Caualties of Caring

It's one of those things I'm surprised my mind latched onto, but it had. I found myself wandering and wondering within about events from long ago and lessons that seemed so obvious, to me at least...

I watched the couple as they walked through the parking lot away from the movie theater and toward their truck. There could be little doubt that the hormones were flowing within both of them. They walked so close together and in such perfect harmony that they shouted to the world the definition of being joined at the hip. There was little doubt that they were very much in lust, but something told me it was more than that, and my suspicion was confirmed when they got to the old Ford pickup. He opened the door for her, and she climbed into the lifted truck and onto the bench seat with the heavy Indian blanket seat cover. He walked around and climbed in behind the wheel. She slid next to him, kissed him and then slid back to the passenger side to put her seat belt on. In a moment the engine came to life, headlights lit their way, and they were gone as I smiled, recalling times now distant…

"I'm wasting my time with you," he said as I tried to do something I'd never done before--drive a car. In the end the high school driving instructor's comments to me were mainly that I was about as bad a driver as he'd ever encountered and that there was nothing he could do with me. There would be no more driving lessons for me as far as he was concerned, and he doubted I'd ever get a driver's license.

The conversation at home that followed is long forgotten but finding me behind the wheel of dad's car out on the gravel of Hog Island Road with dad as the passenger isn't. As I held the steering wheel in a death grip, he calmly talked about how I had to pay attention to everything around me, but most of all I had to be aware of where I was in relationship to the objects around me. The philosophy of a man who earned his living driving the biggest vehicle out there on the highways was to know where I was at all times. This was something I would eventually forget, but not before I became the first of my high school class to get a driver's license.

One of my dreams in those days was to become a NASCAR driver, so the words of my high school driving instructor had struck a rather sensitive nerve. I suspect it was a very real motivation for "The Flight of the Family Ford" over the next two-plus years. Thus it began; one more teenager driving his parents' car on the streets, roads and highways of Wisconsin seeking his freedom and identity in a world that secretly desired neither for him.

How or why a shaped and painted piece of metal becomes an extension and a declaration of just who a person is mystifies me, yet I believe it to be a truth. I think of my truck sitting out in the drive today and realize how much it symbolizes who I am: a dependable if somewhat worn-down soul. Back in the 50s and the 60s it was no less the truth. What you drove was a direct reflection of who you were. So being much of anything special while driving a '64 Ford Custom was more than a little difficult, and Lord knows as a sixteen-year-old boy, special is the only thing I wanted to be.

If there was no other alternative than the one way you could be special while driving your dad's car, it was to have your girl sitting beside you. Of course, having a girl in the first place was an important part of the equation, and in my case I was blessed at different times over the next years with three lovely women who sat beside me, and so perhaps in the best way of all, I was the "coolest of the cool" even though I wasn't driving a Mustang or an SS 396. I drove along all the while feeling the presence of another at my side, and in those moments life was good.

High school ended one day, and not all that much later I found myself in the Navy and very far away from that little town. It was on a destroyer in Charleston, South Carolina that I would meet someone who would become one of the most important people to me. To this day I don't recall how we met, but on a destroyer that had been commissioned at the end of WWII, a sailor knew everyone from the captain on down.

His name was Phil, and on this particular day we had gone over to a shipmate's house so Phil could take ownership of Robby's Fiat Spider. Two bucket seats, convertible and manual transmission were all part of the package, and for a couple of twenty-year-old sailors, life didn't get much better than that. Robby gave Phil the keys, and we were off to experience the freedom of sailors with wheels for the first time.
What I can tell you about that day can be summed up rather quickly; the top was down, the light was green, the radio wasn't turned up. Phil took the right lane because the traffic was stopped at the light and the lane was open. We cruised into the intersection only to see the grill of a Navy ambulance as it slammed into Phil's side of the car.

The mind really is a wondrous thing, and what others say about significant moments in their lives is for me true. Life really does slow down in that moment. I remember feeling the dashboard against my thighs as I was being propelled upward and out of my seat. Then my chest hit the top of the windshield. What I remember most in that brief instant are my glasses flying off my face and reaching out to catch them. Without a doubt it is the best catch I've ever made in my life. Having played first base all those years, I did make one or two dang good catches, but none to equal that one. As I fell back down into the seat, my only thought was Phil.

"You OK?" I asked as I looked over at him.

He looked back at me and said, "No." His eyes rolled back in his head, and his face streamed blood.

In a way it's funny thinking about it today. The guys in the ambulance that hit us jumped out, grabbed us, threw us in the back of the ambulance, hauled us to the hospital and patched us up. Phil ended up being all right though he did get more stitches than I, and I'd made the best catch of my life with those glasses somewhere just beyond the windshield of that little two-bucket-seats and no-seat-belts Fiat Spider.

She slid across the bench seat of my Ford Torino and up against me. It was that feeling I'd felt years before when someone special had pressed her body up against mine and I liked it a whole lot more than just a little. A very big part of me didn't want her to move, not one inch, and life would be good. And for a moment I held the feeling within me of that special someone sitting beside me, and so close that everyone knew that she was my girl. This time was different. This time was going to be forever and this time it didn't matter whether everyone knew or not because I thought I knew.

"We're not going anywhere until you slide back over and put on your seat belt," I said to her.

It was obvious in her eyes that she was taking my demands as a rejection of her affections. I doubt that I said the right thing to her, and to this day I suspect it was the start of a life together that was filled with doubt and questions. In the end it was never the rejection of a beautiful and intelligent young blonde's affections that caused me to, in a manner of speaking, push her away. The truth was twofold. I had heard that the center position in a car was the most dangerous place to be and that I was certain in that moment that I wanted her safe and in my life for the rest of my life.

As I eased in behind the wheel of my old truck, I thought about the couple driving away and how life never quite lives up to expectations. I thought about how keeping someone safe is never a one-way street, and simply because everyone is wearing a seat belt, there's no guarantee that there aren't going to be casualties.

Perceptions

On October 30, 1938 the Columbia Broadcasting System created a bit more than just a simple little stir in a nation gathered around their radios and listening to a program on Mercury Theater on the Air. It was the Halloween episode directed and narrated by Orson Welles and adapted from the H. G. Wells' novel War of the Worlds. The first two thirds of the radio broadcast was done as a news report of actual events, and for those tuning in midway through, the perception was that the earth was being invaded by aliens from outer space.

There are things in this world that, I suspect, will always be a constant for most everyone. One of those "universal truths" almost certainly would have to be that summers in the upper Midwest are always better than the winters for those who've reached the age of some sort of claim to responsibility. If you were a kid growing up in a little Wisconsin town, it likely didn't seem so much the truth only because there was fun to be found no matter the season. Winter had snow and sidewalks slick with hard packed snow, or better yet, ice which made for great sliding and "skating" without the luxury of ice skates. That old sled with the metal tracks worked on any incline from the lawn of the old boarding house next to the funeral home to the glorious hill beside the Methodist church. You didn't need much to find joy in yet another day even if it was only just above zero outside.

Of course, even for kids, summer has advantages that winter will never be able to duplicate. For one, the days are a whole lot longer and warmer, so the need to put on layer upon layer of clothes is done away with. I'm pretty sure that my standard summertime "uniform" as a kid was shorts, shirt and bare feet. I don't think there was any kind of problem with the folks being able to afford shoes, it just never seemed to be a part of what was required while outside and on the run. It didn't take long for the soles of my feet to get toughened up to the point that wearing holes in the bottoms of a pair of perfectly good shoes didn't seem to make much sense anyway. Of course, the downside to that were those miserable sandburs that always found their way into that really soft spot right between my big and second toe or right dead center in my heel. Then there was always that black asphalt on those days in July and August when I'd swear the whole street was melting, and not only were my feet going to end up being burnt off but also I was going to sink in up to my knees, and then how was I going to get out? The memory of that black and, normally hard-as-rock surface slowly oozing up between my toes, can still be felt and the footprint left behind still seen. Because of those days of leaving toe and heel prints in the asphalt when I one day heard about the La Brea tar pits way out in California, I had no problem believing that once you got yourself into that stuff, you weren't getting out.

Today I'd be hard pressed to tell you with certainty exactly when it happened since the days and years never have been the things that tend to stick solidly within my memories. Vague generalities usually seem more the norm for my memories, and I often marvel at how some folks seemed to remember days and dates with the precision of an atomic clock, though the truth is, I've sometimes wondered if they're merely better at believing they remember than I. In the end there are moments I remember mainly for the moment and the rest, the time, the day and all the rest are at the very best fuzzy smears around the edges of the memory. And so I did a bit of research, tried remembering the moment even a bit more clearly, and found a place on the web that pretty much validated what I've remembered all these years.

As a kid in "the Fifties" I didn't know that much about the world beyond the city limits of my town. In fact I'm not so sure I knew all that much about life two blocks over from my house and even less about what went on across US 12 & 16 other than that dad spent his fair share of time at any one of the three bars over there. At eight years of age, about all I knew with any certainty was that pretty much for sure we were all going to get attacked by the Soviet Union. We just called them "the evil Russians" most of the time, and the only way we could save ourselves from those terrible A-bombs of theirs was to duck under our desks when we saw the flash. I never really wondered what might happen to me if I wasn't at school and didn't have a desk close at hand to duck under. I guess I just figured that they'd only try to blow us up while I was in school. The rest of the time I figured I was pretty much safe.

So on that evening in July, you couldn't begin to imagine the thoughts that raced through my mind as we ran screaming toward the only safety close at hand, Sheila's house, four solid walls and a door that would slam shut once we got behind it. Thinking back on that moment I want to believe there was some undetermined mixture of fact and fantasy in both our minds as we ran hollering and screaming that the world was about to end. Then again we were kids who really had no idea of where reality ended and something else began; for us there still were no clear and defined boundaries on most things in our lives.
We'd been playing, Sheila and I, across the street from her house on the southwest corner of Division and Liberty streets. I'm not sure why, but it seems that most, if not all, of my earliest friends and playmates were girls. Sheila had a couple brothers, one older and one younger, but she and I were the same age. My mom and her mom were friends, so we spent time together doing whatever it was two kids might do on a summer's evening. In those days there wasn't a house there, and so that lot and the grass lawn around the old boarding house were fair game for running, falling, rolling and pretending big time. And I'm guessing that's exactly what we were doing as the sun was setting and the night sky was beginning to show itself.

I'm not sure who saw it first, but I know that neither of us could begin to comprehend what we were looking at. For more than a moment we stood there transfixed by the sheer beauty of what we were seeing and unable to move. Never before had we seen anything like it, and so there was nothing from our brief histories on earth to even come close to relating what we were seeing to other than those "evil Russians" and mushroom clouds. And so we stood there watching what we suddenly concluded was the beauty of our impending doom. So at that moment on that evening in July of 1957 in that little town in Wisconsin two kids, an eight-year-old girl and boy, turned on their heels and began running faster than they'd ever run in their lives away from what they'd just seen in the sky and toward the only safety they knew in the moment. In their minds and in that moment all that their teachers had tried to prepare them for what was coming to pass, and there was no school desk to hide under to save themselves.

The Menominee Indians of Wisconsin believed that the lights indicated the location of Manabai'wok (giants) who were the spirits of great hunters and fishermen. The Inuit of Alaska believed that the lights were the spirits of the animals they hunted: the seals, salmon, deer and beluga whales. Other aboriginal peoples believed that the lights were the spirits of their people.

Our mothers came out the front door at the sound of our screaming. In time we were reassured that the evil Russians weren't attacking; they were safe; we were safe at least for the moment.

The bomb never fell, the "evil Russians" never attacked, the Martians have yet to be found, and the Northern Lights are something we marvel at on the rare occasions that we see them. And still the feeling of being truly safe is an elusive thing at best. Those kids running toward the only safety they knew had no idea that perceptions are only that, perceptions.