my hands still. “Eggs and bacon, coming your way,” said Aunt Dodie as she stood by the stove. She gave us a little laugh, overdoing it a bit to compensate for her overly subdued men. “Hey, you, we’re glad you’re with us this beautiful morning. We are dying to hear more about your trip.” That first night in Paso Robles, laying there in my sleeping bag, I pictured Mom calling both aunts, Dodie and Delpha, telling them I left Santa Cruz, and was supposed to be headed back to Orlando. I imagined she’d probably wait a couple nights, wondering if I might change my mind. Without thinking it through and without talking about it, I showed up at Aunt Dodie’s door with the notion that maybe I could stay the night and then call one of my friends the next day. “Mom’s okay, we got to Santa Cruz, no problems,” I announced. I knew Dodie and Mom had talked. She mentioned it the night before. “She’s got a house close to the beach, near the boardwalk.” Uncle Marc gave me a tight smile and cleared his throat. “How come you’re back here so soon?” Uncle Marv asked, looking skeptical. Dodie’s head turned toward me with her eyebrows raised, her lips pressed together. “Well, I wasn’t quite ready to go, so I had to come back. I left my car here. Maybe I can sell it now, I don’t know. Bill has my car. I will be heading his way today if I can,” I said. “I will need to call him here pretty quick.” Uncle Marv let loose of his elbow, uncrossed his arms, and leaned toward me. “So, umm, you’re not here? You’re not staying here? For how long?” “What do you mean?” I asked. “If you mean here at your house. I’d say maybe today or tomorrow. If you mean when do I return to Santa Cruz. I’d say maybe a week or so.” I stood up. The way he said “how long” clanged in my head, and my stomach clenched. I hadn’t touched the eggs yet. “If I can use your phone, I’ll call ’em

now.” “Oh, Skipp, sit down and eat first,” said Aunt Dodie. “Don’t be so jumpy. Sit down.” I sat down and grabbed a fork. I was out of place here, but I took a few bites and tried to relax. They waited while I ate. Most of it gone, with a half a piece of toast left, she spoke. “Tell me about your hitchhiking trip. Lola called me just a couple days ago. We thought it might be a week before you showed. But it was almost the next day, I got your call.” “I got a good ride. A guy picked me up in California, and we drove straight through to Gainesville. I drove while he slept and so on.” “Well, we worried about you, and we prayed that God would send his angels to watch over you,” said Dodie. “And now you’re here, safe and sound.” “The guy who picked me up joked about me being an angel sent to help him.” “Well, I think God will have to send a special squadron of angels to watch after you,” said Dodie, “and that’s no joke.”

* * * * *

Pickens drove his blue surfing van an hour north to Umatilla to pick me up that same day I called him from Aunt Dodie’s house. His parents were gone, and he lived with his grandma. She had a small estate set up around one of the hundreds of lakes in Orlando. His grandma set him up with his own little separate cottage like Karl’s, but his was larger, and he had a little workshop. She agreed I could overnight in his cottage for a few days. That night, Pickens called a few of our friends he hauled around in his van from

time to time, but only Bill came over. Bill’s dad had put my car on his used car lot and sold it within a few days. My resolve to return to Santa Cruz flickered again. I was sorry to hear he’d sold the car. If I had it, maybe I would stay in Orlando longer or maybe not. My aunts would jump down my throat if I stayed too long. But it did cross my mind. Bill handed me the money and asked me if Pickens and I were hitchhiking back to Santa Cruz. Maybe Pickens could drive his van? Pickens had too much going for him living with his grandma on her estate. Free rent, workshop, and she was one sharp old lady. No way was he going to Santa Cruz. I had already gone with him once to Omaha, and that didn’t turn out so great. Bill was ready to go if we had a place to stay in Santa Cruz. I called Mom, and we talked about it. Aunt Shirley had decided to move back to Michigan. Her son, Timmy, told her he was likely to transfer any day from Fort Ord, so her plan to live near him changed. I was much relieved to hear it, and Mom gave the goahead to bring Bill back with me. He could stay for a few weeks, so we could surf. My other supposed reason for returning to Orlando was my girlfriend. Her name Diane too; the same name as Karl’s sister. Gorgeous and a bit childlike, she looked up to and adored her older brother, Don. Thus, as one of Don’s friends, she looked up to me too. Don was one of our surfing companions, and she would sometimes ride in Pickens’s van, and that’s how I met her. She and I went out to see a drive-in movie a couple times when I had a car. Our time together was destined to end because of my move to Santa Cruz. She was slightly taller than me, and that worried her. All the surfing dudes had a crush on her, so for a guy who seldom had a girlfriend, I cheered the friendly pretense that Diane liked me. Just before Bill and I left Orlando, I went to see her. I followed her brother Don into their house. I was waiting there, standing next to their kitchen sink, iring their dirty dishes, when her dad stood in the doorway, made a noise in his throat, and then made hand signals directing me outside. Outside on the porch, he said, “You need to leave. I don’t want you in our house. Stay away from Diane. I’ll tell Don the same.”

So that pretty much ended my star role as Diane’s surfer dude boyfriend. A few years later, Bill and Diane married, but that’s another story for another time.

My Second Trip West: Santa Cruz Surfers

A week later, Bill and I left Orlando and hitchhiked back toward Santa Cruz, stopping for an overnight in New Orleans. Somehow, we lost most of our money, and a couple of days later, we were on our last few dollars. I thought of calling Glade. At least I could tell him I was a world traveler. Maybe I could impress him at the beginning of the conversation, and then if he asked if I needed anything, I’d let him know I could use a little food money at the end of the conversation? It was a hare-brained idea, but what’s to lose? I put a dime in the coin slot to get the operator. “Hello, can I help you?” asked the operator lady. “Yes, I need to place a collect call to Glade Martin,” I said. “Who do I say is calling?” her voice radiated charm. “Skipp Martin, his son.” What else could I say to her? I’d like to hear her voice again. I heard her dial Glade’s number. I imagined what she looked like. She sounded beautiful. So what’s her name? I was about to ask her when I heard Vina say hello. Vina was Glade’s wife, and I’d met her on my last visit to their house some years ago. “I have a collect call from Skipp Martin, do you accept?” the lovely sounding operator asked. She fogged my mind with the way she said my name. “We don’t accept collect calls around here,” Vina said. The operator paused, then she raised the volume of concern in her voice. “This is a collect call for Glade Martin. Is he there?” “Just a minute, I’ll get him.” We waited for Glade to come to the phone.

“Hello, this is Glade. We don’t accept collect calls,” he confirmed. “You’re not accepting a collect call for your son?” the operator’s voice hummed, appalled. My heart hummed along with her when she spoke those words. Could I talk to her? I was road weary and little bit out of my mind. “Nope, we don’t accept collect calls,” he repeated with a hollow voice. And then I heard the click as he hung up. “I’m so sorry,” said the operator. “I hope you’re okay.” “I’m okay,” I said. “He hasn’t heard from me in a long time. I shouldn’t have called collect.” I hung up the phone and told Bill. “Well, that was a bust.” Thus, I made no with Glade, but I was encouraged by the words of the lady telephone operator.

Note 10: Moments We

Bill and I encountered several scenes on the journey from Orlando to Santa Cruz. None stuck with me like the distress I heard in the telephone operator’s voice. Similarly, the sandy-haired baseball pitcher telling me, “Beat it, kid. We don’t play with shrimps.” That scene was just another unimportant moment in time. But it made me feel terrible, so I ed it ever after. Mark it. Above all else, we those moments of extreme kindness and most any degree of unkindness, even if the words are spoken to us by strangers. Bill and I walked up to Mom’s nice yellow house on Seabright Avenue located two blocks from where the San Lorenzo River discharges into the Monterey Bay.

We were hungry but young and strong enough to go without a few meals. We were considerably poorer than when we left Orlando a week or so before. No matter, we were thrilled to be in Santa Cruz. Aunt Shirley was gone, so Bill and I shared the room she moved out of. At least the first few nights. I needed money, so I immediately went looking for work and found a job as a seasonal firefighter stationed at Davenport, eleven miles north on Highway 1. I lived in Davenport on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in old converted school building as one of a dozen firefighters. They woke us at 5:00 a.m. and then made us go for a twenty-minute run on the beach (no lollinggagging in bed!). Then we were led up to kitchen where we took turns cooking and cleaning up afterward. It was there I heard my companion firefighter tell me, “Mornings are heavy here,” as he stood next to the sink, scrubbing burned scrambled eggs from a skillet. If there was a forest fire to fight, we traveled to the site of the fire and lived in tents instead. Fortunately, there was only one small forest fire the month I was there. The fire station chief who ruled the barracks and led us on the beach runs was a fifty-year former US Marine Corps maniac. Bill lived with my mom, bought himself a surfboard, and he went to Pleasure Point and tried to ride the reef breaks at “The Hook,” “Seawall,” and “Sewer Peak.” I took my surfboard to the Davenport Fire Station, and I drove eight miles north to Waddell Creek beach, which was half the distance needed to go back into Santa Cruz. Waddell Creek was a beach break with rougher chop and a bone-crushing shore break. It was too scary for me; I got pulled over “the falls” a couple times with the six-foot shore break, then got spun around underwater disoriented. I felt like I might drown out there. Nobody knew me; nobody would ever find me if I did drown. I quit going to Waddell Creek. Santa Cruz swells were vertical walls, typically four to six feet high, and they initially scared us. Or least they scared me. At first, we went straight into the bone-crunching shore break without timing the waves, and we continually fell off, and we swam for our boards as the waves pushed them to shore. Our fear of the big waves lessened, and we started to learn how to drop down the vertical wave face and shove the surfboard rail into the wave so we could “catch a rail,” carve, and ride the wave. Common sense quickly taught us to time the wave sets to get past the shore break. I caught a few waves and rode them, not many, probably less than ten.

Bill, coming every few days from the Seabright house, learned from the local surfers, who at first ignored him. He progressed faster because he was in the water, and I was at the firehouse. I went with him to Pleasure Point a few times when I drove into Santa Cruz from Davenport. Our trips to Pleasure Point lasted about four weeks because Bill had to return to Florida to keep his job.

My Second Trip East

We were about to hitchhike again certainly with no questions or worry about it. Bill decided to take his surfboard. I quit my job at the fire station and left that grim life behind, so I could go with him. Orlando still had a pull on me. Maybe it was my other friends there; maybe it was another chance to be on the road. Bill and I had surfed in Santa Cruz, and now in our imaginations, we returned in glory to Orlando. We weren’t accomplished Santa Cruz surfers, but when we were in Florida, we laid claim to our few rides at the Hook. Bill made good progress riding those Santa Cruz waves. He had become a better surfer, and I was glad to be with him. This was the era of the Beach Boys, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mama Cass Elliott, and hippie communes in the redwood forests of Big Sur and Santa Cruz. Cool surfer dudes were ired and in demand, so even with Bill’s surfboard encumbering us, we made our way across the US in Volkswagen vans, old trucks, and station wagons with a surfboard stacked on top. A few hippies pulled over for us. “We’re surfers too. We couldn’t leave you standing beside the road,” they’d say. Their free-spirited girlfriends, wearing skimpy paisley-dyed sundresses and bellbottom jeans, flirted with everybody. One such ride was with a long-haired hippie named Gordo. Gordo stopped for us, then he went to a lot of trouble and tied Bill’s surfboard on top of his old Chevy station wagon, and then he rearranged the boxes and suitcases in his car, so we could get our stuff loaded too. We had no room to sit up, so we laid on our stomachs, looking out the rear window of his station wagon. We drove a couple of hours or so, and then Gordo informed us, “We’re spending the night up here at Dominic’s place. You guys are welcome to stay there tonight too. I think you should. We’ll head toward Newport Beach tomorrow. Dominic will have a place for us to crash.”

A few miles further on, he turned off the main road onto gravel, slowed down, and then he gradually stopped the car. “Looking for Dominic.” We heard him say. We were looking straight out the back window, so we couldn’t see who he was talking to. He pulled the car forward and moved slowly down the gravel road, so we saw her drop her arm as she had been pointing toward a small clearing among the tall redwood and fir trees. She turned her back to us as we ed because she didn’t even know we were in the car, and she walked along the gravel road. Gordo told us her name was April. I this because April didn’t have a stitch of clothes on. She did wear flip-flops, which Bill watched carefully, as she walked on the gravel crossing the road as we drove slowly away. Bill hollered, “Thanks for driving slow, Gordo.” “Yer welcome,” he said. It was fall of 1969. April was a hippie chick living “free” at Dominic’s place. We did spend the night at Dominic’s with everyone we met being too cool for words. For me, it felt seriously false and goofy. Mostly guys sitting in a circle, smoking ts, with the smell and smoke of incense thick in the air. I noticed an oversized stone Buddha statue sitting prominently in the corner with its eyes closed. Music speakers were turned down low while sitar music played in a loop on an eight-track tape player. “Be mellow, dude. No rush, no hurry. Life’s a groovy scene. Do you wanna toke?” The screen door slammed, and I looked over and saw April again, standing in the doorway. She walked slowly past us to the kitchen. She was about to help put the food on the table. She had her clothes on. We had brought our own food, beef jerky, sandwiches, and we shared such as we had. They had some cheese and a pot of rice, beans, and lentils. We stayed the night in our sleeping bags and headed out the next day. A few days later, we rolled into Orlando and Bill called his mom.

Pickens’s Grandma

Back in Orlando, Bill and I spent the night at his mom’s house. I slept on their couch in the living room, and I got up the next morning and called Pickens. He checked with his grandma with the idea that maybe I could stay with him for a few days. “No problem, she’ll be okay with it.” She surprised him and told him she wanted to talk to me. Pickens called her “Gran.” I tried calling her Mrs. Pickens, but she shook her head. “No, I’m not a Pickens.” She paused like she was thinking about her name. She flashed a quizzical half smile and said, “You can call me Irene.” She pointed to her kitchen table, and we sat down. She was up in years but totally alert, quicker, and smarter than most. She had thick wavy gray hair cut short, parted on the side, hanging loose. Dark eyes, with large high-centered eyebrows, and an oversized attractive mouth carried her face with considerable influence. Critical and questioning in her way of speaking, she guarded her grandson. She had a presence and a way about her that was polite, but she was not overly friendly to us. We’d see her outside walking near the lake. She wore a large brimmed hat, and she was tanned from years in the Florida sun. With his friends around, she was always stern with Pickens, called him by his first name, which was Vince. His name was Vincent Pickens, but we always called him by his last name. I hadn’t seen her smile until she told me to call her Irene. She’d been a nicelooking woman, and still was, though she moved gingerly, maybe with some arthritis. She walked erect without a cane, fit for her age. She wore a light silk or cotton-flowered scarf around her neck.

But I didn’t think about any of that until after she grilled me. “So as I it, you and Vincent went to Omaha?” she asked. “Yes, that was me.” “He has told me a few things about you. You have been friends for several years. He talks about you…in a good way. He said you make him laugh without even trying to be funny, that you have a smart way about you. That’s a good thing.” “Yes, ma’am. Pickens… I mean, Vince, helps us, and he’s funny too. We all like to surf, and we like going with Vince in his van more than any other way. We do pay him gas money.” “I’ve taught him to be careful with his money,” she said. Changing the subject, she said, “So I know you just moved to California, yes?” and I nodded. Then she said, “Like just a few weeks ago, you were here before, and you spent a couple nights with us.” Her eyes narrowed, and she pressed her lips together tight just for second. Then she said, “Now you’re back. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to ask you…why are you here again so soon?” “Well, Bill came out to visit. We surfed Santa Cruz for a month. He would have been by himself, so I came with him.” She narrowed her eyes again and sifted her voice, she said, “Vincent tells me you’re going to be here for only a couple more days?” I nodded. “And then you are turning around, and you are going to back to California? That sounds crazy to me.” “That sounds crazy to me too,” I said. “When he told me today that you were back again that tells me you might be in

trouble. Are you trying to hide from the law?” She alarmed me with that question. “No, ma’am, I’m just a surfer. We just moved there. I guess I missed Orlando, so I came back again.” She looked away from me across the room like she saw something. She got up and walked over to the stove and turned on the gas flame under a teakettle. She said, “This doesn’t make much sense to me. I think you could get into serious trouble, traveling to-and-fro between Florida and California. If you were mine, I’d be scared for you.” “I’ll be okay. I’m not in any trouble.” “Vincent thinks you’re just ‘Jim Dandy,’” she said, “but your wandering ways don’t feel right to me. Though I’m reminded of your trip to Omaha a couple of years ago. You weren’t even of age then. I’m sorry I let Vincent do that.” She paused again and picked up the tea kettle and said, “I’ll go with his opinion. You can stay with us for a couple of nights.” She paused, waiting for me to say something. I just sat there, looking at her face. Somehow, I felt good about this talk. I heard the echo of her kindness. “If you were mine, I’d be scared for you.” She’d taken time to talk to me. Seeing me slow to speak, she smiled again and said, “Now go. You’re dismissed.” “Thank you, ma’am.” I got up and left her kitchen. I started calling him Vince too after talking to his grandma. If she’d said no, I’d would’ve gone to Aunt Dodie’s and probably gotten another scolding, especially if Uncle Smitty found out I had left Mom yet again. Prompted after my talk with Irene, I called Mom and told her I was heading back to Santa Cruz soon.

“How’s Bill? Is he coming back too?” she asked. I told her no one was coming, except for me. “That’s enough. We’ll be glad to see you. The kids have started school here. This is a good place for us. I was sick of Florida,” she said, “This gives us a fresh start.” She was sober. “Well, we’re Californians now,” I said. “Bye, Mom, see you in about a week.” “Maybe you could enter college,” she said. “We’ll see about it when you get back.” During those couple of days at Vince’s place, we made one trip to Cocoa Beach with four surfers in the back of his van. Bill and I told our stories. These were friends that I would miss and then forget. Orlando still pulled at me. If Mom had not moved to Santa Cruz, then I probably would have stayed. “We’ll come to see you in Santa Cruz!” they said. “We’ll be ready. I’ve heard about ‘The Rivermouth’ surf break. It’s right next to our house,” I told them. While on the road back to Santa Cruz, I learned about free first two years of college in California. Junior college they called it. One middle-aged man and his gray-haired sister reminded me about the military draft, which was becoming a big deal that year. “You’d better get into college, or you could end up in the US Army infantry crawling around in the jungles of Vietnam.”

My Third Trip West: First Year of College

Back in Santa Cruz, I applied for the spring semester, mid-January to May, at Cabrillo College, a two-year junior college in Aptos, California. It was one and a half years since I’d graduated from high school. Cabrillo accepted me, gave me some aptitude tests, and got me started with English, history, economic geography, and weight training. Mom was happy about it partly because she determined that we’d get some extra Social Security money because she was a widow, and I was now a student. She gave me the extra money every month. “I want you to have time to study and get good grades,” she said. We lived within six miles of Cabrillo College, so we bought a green Stella tenspeed bicycle. I used it to travel to school and back. About halfway from Mom’s house, I’d stop at Pleasure Point, near Forty-First Avenue and East Cliff Drive, and check out the several surf breaks there, “The Hook,” “Seawall,” and “Sewer Peak.” Pleasure Point was a neighborhood of small single-story, rundown rental houses. Before she rented the Seabright house, Mom and I drove through the narrowpaved streets with gravel alleys. We saw old Chevy trucks, and even older Volkswagen vans painted bright colors parked along the streets. Mom noticed the unkempt, cluttered yards, with bicycles leaning against broken fences, with surfboards lying about. “I’ll bet they sell drugs in this neighborhood,” she muttered to herself. “We’re not living here.” On that drive with her, I noticed a “room for rent” sign stuck in the window of rambling ranch house that was within a block of “The Hook.” There were surfboards in the garage with long-haired surfers milling about. Maybe I could check that out someday, thinking to myself. Getting down to the beach from the fifty-foot-high cliff at Forty-First Avenue was along a steep, narrow foot path, obstructed by a large tree root, twisted around a big rock. The path put you some thirty feet above the rocky beach with

no handrail. One misstep, and it was a long fall. Dennis was the owner of that rambling ranch house, and I saw him in his garage. When he was out in the water at “The Hook,” he took most of the waves. I’d be about to drop into a wave when I’d see Dennis already dropped in on the breaking wave. I’d have to pull up, turn the board around, and then try get another one, only to be stopped again with someone else already on the wave. Some mornings I spent my whole time just paddling around, maybe catching one or two waves. (See Figure 13.)

Figure 13. Pleasure Point, Santa Cruz

One day, I stopped at Forty-First Avenue and East Cliff and looked down the steep path coming up from the beach. I’d finished my classes for the day, and I was standing with my bicycle. Dennis was climbing up the path with his surfboard under his arm. “I see you a lot around here,” he said. “You surf?” “Yeah,” I said, “I’m learning.” “Yeah, maybe I’ve seen you out there,” he said. He had sun bleached shoulderlength hair. He was medium build, a good-looking man with piercing blue eyes. He had a relaxed manner standing there holding his board under his arm. “Where do you ride that bike every day?” he asked. “I go to Cabrillo for classes. I live over on Seabright with my mom.” “College, huh? Good to hear,” he said as he walked away. “See you around.”

* * * * *

Rivermouth was a sheltered beach break, and most of the year, it had no rideable waves. That changed when snow melt and extra rain in the mountains swelled the San Lorenzo River. The swollen river pushed a sandbar out into the Monterey Bay. Incoming ocean swells crashed on the sandbar and created “the Rivermouth” surf break. When Rivermouth cranked in the four to six-foot range, it rivaled any of the reef breaks of Pleasure Point. We had a couple of weeks of big surf, and Rivermouth was turning out glassy overhead tubes. Bone crunchers. The rights were better than the lefts. When I

lost my board going left, the force of the waves pushed my board upriver. We didn’t have leashes on our boards, so on my first few sessions at Rivermouth, I spent more time swimming after my board than riding it. Over the weeks that followed, I saw Dennis again at “the Hook.” Maybe he’d nod his head toward me, but he was not overly friendly. He hardly spoke to anyone when we were in the water. He focused on catching waves, meanwhile I was paddling around, not catching many waves. I wasn’t good at making small talk, so I didn’t talk to anyone. Unspoken, I understood “no sharing of the waves.” The best surfers got on them first. One rider to one wave. No dropping down in front of someone already on the wave. Don’t waste the waves on people who can’t ride ’em. But my surfing skills improved because I lived next to Rivermouth. During those few weeks of decent waves at Rivermouth, I got up early, and I was first in the water, so I had my pick of the waves. I rode the rights, kicked out before the shore break got me, and then paddled back to get another one. (See Figure 14.)

Figure 14. Going Right at Rivermouth, Santa Cruz

Barefoot in the freezing water, I couldn’t feel my feet walking back home along the sidewalk. Back in the house, I washed up and got ready for school. Cold tap water felt hot on my skin; my feet were numb with cold as I pulled on my shoes. By the time I pedaled an hour or so to class, I could feel my feet warming up. My college classes, English, economics, and history were generally about ten students, seldom above twenty. Tuition free junior college with a “work-study” program gave me a push upward. We were a motley bunch like one barefoot thirty-year-old hippie with a law degree starting over in engineering, one slouching young woman who told everyone she was Wicca, and several guys like me, rudderless, our comes broken. I went back to the “the Hook” at Pleasure Point. I dropped down the face of a decent wave face as Dennis was paddling out. A while later, he paddled over to me and said, “You’re learning.” “Yeah, I’ve been over at Rivermouth,” I said. “It’s been good practice.” Back and forth, I went on my bike, riding along those fifty-foot-high sandcolored cliffs adorned with ice plant, eucalyptus, pine, and oak trees. I eventually banged up my surfboard on the rocks, and it needed repair. Dennis invited me to his garage, and we fixed it there. I saw he still had the “room-for-rent” sign up in the window. I asked him about it. “We’re always looking for renters.” I worked every so often in Dennis’s garage, pressing my hands heavily on electric sanders, smoothing and shaping surf boards. I wore a mask, but if you were standing close, you would see fiberglass dust swirling in the air, and you would notice the overwhelming smell of curing epoxy resin.

Dennis and Connie

Finally, Dennis’s renter moved out, and I moved in. Dennis was ten years older than I. Friendly, funny, he ran the household loosely without many rules. Use the refrigerator, eat your own food, clean up after yourself, especially the bathroom and toilet. Divvy up the cleaning chores after dinner. He always did more than his fair share of the housework. If he asked for help, I helped him, no questions. I was glad to be there. He had a beautiful girlfriend named Connie. She was short, about my height, with luminous brown eyes with a massive amount of unruly dark-brown curly hair. She didn’t surf, but she was a realtor, and she worked at a bank. She was responsible, and she loved Dennis. She had money. Dennis made surfboards, and he was a handyman who would barter and trade for profit. He was a talker and dealer. Still, I was not sure how he made his living, but I didn’t know much; I was the new guy from Florida. Usually Dennis treated me well enough, but sometimes when I approached him coming in from town or the college, he would point to his own nose with his thumb and make a show of brushing something off his nose. “Hey, Skipp, what is that white stuff on your nose? Mescaline?” he would say. “Go easy on that stuff. It will mess you up.” He sounded superior in his tone. Maybe he was joking? Was he mocking me? I couldn’t tell. It sounded like it, but I ignored it and tried to smile. Maybe his joke was an invite to do drugs? I didn’t like his joke, whatever it was. College studies and surfing were all I wanted to do. “Leave him alone, Dennis,” Connie told him. “Quit messing with him. You are trying to be funny, but you are not.” One Saturday morning, Dennis invited me to come with him. Walking from his house with me as a renter, we headed toward Thirtieth Avenue, and we stopped at one of his friend’s house on Hawes Drive. New to me, a girl answered the door, and Dennis and I went into the house. There was a second girl in the house, and I was introduced to them both. I quickly understood what they had in mind,

and I was alarmed but quiet about it. “Sorry, Dennis, I can’t do this. I’ve got to go,” I said. “So you’ve got a girlfriend? You never said,” Dennis commented to me as I went outside. Walking back to our house, I thought about what Dennis was trying to do. “Maybe do me a favor? Get me a girlfriend?” I didn’t need his help. What about Connie? What was he doing? Connie was waiting in the yard at the Dennis’s house when I walked up. “I can’t find Dennis. His board’s in the garage. Do you know where he is?” she asked. I had to quickly think about my answer. Oh no, how could I do this? She saw the hesitation in my face and heard it in my words. “Ahmm, if he is still there,” I hemmed, and then I paused, trying to get the words out. “I think I could find him. It is not far.” I felt hot; I’ll bet my face was red. “Let’s go,” she said, looking away from me. I was such a bad liar that she was embarrassed for me. She stepped over next to me, and we walked out alongside each other. No more talking, I didn’t want to answer any questions. Connie had a stern look about her. We walked back toward the house I had just left. Maybe thirty minutes had gone by since then. About halfway there, we met Dennis face-to-face, walking toward us alone. “Hey, what’s up?” he asked. “We were walking to see if we could find you,” I answered, feeling dread coming my way. “Whoa, oh boy! It must be a full moon coming tonight. I feel some heavy air,” said Dennis. He tried to give us a smile, but it was false, his eyes blank. He

looked at me and then asked, “Do you feel it too?” Putting on his best dealer face, he said, “Hey, yeah! Finding me wasn’t so hard, was it?” We walked back to his house. While we walked, Connie wasn’t talking. They were ignoring each other. When we got back to house, they argued. Halfway through the fight, Dennis yelled something about, “This could be number two! This could be number two!” Then he picked up a plate off the table and threw it against the wall, smashing it. Connie spoke calmly and with authority, and her words left Dennis crazy with what seemed like anger. He accused Connie and me of “getting it on” together and conspiring against him. He played me as the faithless friend. I had no words or heart for such talk. I was the new guy with no status, no understanding, and no history. Connie evidently had some power over Dennis. I was no use in this charade, so I grabbed my backpack and left the house and went back to Mom’s. The next day, I returned to the Dennis’s kitchen. I was getting ready to pack up and move out. Connie and Dennis were there and a guy named David, who I had never met before. From outside, I heard David’s voice, but when I walked through the kitchen door, he stopped talking. Belligerent toward me, Dennis spoke, “So have you got your head on straight yet?” Before I could speak, David turned to Dennis, both shoulders square, lined up against him, and said, “Stop, Dennis. That’s crap.” Dennis stopped. I was headed to my room, determined to leave. David then said to him, “Skipp didn’t want to tell lies for you, Dennis, and he didn’t. There is nothing wrong with that.” Hearing my name again, I turned around, and I saw David, solemn faced. He looked intently at Dennis as he spoke. It turned out, I learned later, that David, Connie, and Dennis were longtime friends. Dennis continued to do “hands-on” work for projects for David and Connie. They liked him, and he did decent work, but he sometimes crashed with

poor behavior and bad judgement. This was one of those times. I knew Connie and Dennis were romantically involved, but I didn’t know that Dennis was a womanizer until that weekend. Obviously, Connie knew that already. I found out later, to my surprise, that Connie owned the house, and she was the landlord, not Dennis. Dennis was renting too, but he was her property manager and handyman. Looking back, I was the unknown guy with no information that Connie tested that morning when she asked me if I knew where Dennis was. Okay, I tried to be barely honest and not to rat on Dennis and not lie to Connie either. I didn’t stand up to Dennis. For years, I had chosen to flee from conflict, so I had no skills for arguing, no stomach for emotional turmoil. As the confusion ebbed and the next day following the big fight, Connie told me that I was welcome to stay in the house. She and Dennis patched things up, and Dennis turned on the charm too. He apologized with style. Dennis could wheel and deal, and I was no match for him. I was more like a “bruised reed” mentioned in the Bible. I really didn’t want to move back in with Mom either, so I found another room to rent, and I moved out.

The Madrone Avenue Garage

Thus, a gathering of young men, like Dennis and me, came to Santa Cruz. We crammed into small houses and shared bathrooms and kitchens because we wanted to live near those surf breaks. I tried living with Dennis and then later with one other surfer but didn’t like either one. One day, I noticed a sizable storage shed for rent near Thirty-Seventh Street and Madrone Avenue. It was sized like a two-car garage without electricity, built as a wood-framed building on a cement slab, sheet rock with insulation in the walls, and an asphalt roof with a locked wooden garage door facing the street. Entry was through a solid wooden door in the back. The garage owner lived out of town. I called him and told him I would get his shed permitted for electrical power, and I would wire it with electricity, including all necessary inspections and construction permits. By then, I was established at the college on the work-study program. I had completed one term, and I had some local work references from the college. Dad had taught me how to use basic tools. I wasn’t good at emotional turmoil, but I was capable and confident enough to read manuals, ask questions, get permits, use saws, hammers, and drills, and run electrical wire inside electrical conduit and install electrical plugs. The Madrone Avenue garage owner rented it to me month to month. He didn’t know that I was going to live in it. I didn’t really mention it to anyone. I used my mom’s mailing address. If you looked inside the Madrone Avenue garage after I moved in, you would have seen a bedsheet over the window, an air mattress, some blankets, a broom, a squeeze sponge mop, and a bucket sitting next to a cardboard box. Several plastic gallon-sized jugs of water sat next to the rolled-up sleeping bag. No sink, no kitchen, and no bathroom. The olive-colored duffel bag sat on a small twoperson couch with a card table piled up with books next to a metal folding chair. A couple of three-by-five-inch rugs lay on the cement floor. Two electric heaters sat near one of the electrical outlets. You might have noticed a white porcelain pot sitting in one corner away from everything else. I’d learned about “pots to pee in” living in the Garden City house with no plumbing in Missouri. There

was my green bicycle and my surfboard leaning against the wall near the door. I took my showers at the college gym. I used the public bathroom at the nearby 76 gas station. Nothing else was in the garage, except an oversized poster tacked to the back wall that I had stolen from Cabrillo College. My work-study job at Cabrillo College had me inside classrooms after hours in the evening moving auto-visual equipment to and from storage. I moved slide projectors and overhead projectors with portable screens, and I set them up as requested by the professors for the next day’s classes. In one of the art classrooms, there was a stunning oversized poster showing a pretty girl sitting on a stone bench inside a glass-enclosed flower garden. This girl eyes looked intently through the glass right at you. The poster caption read, “We are all so desperately alone, we must keep making motions through the glass.” On campus, I looked at the poster for weeks, and then one evening, on a whim, I took it off the wall. I had a bad feeling as I rolled it up and put it in an empty cardboard tube. I tied it to my backpack and pedaled home. I tacked it up on the back wall in Madrone Avenue garage. I liked looking at it, but that edgy feeling persisted. I stood next to Ken, my work-study boss, and he said, “The art history teacher mentioned she’d lost one of her posters.” We were alone in the audiovisual equipment workshop, which was in the college library. “Hmmm, bummer,” I said, narrowing my eyes, pressing my lips together. I closed my fingers, flexed them, and then picked up the overhead projector and put it on the cart. “Evening classes. Unlocked doors. Could’ve been anyone,” he said. “It was in staff meeting she asked if we could watch out for strangers in empty classrooms,” he told me. “Let campus security know.”

Could I return it? Probably not, so I took it down off the wall, and I folded it up. I felt ill as I creased it and folded it over and over. I got no relief as I laid it in the garbage can. I saw my mom occasionally. We were always civil to each other, and she was proudly independent. She seldom asked me to help her with anything. Meanwhile, I could not suffer her drinking, so I left her and my siblings alone for extended periods. They were getting along fine without me. “You shouldn’t be so hard on your mom,” my surfer friend Bill said to me once. He was sitting up front, I was in the back seat of a Volkswagen hippie van on our way back to Orlando. Bill’s surfboard was tied on top of the van. Bill had an audience with the driver and his girlfriend. She was sitting next to me in the backseat. She’d just said something about her mom, and now Bill was sharing what he knew about Mom and lecturing me at the same time. “I can see her happy on those farms wringing chicken’s necks, getting tomatoes out of the garden. She’s a worker. She cooked for us at Seabright. Aless and Todd rely on her, and she comes through for them. I think your mom is really nice.” As I mentioned before, Bill lived with Mom in Santa Cruz, while I was a firefighter at Davenport. She was capable, I’ve always said that, and he noticed. Maybe she drank less when he was there; I didn’t know. I didn’t much like the lecture, but riding with strangers for hours on end somehow frees up the conversation topics. “You should be nice to your mom,” said the driver, looking at me from his rearview mirror. ing that time in the van, I was glad to hear Bill say that he liked her, but I didn’t want to live with her anymore.

* * * * *

One day, at the Seabright house, I came across Dad’s Bible. I’d been looking for it because I’d been handed a “how to get saved” tract from one persistent gangly blond-haired Jesus devotee that wasn’t even a student. He hung around outside the bookstore trying to tell me about Jesus. He asked me if I’d read the Bible. I hadn’t, so he told me with a persuasive tone, “You really need to read it. Find out if God will meet you there.” I told Mom that I was taking Dad’s Bible. I think she heard me, but she didn’t say anything. Later, living alone in the Madrone Avenue garage, I began reading it. Dad made a few marks in it, mostly in Philippians.

“Work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” “Be anxious for nothing…By prayer, let your requests be known to God.” That seemed like opposites to me, don’t be anxious but to have fear and trembling. I studied it and talked to myself and to God. I decided to read it as a feat. I ed when Dad came back from Uncle Bob’s funeral, we went to church for a while. In the reading guide in the back of his Bible, Dad had circled a phrase.

“You can read the Bible as literature, history, or poetry, and it was all of those, but if you want to get the most benefit, read it for what it purports to be, ‘God’s Word to mankind.’ Know that he is speaking to you through his Word. Learn that God cares for you, find out what he wants you do, and then do it. You will find him faithful.” I tried to do just that, but for me, it was a slow process.

The Hound Approached

She had shoulder-length curly hair, and she stood with her bicycle next to my door. I rode up to her on my bike. She greeted me by name. Though I’d never spoken to her, I knew her name as Sally. So I greeted her by name too. She was rangy, attractive, and she’d followed her surfer boyfriend to Pleasure Point. I’d see him at “The Hook,” and sometimes she’d meet him up on the cliff at FortyFirst Avenue. They had a car, and they lived in one of the rental shacks nearby. Evidently, they were having trouble. “Can I move in with you?” she abruptly asked. “I can pay rent.” “When?” I asked, stalling. I could see she was serious, but why was she serious? This made no sense. “I could move in tomorrow. I can pay rent,” she repeated. “I need a place,” she said. “I’ve got a backpack and a sleeping bag, not much else.” “Sally,” I said her name again. “Sally, I don’t even have running water here, no bathroom, no sink, nothing.” I shook my head. “You’d be better off at Brighton Beach campground, at least there you’d have a flush toilet and a sink.” “Oh, I didn’t know,” she muttered, disappointed. “How can you live without water?” she asked as she turned her bike around and pedaled away.

* * * * *

Cabrillo’s college library sat on the top of the hill overlooking the Monterey Bay. I manned the audiovisual equipment checkout desk inside the library. I got paid by the hour with not much to do, so I had time to study during the day between classes. Outside on the three-foot-high redwood and concrete benches facing the bay, students sat with their backs to the library, looking at the azure shimmering

water with ocean swells reduced to curved pencil lines rolling toward the beach. The library inside was well lit with stacked ten-foot floor-to-ceiling windows, expansive with twenty-foot ceilings held up by massive three-foot square beams, layered with redwood, and winding concrete staircases with varnished wooden bannisters leading up to bookshelves on the second floor. The study desks sat under the stairwells in glass-enclosed rooms. Sitting at my favorite study desk, I faced the book checkout area fifty-some odd feet away in the middle of the library ground floor. I looked up from my desk. A young woman was standing in line, staring at me. She didn’t look away, so I turned my attention back to the algebra. A few minutes later, I looked up, and there she was again, closer this time, sitting in my line of sight at a study desk, her back to me. Every few days, I’d see her wearing a shabby gray or blue sweatshirt, under oversized denim farmer coveralls with one suspender over her shoulder, with the other one daggling loose. The denim coveralls were purposely torn and faded. She pulled her dark-brown hair tight around her head, away from her face with a ponytail bobbing behind. Sometimes she wore a dark-colored stocking cap. She deliberately dressed as shabby as possible. She had pale white skin with regular features with black bowed eyebrows seated just above her enormous brown eyes. She looked sad and strange in her getup. I woke up once at night, wondering about her. She seemed even more socially inept than I was. Meanwhile, another dark-haired, attractive girl named Anne spoke to me with just the right rhythm in her approach. She’d ask to sit with me, then sat down before I could answer. Confident of her own charm, she’d pull a sandwich out of her backpack and slowly unwrap it. “Been surfing lately? Want a sandwich? Mom makes two.” She’d tell me, just getting warmed up. “’Two sandwiches so you can make a friend,’ Mom tells me every day. Mom’s worried I’m going to be friendless. Ha.” Anne laughed at her own jokes. I’d sit outside the library on the wall, and if she showed, we’d sit together. She carried the few conversations we had. My heart lurched between her poise and my abysmal silence. She was overly kind with me. Gradually she sensed that I

was way off-kilter. She quit coming to the library wall at lunchtime, though if we met on the walkways, she made friendly eye , nodded, and kept walking. I avoided her because she was far above anything I could hope for. A Cabrillo career counselor met with me and reviewed my progress after I’d finished two semesters. “So far you’re doing fine,” he said. “Mechanical drawing and math. Good stuff.” It sounded good, but I was emotionally shoddy. A conversation with another caring counselor inexplicably caused me to weep. “Did your dad ever tell you that he loved you?” he asked me silly questions like that. I felt insulted that he even suspected there was something wrong with me. In tears, I left his office and headed outside. I was ashamed to be seen crying, so I made sure no one did. Occasionally, I would run in the hills, jogging, behind the college, weeping as I ran. I was desolate, but I didn’t know what my sorrow was about. I finally spoke to the girl in the shabby denim coveralls. “My name’s Sarah,” she said as she stood next to my table in the cafeteria. I looked up from trying to write a sentence, my pen in hand. I told her my name. “You’re writing?” she said. “I’m writing a story about my trip to Florida,” I told her. She arched her eyebrows and pursed her lips off-center. She touched my notebook with one hand and touched her mouth with the other hand. She dropped her hand from her face as she said, “I’ve always been a writer. I don’t write much yet, but it’s in me.” She squared her shoulders and looked at me with a nod and a first-time smile. I was mysteriously bruised inside and not able to be anyone’s friend. I couldn’t

relate, though I tried. I was scared, but like the grief, I didn’t know why or what my fear was all about. I was glad to be noticed, but I was tongue-tied and tense. Alone in the garage, I read the Bible, plus some Erich Fromm books. I was reading the Bible a chapter in the morning and one in the evening. I’m gonna read it through. Plus, I tried to fast and to pray. I read that sometimes, God talked to us in “a still small voice.” I tried inward listening, and I thought I heard him say, “Don’t speak unless I give you the words.” One morning, I scared one of my running companions out of his wits by completely ignoring him and not saying a word as he greeted me. In silence, I put on my running shoes in the locker room. He stood nearby, leaning over toward me. “Can’t you hear me! What’s wrong with you?” he shouted before he clomped away. “Led by the spirit,” I walked through a wooded area, jumped off a small cliff, fell, and dramatically twisted my knee. I hobbled out of the woods and ended up in the emergency room at the hospital. They drained the fluid off my knee, and I could barely walk. I sat on the couch in the garage for two days with a bucket of ice, with my foot up on the metal folding chair. My knee healed enough, so I could limp about with only a twinge of pain. I amped up my Bible reading so I could finish it quicker. Before school, I tried to finish two chapters of the Old Testament. In the evening, I’d read the Psalms and the New Testament. One night, as I was reading, the words started leaping off the page. I felt someone else in the room. A voice in my head said, “I’m here. I’m with you.” All of a sudden, I felt God’s presence close to me. What to do? What to say? “O God of heaven, help me.” We had no conversation, but with heat in my chest, I raptly listened to His kind voice, “Don’t be afraid. I’m here, and I am always with you. I’ll never leave you.” I made it through the night. I went to school the next day, wondering, “Did God really visit me?” I hoped and then doubted, back and forth, throughout the day.

The next night, as I read the Bible, I wondered if I’d feel God’s presence again. I didn’t feel anything, but I’d read somewhere that “feelings can’t be trusted.” Even so, I hoped that He had come to me, yet I was still ashamed and full of doubt. Say it was God. Then I was worried because then the next steps would be up to me! For me, my anchor of belief stemmed from that little boy standing by Aunt Delpha, who said, “I mean it, God.” Heaven kept me safe since then. I still meant it. With a few more years, with a few more prayers, with a few more tears, and some “Oh so serious Bible study,” I still wasn’t much different than that little boy. I went to sleep thinking about the verses in Jeremiah 29, “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.” What God thought about me, now that was important, especially if it was as wildly good as Jeremiah 29 indicated. That night, I had a vivid dream with someone telling me I was about to get everything I could ever want. “But you won’t need the Bible. Just go with the girl,” said a gentle voice. In the dream, a girl reached out to me and took hold of my hand. I had a warm easy feeling as she held my hand. The reassuring voice continued, “With my help, you’ll have everything. You’ll be with her, and she’ll be yours.” I woke the next morning, thinking about the beautiful girl, and I felt good about that part. But I felt uneasy, maybe a little scared, when I ed the smooth voice, who told me I wouldn’t need the Bible. I didn’t know much, but I knew I was being given a choice. I prayed, “So, Lord, what was that beautiful girl about? Who could be telling me I didn’t need the Bible? It wasn’t you, that’s for sure.” Anxious, I mulled over the idea of making another trip back to Orlando. My

heart genuinely leaped with the thought of leaving. Both heaven and hell had paid me a visit. The Hound had approached me. Alone in my garage, I was spooked.

* * * * *

That same week, a day or so later, I rode my bike over to Mom’s house and borrowed her car. I was in the middle of my third semester, so I drove to Cabrillo College. There in the istration building, I told the registrar clerk and my work-study boss that I had a family emergency. “I’m withdrawing for this term, but I’ll be back in the fall.” They tried to ask me questions, but I shook my head. “I can’t talk about it,” I told them. Then I walked out of the double doors. I stopped by the garage and packed up my duffle bag, put it in the car, then locked the garage door. I drove over to Mom’s, unloaded my duffel bag from the car, and carried it into her kitchen. I wanted her to see the duffel bag and to know full well that I was leaving for a while. Maybe with me standing there, with my bag in hand, she could better sense why. I just didn’t want to talk about changing my mind or doing something different. I handed her the car keys and told her I heading back to Orlando. This was so drastic, so ill-conceived; she just shook her head. “You’re going back to Orlando? And you can’t say why?” “I’ve been reading the Bible, and I’m lost here. Maybe there is something in Orlando that I need, but I don’t know what it is. I’ll be back soon enough.” I carried my bag down the street. I walked over toward Highway 17 so I could

take it to San Jose and head east from there.

My Third Trip East

A married couple, an older guy with a younger wife, picked me up. They were traveling from Santa Cruz to Salt Lake City, but they bickered and fought so much; I didn’t like riding with them. It was the middle of the night, and they stopped at a restaurant in downtown Reno. “We’ll be heading on to Salt Lake,” the man said. “We’re just stopping for coffee.” “Thanks, but I’m getting out here,” I said as I walked around and got my bag out of their car. “We argued too much, didn’t we?” posed the woman. Speaking to her husband, she said, “I told you he was gonna leave us. I wish you’d listen to me and try to be more pleasant. No one wants to be around you.” “You’ll never shut up, will you?” the man growled as he walked toward the restaurant. Whew! They argued about me, a stranger, not wanting to ride with them? I picked up my bag and walked away, but I was not sure of my direction. I didn’t stop because I just wanted to put some distance between us. I needed relief from the sound of malice in their voices. I hadn’t walked far when a wiry, older guy came up to me. “Hey, traveler, I know where to find the girls.” I kept walking, and I shook my head. “Hey, I’m here to help you,” he said. “Stop, I want to talk to you.” I kept walking, so he walked along beside me and pestered me with questions, and he tried to hand me a burrito and then a lit cigarette. I ignored him best I could.

Suddenly a city of Reno patrol car cruised up next to us, and the patrolman turned on the flashing red lights. The officer rolled down his enger side window, leaned over, and said through the window to the older guy, “Stop there for a minute, Billy.” He stopped the car and got out. Billy stopped for him. I kept walking down the sidewalk, glad to be rid of him. I was following the signs to Highway 580; I was looking for a decent intersection that I could get a ride. Another block of walking, and the same officer pulled over and stopped me. He looked inside my bag; he looked at my driver’s license. He ran my name through their network. I had packed the Bible, and he pulled it out of my bag, and he held it in both hands and then thumbed through the pages like, “What have you got this for? Are you hiding something in it?” Then he told me to get into the patrol car. His car started moving, and I was in the backseat. “Have I done something wrong?” I asked him. “You’re in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said. “That guy walking with you just now. Billy would knock you in the head or worse, just to take your money. So I’m moving you outside his neighborhood.” “Okay,” I said, “I’m heading south.” Sitting in the patrol car, I looked through my duffel bag for my spiral-bound notebook. Dang! I must have left it that couple’s car. I had about a year of handwritten stories in that notebook, and now it was gone. He took me to a well-lit truck stop, and there a trucker gave me a ride to Las Vegas. I slept in his cab for a few hours, and about eight hours after arriving in Reno, I was in Las Vegas. I was still 2,300 miles from Orlando. After another day with a lot of waiting, I woke up on the outskirts of a big southwestern truck stop with a majestic sunrise, its beauty amplified. I sat up in my sleeping bag, looked at the big sky, and I was content to see those oranges, reds, and blues. Hawks circling in the sky. God’s grandeur. I prayed and thanked God that I was alive. “All who have God, lack nothing.”

Over the next few days, I had some rides with folks that didn’t have God, and they either made lewd propositions, which I rejected, and then I ended up in the middle of nowhere, or they were people who cried telling me their sad stories, and then they left me stranded in the middle of nowhere. I sat for about ten hours one day without a ride. It was my longest trip ever, but I knew I wasn’t alone. He was there beside me.

* * * * *

Back in Orlando, I made the rounds, starting with Aunt Dodie and Uncle Marv. I stayed with them a couple of nights. Because I’d been to college for a year, Uncle Marv asked me to do their income tax return. They had that question that I was to answer repeatedly, “So tell me just why have you come back here again?” I told them best I could, which left me feeling like a loon. Overtime, after talking to them and others, my answers boiled down to something like this. “Well, I don’t really have a settled answer for it. I was reading the Bible, a few chapters a day, while going to college. I lived in a garage near the ocean. While studying alone late one night, I was convinced that God was suddenly in the room with me. I did not hear audible voices or see anything, but he was there. The Bible reading changed that night. I was not reading just a story anymore. God cared about me, and he was right next to me.” I’d pause there, and I looked for a semblance of accord in their faces. Finding none, I pursed my lips, breathed deep through my nose, ed their blank looks, and kept talking. “I had a vivid dream the next night that scared me. I felt a presence that wasn’t God. ‘Maybe you don’t need the Bible,’ said whoever it was. ‘I’ll give you what you want.’ These encounters felt like the meeting of heaven and hell, and I was in the cross fire. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. I felt adrift, so I thought about leaving. The more I thought about returning to Orlando, the better I felt, so I decided to come back.” Dodie and Delpha were churchgoing Christians, so they were less critical, and

they somewhat accepted what I said. Uncle Smitty scolded me for leaving Mom again, then he later called and apologized because Aunt Delpha told him I was becoming a Christian. He asked the question that begged to be answered, “Couldn’t you have stayed in Santa Cruz and considered what God wanted you do from there?” Vince’s grandma, Irene, said, “Sounds like maybe you spent too much time alone. What about your girlfriend? What did she think about all of this?” When I told her I didn’t have a one, she said, “Hmmm, that’s partly why you came back, huh? No friends there.” Vince drove me over to the Super Foods warehouse and waited for me as I went inside to apply for work. Lonzo saw me as I came through the door. “Maa-tin, Maa-tin. Hey! Are you looking for work?” he asked. He walked with me into the office. “Hire this man. He’s a good worker,” Lonzo told the new supervisor. So I went back to work at Super Foods the same day. I ended up downtown in my old apartment, pedaling my bike back and forth to the Super Foods warehouse. Every day I ed a small church. I noticed the welcome sign out front. One evening, Aunt Delpha called me and asked me if I was attending church anywhere. I said, “No, not yet, but I am thinking about it.” “Well, if want you want come with me, I’ll pick you up,” she offered. But that didn’t feel right to me, so I said no. “I’m thinking of going to the church of God down the street here,” I countered. “Well, good. I’m glad. Get yourself down there,” she said. I appeared there the next Sunday morning and sat in the balcony. That same Sunday, or maybe it was the evening service, I stood in balcony as the sermon ended, and the speaker gave the invitation to come forward to the front of the

church and accept Christ. I stood for a while, alone, reluctant to make a spectacle of myself. A man came over and stood beside me. “Do you want go down there? I will go with you,” he offered. With that nudge, I went with him, and I accepted their prayers, and I prayed too. “Lord Jesus, I ask that you forgive me, and I ask that your shed blood cover my sins. Please come into my life, renew me, and change me. I need your help.” Then every Sunday, I’d be there attending the adult Sunday school class and then afterward, walking inside the church, sitting in the balcony, listening to the sermon, and singing their songs of freedom. My surfing friends came over to my apartment, and I’d read to them from the Bible, trying to show them what I’d learned. One of them was especially interested. Jim sat with me in the balcony. After a few Sundays, he accepted Jesus’s call on his life too, and he went forward during the altar call. A few weeks later, he gifted me with his Dake Study Bible that he had written a thank you note on the inside the cover. (See Figure 15.) “It’s very hard to know what to say at a time like this. Jesus through you turned me on to a lifelong trip that I will be eternally grateful for. I just hope this Bible will give you a much closer walk with the Lord. His will be done. Your friend always, Jim”

Figure 15. Jim’s Note, Inside Cover of My Dake Bible, June 1971

Soon enough, I was settled in my mind and heart as to what I needed to do. They told me I could rely on God’s spirit to guide me. He’d be there beside me always. Even when I sinned and disobeyed his promptings, the same Holy Spirit that raised Jesus from dead woke me every morning. With each sunrise, I was redeemed. Summer 1971, I knew it was time to return to Santa Cruz. I called Cabrillo College from Orlando to find out if I could still attend college there. The registrar kindly told me they were expecting me. I was studying Psalm 107, memorizing parts of it. It described God’s great works of deliverance. “Get yourself back here, we’ve got a place for you,” my work-study boss told me.

Whoever is wise will observe these things, and they will understand the lovingkindness of the Lord. (Psalm 107, verse 43)

My Fourth Trip West: The Bible Tote

On my way back to Santa Cruz, I visited Glade Martin in Benton Harbor Michigan. As a new Christian, I thought I should visit my natural father. I climbed down out of the 18-wheeler in front of Glade’s house on Red Arrow Highway. The driver waited for me as I crossed in front of him and went across the highway. Glade talked about his older sister, Myrtle. “She asks about you, but I never know much. I told her you moved to Florida. She’s a Bible tote too,” he said, so we visited her. Myrtle choked up when she saw me. “I have been praying for you. And now you are here?” Glade worked as a career welder, and he had been a longtime drinker. He handled it with enough moderation that he and his wife, Vina, had some property with a house and a pond. He wanted me to stay. “If you want, you are welcome. I’m starting to run out of shells, but I’d like to see you settled here.” For me, Glade’s request was far-fetched. Mom was still in Santa Cruz, committed to that new place and her feeling of freedom, far from her meddling sisters. She wasn’t going back to Florida, and I told her I’d return. Meanwhile, I still had promises to keep with Cabrillo College, so I politely declined and left Michigan. The hours and miles rolled by as I mulled over the possibility of being raised by two alcoholics, Mom and Glade. Twice the heartbreak. I woke up in the parking lot of a cowboy bar in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The redhaired man who had picked me up in Nebraska was supposed to take me into Salt Lake City, but while I slept, he stopped at the bar for a few drinks. I stirred

himself, left the parking lot, and went back to the road. Early morning, daybreak, about fifty miles farther down the road, I was sitting beside my duffel bag, still waiting for yet another ride, when the red-haired man pulled over again. “Hey boy, you ready to go on to Salt Lake?” “Thanks, but I will wait for the next ride,” and I waved him on. I’d gotten messed up going into Salt Lake both times. First coming in from the west with the bickering man and his baleful wife, so I got out in Reno, Nevada, in the middle of the night, and I almost got mugged. Now coming into Salt Lake from the east, the red-haired man had been drinking, and I wasn’t about to get back into the car with him.

* * * * *

Fall 1971, I was back at Cabrillo College redoing my sophomore year, thinking maybe I should go to Bible College, so I applied to Lee College. I tried to share with Mom what I had learned about my separation from God and how to fix it. Poorly done, I jolted Todd and Aless with my simple, too strong, Jesus talk. I prayed in Mom’s storage closet adjacent to her kitchen, but not quietly. Mom’s boyfriend, Antony, told me about his love of souls. Visiting Mom, I’d see him in the kitchen with his coffee cup in hand. He’d put his cup down on the table, come over to me, exuberantly shake my hand, and tell me, “Isn’t God good!” Most every time I saw him, he found a new way to mention his early morning prayers at Mass. My skin crawled, and I knew he was just a fast-talker. I got the call from Todd at my work-study job at the college. “Mom’s not here this morning. Her car’s gone. Her closet was cleaned out. I think she went away with Antony. No note, nothing.” I stood in their apartment building parking lot and watched Aless crying as she

walked alongside the equally distraught lady case worker sent to fetch her. Todd was older, more stoic, but grim as he climbed into the back seat and sat next to Aless. Both Todd and Aless were underage, and they were put into foster care. A few weeks later, near the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, I saw Mom’s car parked in front of a cheap motel, so I stopped and knocked on the door. She opened the door with a benumbed expression on her face and a false congenial voice. “Oh…surprise, surprise, hi…hi there, son. I’m glad to see you.” I saw she was with yet a different man, this time a US Mail Carrier. His US Mail delivery truck was parked outside, next to Mom’s car. “Let me introduce you to my friend,” she said to me. I stood stricken, next to her motel room door, beside myself, thinking, praying, “O God, how can this be? She’s selling herself?” Our abrupt conversation ended when she told me that she was “just fine, and that she had a new life now.” Unsaid, but I knew that her so-called new life did not include us.

* * * * *

My favorite coat was a beige, tan, corduroy material with four-inched oval lightbrown felt patches on the elbows. It had two narrow lapels in the front and two brass buttons that I left unfastened. I’d carefully fold it into my backpack when I rode my bike to school and to church. Within the first week of the fall semester, I saw Anne on the breezeway over Soquel Drive going to the gym, and she stopped me with a serious look. “You left. Now you’re back. I want to hear about it,” she said. “You’ll be at the library tomorrow?” The next day, I waited for her on the bay facing benches at noon, but we hadn’t

set a time. A few days later, she came up to the audiovisual checkout desk, asking for me. We went outside, and we sat on the wall overlooking the bay. “I became a Christian. I read the Bible now, go to church,” I told her. “Nothing wrong with church,” she said, then she pressed her lips together, narrowed her eyes. “Jewish, my family’s Jewish.” “I might go to Bible College. I don’t know yet,” I offered. “I hope it works out for you,” she said. “I’m glad you’re back.” She unsettled me. I couldn’t reach that high. If I talked to her, if I told her that I liked her, she might reach down and grab my hand. Days later, she picked up my corduroy coat off one of the concrete benches in front of the library. “You forgot your preacher coat,” Anne said as she brought it over to me inside the library. “This has to be yours.” Mom had left my siblings, and I was ashamed to talk about it. I was only in my second year of college, unclear of my future. I was not what smart women would call a catch, far from it. I didn’t give Anne anything to work with; she was too dangerous. Somehow, I knew she wouldn’t have been my girlfriend. I didn’t have girlfriends. Anne was not looking for a boyfriend, and I was not ready to get married.

* * * * *

The college career counselor reviewed my aptitude test with me. “I’ll bet you could be an engineer. Give it go for a couple semesters and let’s find out.”

This was the same counselor I fled from in tears a year or so before. I was stable enough now not go around crying like a baby. I met Aless’s foster parents, and they were Christians attending Cabrillo Assembly of God in Soquel, just down the street from the college. I attended that church too, but I seldom saw Aless or Todd. They stayed away from the church. I didn’t know who Todd’s foster parents were, and I didn’t try to meet them. I was befriended by the Raupp family partly because Grandfather Raupp met me in the church foyer and told me it was a shame for a man to have long hair. He quoted the verse in Corinthians to me. At first, he was kind enough and polite about it, but he’d remind me Sunday after Sunday. I avoided him best I could. His son, Mr. Raupp, gave me a ride home one night, and he said he was sorry that his dad spoke to me so adamantly about cutting my hair. I did have shoulder length hair, but so did most every other surfer in Santa Cruz. As we rode along, he asked me if I had some extra time on the weekends to help him with some boat repairs. He had an older wooden boat docked in the Santa Cruz Harbor that needed some sanding. I agreed to meet him at the Harbor on Saturday morning. “Eight o’clock sharp,” he said. The boat was a forty-foot double-masted schooner, all iroko and teak wood, with a broken hatch cover. Sand, apply varnish, sand, apply varnish was the routine that ruled my hours, plus I fixed the broken hatch cover. I drilled out one fourthinch inset holes, and then tapped in oak dowels with a rubber hammer. “Shoot, I wish I’d known you were going to do such a good job with that hatch cover. I would’ve given you a piece of mahogany,” he told me. He liked my work, so he hired me. “I haven’t got much money to pay you, but you could live on the boat if you want. Work on boat, say eight hours a week? How’s that sound?” he asked. It cut into my surfing time, but I was glad to have the work on the weekends. I got into a routine riding my bike from the Harbor to college with classes and study there, church on Sunday morning, work on the boat, sanding, varnishing at odd hours. I met with Mr. Raupp on Saturday mornings. I was honored to live on the boat. God was making a way for me.

I put my mind and energy on the algebra, chemistry, preengineering studies. I was never sure I could do it, so I studied all the time. I signed up for physics because two semesters of physics were a requirement for graduation, but after a couple of weeks, I felt overwhelmed and withdrew from the class. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough to be an engineer. Mrs. Raupp reminded me that maybe I couldn’t do it. “You might want to set your end goal a little lower,” she told me. “You could be a surveyor, and we could help you get work.” Meanwhile, I’d stand with a glad heart on the boat deck in the evening and feel the wobble in the boat as it sat in harbor water. I’d listen to the constant creaking sound of boat bucklers straining on the pier. With sound of seagulls cawing and the smell of the pacific in my clothes, I’d climb down through the boat hatch and sit on my bunk. “How can this be, Lord?” To me, living on the boat felt like a miracle. I liked going to the Cabrillo Assembly church on Sunday mornings. I’d wear my corduroy coat, and I tried to fit in, but I kept to myself when invited for any kind of outing. “Sorry, I’ve got to study,” I told everyone, then got on my bike, and pedaled away. Anne graduated from Cabrillo College in May 1972. We didn’t say goodbye, and I didn’t know where she went from there. I took precalculus math in the summer term 1972, and I lived on the boat. I worked with Mr. Raupp holding a surveyor’s leveling rod as he surveyed property lines on his Moss Landing real estate subdivisions.

The Hound Staggered Me

Mrs. Raupp told me to wait for a minute. She knew some Bethany Bible college students, who were driving back to Scotts Valley. The church usher asked them if they could drop me off at the Harbor. They were three young college age women, and they agreed to give me a ride. “You live on a boat?” they said. “Oh, we got to see that.” So they parked their car, and we walked down the steep ramp to the boat slip. That was how I first met Debbie. My surfing friend, Chick, left his motorcycle, a Kawasaki 650, with me for the summer while he went back to the east coast to work with his dad. I called Debbie and asked her if she would go out to dinner with me. I rode that motorcycle out to Scotts Valley about six miles to pick her up, then we rode back to the Harbor, and we ate dinner at the Crow’s Nest restaurant. That first evening in the restaurant, I saw how beautiful she was sitting across from me. She had flawless white skin, and she wore no makeup, no lipstick, and no eyeshadow. Nothing. Her expansive blue eyes searched me for motive when I answered her questions. Her brown hair, parted in the middle, hung straight and loose down to her shoulders. She had no guile in her at all, and the sound of her voice awakened a new certainty in me. She wore no jewelry, no lace, and no ribbons. Nothing. Unadorned in her jeans and her crisp white blouse, she was by far the most beautiful woman that I had ever been with. She told me that her dad, a plumber, half kidding her, had said, “Try to marry an engineer, they’ll make a good living.” She laughed at herself when she asked me, “And are you studying engineering?” Ha. With that motorcycle, I had some wherewithal. Without ever wearing helmets, we rode that motorcycle back and forth between Scotts Valley and the Harbor. We picked our way through the fourth of July traffic jam when we watched the Santa Cruz fireworks. We made one crazy ride on that most dangerous California Highway 17 to San Jose to watch The God Father movie. We were invincible,

and I was staggered with love. I told her when we walked in the redwoods of Felton, “I am not asking you now. But one day, I will ask you to marry me.” I knew that I was no Catch, but I tried to stake a claim on her, just in case she had a weak moment, and forgot that I had nothing, was no one, and I had no marketable skills. Chick came back, and I returned his motorcycle. I almost dumped it in the harbor one morning. I drove it down the ramp each evening and parked it next to the boat. The ramp was steep at low tide, and I’d rolled in the night before on the reserve gas tank, nearly empty, so I was worried I wouldn’t have enough gas to make it to work. That morning, I gunned the engine before letting it warm up, so the engine sputtered and died, and I was on the extreme edge of the dock with no place to put my foot, so I had to push the motorcycle away from me, while I fell in the water. I wore my navy peacoat that morning, and I had a hard time climbing up out of the water on to the dock. Debbie’s dad gave her a yellow 1958 Chevy station wagon. We drove up to Seattle to meet her parents, and while there, she told them that she felt like God shook her shoulder while she was sitting in church. “Take notice of him.” A strong impression gripped her. Continuing her story. “I looked around and saw a short guy with windblown long hair in a corduroy coat. ‘Do you mean him?’” she wondered. “Yes, take notice of him,” a voice inside her head confirmed. “God was telling me something,” she told her parents. The next Sunday, she and her friends gave me ride to Harbor and I met her for the first time. Her parents asked me what I thought about her story. “Well, it could be God interceded for me. She’s got a car. I don’t. I thought I was getting married because she’s got a car.” Debbie rolled her magnificent blue eyes and shook her head. Her parents ed together in one of their fake laughs. It became one of my favorite things to say, “I married her because she had a car.” It seemed funny to me.

A few months later, we were married in her home church, Renton Assembly of God, near Seattle, Washington. Aless rode with Todd as he drove his old Triumph Spitfire from Santa Cruz to attend the wedding. Todd served as my best man at our wedding. Our wedding was on Groundhog Day on a Friday, and we had to be in school and work on Monday. We spent the night in a Seattle hotel for our honeymoon, then we drove back to Santa Cruz on Sunday in the pouring rain. Todd’s old Spitfire kept cutting out while driving down I-5, leaving Seattle. The heavy rain puddled on the freeway splashed up onto the Spitfire’s loose distributor cap, and then the engine would sputter and die. Late afternoon, I stopped and tied the Spitfire on to the back of Debbie’s car. We towed the Spitfire with Mike and Aless seated inside into the night all the way through Washington and into Oregon until we hit dry pavement and Todd’s car would run again. We returned to Santa Cruz, where Debbie worked a full-time job at the teleprompter customer desk to us. Meanwhile, after just a few weeks of classes in the new semester, I dropped out of Physics a second time. When I mentioned it, her eyes flashed, she stomped on the floor, crossed her arms, and declared, “You’re only taking nine credits now. You told me you need two semesters of physics to graduate. Just how does this help us? You’ll never finish like this.” The Lord helped me to dig deep and get both of those Physics courses done in last two semesters, along with the other requirements that had piled up. Our last year in Santa Cruz, I studied like a banshee with thirty-two credits completed in two semesters. We’d eat at the “Broken Egg” restaurant early Saturday morning, then she’d drop me off at the Santa Cruz library, where I’d study all day. She’d pick me up in the late afternoon. I finally earned a two-year associate of science (AS) degree in engineering in May 1974, almost five years after arriving in Santa Cruz. In fall 1974, we pulled a small U-Haul trailer to Chico, California. We arrived late at night and parked in an empty gravel lot next to a gas station, then we climbed into the back of that yellow station wagon and slept for a few hours. We woke up together at about 10:00 a.m., gasping for air. It was well over one hundred degrees outside. We flung open the doors and jumped out. The city of

Chico named their professional baseball team, “Chico Heat,” for good reason. We quickly found an apartment. The next day, we headed over to the commons area of California State University, Chico. We split up with me walking toward the engineering building. Debbie stopped and decided to go to the bookstore. I looked up and saw a young woman pivot and walk toward me. I saw her deliberate unhurried walk, and I ed Cabrillo, and it was Anne. She got close enough to speak, smiled as she raised her hand at the wrist, g a halt. “Hey,” she said, “I you. You’re here now?” “I finished Cabrillo finally. Engineering, I’ll be a junior.” “Hmm…I’ll keep my eye out for your corduroy coat. Did you lose it again?” She laughed. She was still the same. “Do you go here too?” I asked her. “I graduated. I’m leaving soon,” she said, and then she dropped her chin. “And you’re married now?” I nodded. “Yep, her name’s Debbie about a year and half ago.” Then I said, “I’d probably be a surf bum without her. That’s no joke.” “Well, I’m glad to see you again.” “Me too,” I said, and she turned and walked away. I walked toward the bookstore, and Debbie met me partway there. As we walked back to her car, Debbie made a little bit of a speech. “Hey, I saw a girl walking near the bookstore, just now. I thought to myself. Now that’s someone that Skipp would like.” She stopped talking for a second and looked over at me to see if I had a reaction. With some strain in her voice, she continued, “Then I watched her. She was walking away, but then when she saw you, she stopped, turned, and made a beeline straight to you. You two had few things to talk about.”

“That was Anne. I knew her from Cabrillo. She left a couple of years ago before I met you.” “You never mentioned any Anne before.” “Not much to tell, we never went out. I had lunch with her in front of the Cabrillo library a few times.” At the time, I think Debbie wondered if there was more to it than what I told her. Maybe there was a bit more. But I was ashamed to it that I had been such a lump that Anne gave up on me and disappeared. I still didn’t know how to talk about it. I was amazed at Debbie’s certainty about God’s love in our life, her first-rate discernment of the present, and her ability to see the “now.” Her instant correct judgment about Anne was way beyond my ken. Debbie had great confidence in herself to hear God speaking to her. That certainty settled my confidence in her and gave me hope that maybe I could learn something like that too. Our son, Isaac, was born at the end of my junior year there, and we stayed in Chico until I earned a bachelor of science (BS) in civil engineering, two years later. (See Figure 16.)

Figure 16. ID Card, California State University, Chico, Fall 1974

We packed our stuff, and we went on to Utah State University in Logan, where I earned a master of science (MS) degree in civil engineering. From Utah, I applied for engineering jobs throughout the US. We relocated to Corvallis, Oregon, and I went to work for CH2M HILL, an engineering company headquartered there. Within five months of our arrival, Debbie gave birth to our second child, a beautiful girl named Bond.

Aftermath

Debbie and I, circa 1982, drove down to Santa Cruz to see Aless, and while there, we visited Mom and her domestic partner, Babe. (See Figure 17.)

Figure 17. Skipp, Debbie, Isaac, and Bond, Corvallis, Oregon, 1982

Babe and Mom took care of each other, and they lived together in Babe’s small house. They both were a little unsteady on their feet, but she was safe enough and still independent. She asked nothing from us. Two years later, I got a call from a surgeon’s nurse in Santa Cruz. “Your mom’s incoherent, and she is in so much pain. She is out of her mind.” Mom had gangrene in both legs. They needed a family member to sign and approve the surgeon to take both legs off above the knee, knowing that she might not survive the operation. The alternative was to let her die a slow agonizing death. I signed the papers for the operation, and Mom survived, healed up, and soon she was in her right mind again. Babe had died a few months before, and she wanted out of the rest home. I drove to Santa Cruz and brought her back to Corvallis. Debbie and I moved her into the downstairs daylight basement, newly remodeled to include a second kitchen with low counters for Mom to access in her wheelchair. Our two children, Isaac, age nine, and Bond, age six, played with their Grandma. Mom wheeled down the long hallway from the bathroom to her kitchen, unsuspecting. Bond, hiding in the nook in the kitchen, would jump out to scare her. “Oh, Bond, I am going to blister you!” With a toothless grin, the little girl shouted, “I love you, Grandma!” Mom sat proudly in the church foyer, stern in her wheelchair at Royal Ranger Pine Wood Derby races, and she watched Isaac’s derby car win ribbons. “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” she told him.

After church most Sunday mornings, she rode in her wheelchair with me, pushing her on the sidewalk the six blocks back to our home. “I am happy to be alive and see those kids,” she said. “Thank you for bringing me here.” Each morning, lying in her bed, she’d grasp the hand loop, hanging next to her head, and call out, “O Lord, give me strength,” as she’d pull herself up to a sitting position. We’d hear her from upstairs. “She’s up now,” Debbie said. With that, Bond would head downstairs, holding the handrail. “Coming, Grandma,” she’d shout. After one and a half years living with us, she had pain in her chest, and I drove her to the hospital. Without fear, she held my hand and, with a sense of calm, smiled and said, “I’m ready to go. God’s been good to me, better than I deserve.” She died the next day.

Save Me, save only Me? All which I took from thee I did but take Not for thy harms, But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms All which thy child’s mistake Fancies as lost; I have stored for thee at home ‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, I am He Whom thou sleekest! Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me’

Courtesy of Francis Thompson, circa 1890

Epilogue

I found a path through the muddled silence. It led me to a kingdom, which cannot be shaken. With two pierced hands, our King of glory carried Truth in one hand and mercy in the other. With majestic power, he flung innumerable stars across the sky. With immense gravitas, heavier than the created worlds, he knelt to better hear our mother’s sighs, to answer her prayers, and to mend our brokenness. He reminded us that the level of detail of his care on our behalf was incomprehensible, “But the very hairs of your head are numbered” (Matthew 10). In silence, the stars shine, and redwoods grow, and we stagger under the stars and among towering trees, and our sighs soar, propelled in their clout, and they go straight to the heart of God. “In the silence of God, I am still, with no words, with no demands, with no worry, and with no fear. All who have God lack nothing.” If only that prayer were true for me, for every moment, for all eternity. Meanwhile, he sat with me every moment as I traveled for those two years across the continent, back and forth with six trips between Florida and California. We had fifty days on the US Highways, traveling eighteen thousand US miles with each of my one hundred thousand hairs numbered, changing every minute. Sitting in the garage, alone, with the heavy weight of his presence in my mind, I couldn’t abide the confluence of heaven and hell as they fought for my soul, so I fled again. He followed me with “deliberate speed and majestic instancy.” In that little Orlando church, he moved his presence from my mind into my heart, and he taught my hand to find the taut rope strung tight between his heart and mine. Holding that rope, he led me back to Santa Cruz yet again, this time not to find towering ocean waves but to find that one particular woman without guile, unadorned, and sturdy in her devotion to the kingdom that cannot be shaken.

I held on to the taut rope, and he led me to her, and such as I was, she accepted me, and we were married, ed as one in his sight. His rescue led us together through the toils of college years, where we learned to depend on the taut rope to guide us. He taught us to stay close in this time of spiritual conflict and war. We learned to follow his voice if we could hear it. If we heard only silence, then we reached for his taut rope, and we followed that. We learned to recognize, as G. K. Chesterton described it, “Our world is a wild, startling, delightful place. Before this wildness and delight, we may well be modest and submit to a kindness.” Our rescue continues because we’re not home yet. Until then, there’ll be more to follow in our story.

Because His Lovingkindness is better than life. (Psalm 63)

About the Author

Not particularly self-aware, his risk-taking parents raised him as a traveler throughout the Midwest and Southeast United States as a child, teenager, and then led him on to California as a young man. He was on track to be a California surfer ne’er-do-well when he was changed by reading the Bible and then acting on it. Cooperating with divine intervention, he married early and well, which further changed his course leading to AS, BS, and MS degrees in civil engineering. Equipped and working with one of the world’s premier engineering companies, he completed thirty years of engineering projects and traveled throughout the world. As trained risk-takers, he and his wife, Debbie, took their family from their home base in Corvallis, Oregon, to live five years in Cairo, Egypt, a year in Amman, Jordan, five years in Alaska, and two years in Puerto Rico. He worked and lived without his family, four out of six years in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. His writing skills were developed writing computer programs, which lead to an eye for detail and dialogue. His technical engineering reports had a limited audience and led to a well-developed sense of being unread. He is a published technical writer with nine engineering papers, some with delightful titles, beginning with “Mathematical Model of Stratified, BiDirectional Flow in Short Culverts (a solution of the Naiver-Stokes equations using the finite element method. Early application of Computational Fluid Dynamics [CFD])” master’s thesis, Utah State University. His memoir series Unsettled in the World begins with Taut Rope, which is the story of his family travels during his early years leading to adulthood.