Putting the Shards Together

“It’s a semi-true story, believe it or not, I made up a few things and there’s some I forgot…”
         Jimmy Buffett song

    Although we are only a year apart, my sister and I have some very different memories of childhood – not just points of view but entire episodes.
    That came home to us on one of my recent visits to my hometown. We were talking as we drove to one of her job sites, and for some reason the conversation turned to childhood. (Of course, reminders of childhood are everywhere in my hometown, more so since Sis’s house is only a few feet from where the house where I grew up stood.)
    I recounted an incident that had a lasting impact on me one that happened when we were five or six years old. I was surprised that she did not remember it at all.
    Other events from childhood bubbled up, and we realized that each of us had an entire catalog of memories that the other had long forgotten.
    I am sure we have different recollections of the same events, too, though we didn’t get that far in our conversation.
    So we made a bargain of sorts.
    I told her that I would write down some of the things that I remember and will send that collection to her so she can add her own memories and perspectives on the things that we both remember.
    Eventually we will pass it all along to our brother, who is four and a half years younger. He will, I am sure, have memories that are totally foreign to the two of us.
    I am up early, and sunrise lately has found me at the keyboard, savoring a cup of coffee as I engage in my own form of time travel. It is curious how one memory leads to others, and I pause to jot down the topics before they wing away.
    Some of the memories are happy ones –we tend to use those to crowd out the demons from the past – and some still bring a twinge of pain. Some, perhaps, are best left buried.
    I do not know what my sister and my brother and I will do with this project, assuming we actually finish. We are not writing autobiography or even a coherent narrative. Rather we are putting together pieces, rather like trying to reconstruct an old pot when some of the shards are missing. One day our children or grandchildren may want to explore the relics.
    At some point I will have to decide that childhood has been covered. Not too soon, though. I keep thinking of stuff that Sis might be interested in.


“...But the life and the telling are both real to me, and they all run together and turn out to be a semi-true story.”

Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com

Memories go out in a garbage bag

           
            From the dark recesses of the attic, I retrieved a couple of file storage boxes labeled “Bill’s Stuff” to search for some tax records.

            I didn’t find the tax records; it turned out that I didn’t need them anyway.

            What I did find was fragments of my long ago youth, clippings that marked a career in newspapers that began in 1962.

            “By William Brown” the bylines read, although no one called me William. The St. Petersburg Times of that day insisted on using given names in bylines; there were no Bills or Bobs or Chucks. (Male Times reporters also wore ties and jackets when many of the other media representatives were wearing sport shirts.)

            The clippings were folded and brittle, but as I browsed through them, they took on color and smell and shape. I could remember what things looked like and smelled like and even tasted like (blue sky that went on forever and thunderheads that seemed to portend the end of the world, the soft smell of tropical flowers and the tang of salt air, smoked mullet at Ted Peters and black beans and rice and crusty Cuban bread at the Jockey Club).

            For a little while I was a newly minted college graduate setting out on a great adventure. There was my first byline only a few days after I’d started work on a story about a fatal traffic accident at Roosevelt Boulevard and Ninth Street North. I could recall following the police officers and the gurney down the hallway in the emergency room at Mound Park Hospital and watching one of the doctors pull the sheet over the victim’s head.

            Welcome to the real world.

            The clippings in the stack were eclectic:

            Murders and suicides and fires and accidents.

            Feuding politicians and ambitious land developers.

            A story about the great freeze of 1962, written on an old Smith-Corona portable typewriter by the light of a fire in an orange grove in Pasco County as the growers fought, mostly unsuccessfully, to keep their crop from freezing.

            An interview with the creator of the long-running soap opera “The Edge of Night” who mailed in his scripts from his home in Sarasota.

            A thoroughbred horse auction in Ocala.

            There were columns, too, complete with a photo of a kid who must have been me.  

            It is perhaps vanity, but even the routine stories still read well.

            The clippings ended when I became an editor and didn’t appear again until years later when I began writing a column regularly.

            I looked at that pile of clippings and thought: What a grand and glorious adventure it truly was.

            But it was my adventure. To anyone else they would just be a pile of old newsprint.

            So I picked out a few of them to help stoke the fires of memory. The rest of my long ago youth I put in a black plastic bag and took out to the garbage can.

Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com

Not Charlie

When each biennial Roundup of the Usual Suspects is winding down, we agree on a location for the next reunion, and someone takes responsibility for scouting out locations and making arrangements.

In our minds, we Usual Suspects are still the four young couples that we were in the mid-1960s when our friendships formed in St. Petersburg, Fla. Photos from the ‘60s, from our first reunion in 1994, and the most recent one last year, however, would reveal the irresistible tug of time and gravity.

It has been a long journey

Just getting accustomed to being adults and too poor to be pretentious, we were friends simply because we liked each other. We are friends now because we still like each other.

We could have missed knowing that, though, except for a lunchtime conversation.

Jean and Charlie had remained in St. Petersburg, and Tom and Shirley lived in Clearwater. The two couples did not see each other often, but Jean and Tom both worked in downtown St. Petersburg and often lunched in the same place.

By then Chuck and Leanne and Adelaide and I had long been gone from St Petersburg. They were settled in Claremont, Calif., and we lived in Montgomery, Ala.

One day at lunch, Jean suggested that the four couples have a reunion at the house Tom and Shirley had built in the mountains of Colorado in anticipation of retirement.

I think curiosity impelled all of us to attend that first reunion, and we approached it with questions and a certain amount of trepidation. Within minutes of the last couple’s arrival, the intervening years were swept away, and the Usual Suspects were born.

We agreed that meeting every other year would keep the reunions from becoming a duty, and the schedule gave us something to look forward to. The primary site specification was that there be room for all of us to hang out.

If you listened to a sound track of our gatherings, you would understand why. You would hear laughter, punctuated by barbs that would make you wonder how the verbal combatants could possibly be friends. We are armed with sharp tongues, but we never draw blood.

Each time a Roundup of the Usual Suspects ends, we know that our numbers might be diminished before the next gathering. Mortality is a reality, and as the years pass, the horizon comes closer.

Still, in the summer of 2008 when our reunion on the Oregon coast broke up, none of us expected that the first person missing would be Charlie.

Charlie was full of life, passionate and curious and energetic. He loved corny jokes and bad puns, and he would tell them with relish, knowing that his reward would be a chorus of groans.

He loved his native St. Petersburg and the starkly beautiful Four Corners of the Southwest and the brooding mountains of Tennessee. And because he loved them, he acquired a depth of knowledge about the flora and the fauna and the people of each region.

He loved visiting rock shops, and he polished stones to decorate the exquisite wooden boxes that he crafted.

He and Jean were the perfect pair. And he was positively gaga about his grandchildren.

In all the years, we had never known Charlie to be ill with anything.

But not long after he and Jean returned home from the reunion, Charlie was diagnosed with lymphoma. Chemotherapy drove it away, and last spring Jean and Charlie and Adelaide and I spent a week in his beloved mountains celebrating his remission from lymphoma and my recovery from bypass surgery.

The lymphoma had retreated, but it had not surrendered, and it returned last summer more virulent than before.

Charlie died just before Christmas.

So early in January six of the Usual Suspects will go to St Petersburg. We will join Jean at a memorial service for her husband and our friend.

Adelaide and I will share our son’s observation upon learning of Charlie’s death: “To make a difference and to be well remembered is something everyone aspires to.”

Certainly Charlie achieved that and much more.

But knowing that does not ease the sting of his departure.

Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com

Good words about Good Old Boys

(I ran across this while cleaning out some old files -- more about that later -- and realized it had never been published. So here 'tis.)


    Good old boys have an image problem.
    Say good old boy and the picture that comes to mind is of an ignorant redneck with mud on his shoes and beer on his breath, an overweight hayseed whose vocabulary is smaller than his belt size, a hick in a rusty pickup truck.
    The reason for this sad state of affairs is that good old boys don’t spend their time indoors writing scripts for TV shows or drawing cartoons for slick magazines.
    It’s time someone set the record straight. It’s time to say something good about good old boys.
    A good old boy is polite to a fault. He will take time to compliment the flowers in your front yard and inquire about the health of your mammy and pappy even before he asks to use the phone to call the ambulance because his wife has gone into labor with their third child.
    A good old boy is helpful. If you have hay in the field and it’s making up to rain, he’ll show up before you call for help and he’ll stay til you’re through. In fact, if what you’re doing is more interesting than what he was doing, he’ll stay til his wife threatens to serve supper without him.
    A good old boy has perspective. He knows that a hundred years from now not much of what anyone’s doing is going to be in the history book, so if it’s a nice day and the fish are biting, it’s no big deal if the fence doesn’t get painted until tomorrow. Or the next day.
    A good old boy is an island of calm. When’s he sitting on the front porch in the rocking chair and he looks as if he’s asleep, he’s just meditating. Folks in town pay big money to their yoga teachers to learn to do that.
    A good old boy is friendly. Notice what happens when you meet one coming down the road in his pickup truck. If he doesn’t know you, he’ll lift one finger off the steering wheel. That’s short for “Hi.” If you’re another good old boy, he’ll lift two fingers. That short for “Hi, there.”
    A good old boy is not a slave to fashion. You won’t see him changing his wardrobe every year just because some dandy in Paris or New York said it’s the thing to do. He never bought a leisure suit or a Nehru jacket, and there aren’t that many different ways to tailor a pair of hog washers.
    A good old boy is a smart consumer. The cartoonists may picture him as a rube dumb enough to buy the Brooklyn Bridge, but you won’t find him paying good money just to buy drinking water that some slicker has put in a fancy bottle. Heck, you can get beer for that kind of money.
    A good old boy is a conservationist. If there’s something around the house that he doesn’t know what to do with, say an old water heater or air conditioner, he’s won’t just take it to the dump. No, he’ll toss it over the fence, because sooner or later he or one of his neighbors is going to need to scavenge something off of it to fix something else.
    A good old boy shares. You won’t find him throwing a perfectly good aluminum beer can in the garbage can. He’ll toss it in the ditch, instead, so some less fortunate soul can salvage it for recycling.
    A good old boy uses cash only if all else fails. He’d rather trade than eat, and anything he’s got is prime for barter except his kids and his hound dog. Well, the hound dog for sure.
    A good old boy knows good food. He’d eat fried dirt if you put batter on it.
    Being a good old boy is a state of mind. Even someone who has been to college, even a lawyer, can be one.
    Of course you can’t have good old boys without good old girls, but that’s a whole other subject.


Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com