What Is It?

It had to have been my freshman or sophomore year in high school, any later and I want to believe I would have been much to "cool" to have participated. The one thing I'm certain of is that it was a high school fund raiser and I want to think that it was most likely for new band uniforms. That's one of the multitude of ways I would have found me there in the high school gym that evening and thinking I had to be right in the middle of everything. No matter, it would become one of those moments that would leave a scar on my psyche to this day.

I don't recall all the ways the students and faculty came up with to raise money but there are two I'll always remember. Oh, I'm sure there was a bake sale, even during the Clinton era bake sales were an important source of revenue for everything from band uniforms to lowering the National Deficit, and this was long before the Clinton era, but I do remember there was an old automobile in the center of the gym floor sitting on top of a really big tarp. And there was an auction that night.

That car sitting there was an unbelievable hit, literally. I suspect that folks likely paid ten cents for a swing at that old junker. You paid your money and for it you got a five pound sledge hammer and one swing. In those days ten cents bought a sixteen ounce draft beer in the bars for the guys who would swing that hammer that evening. Those dimes were treasured by the men I knew. On the other hand for me that dime would have procured two packs of baseball cards complete with slabs of bubblegum as big as the cards themselves. But on this evening those dimes weren't going for either glasses of beer or baseball cards, they were going for a swing with a hammer at an old car.

It was a sight I'd never have imagined, full grown men swinging that sledge with an ferocity that was never witnessed and seldom heard of in our little town. Men showing emotion was something left for closed doors and family if it was ever shown at all. And here it was at ten cents a swing , that emotion and that unbridled intensity so seldom seen by anyone, in full view of not only family and friends but the entire town. All of it directed at an old junk car that had likely never done anything but it's constructed job to anyone during its' existence. And for reasons not yet understood by me men young and old spent their dimes to pick up that hammer and swing, some with muttered epithets, at whatever part of the once proud product of Detroit that was potentially the most vulnerable to utter destruction. And damage was the only objective in their endeavor.

The evisceration of that hunk of glass and steel continued through the evening with whoops, hollers, screams of joy from bystanders watching as the roof finally caved in or there was no longer anything recognizable of the grill, and all the while the grunts of men throwing all they had of themselves and their emotions into humiliating an inanimate object that brought out so much in them. Those men who farmed the land, who constructed stainless steel tanks for hauling milk, who worked the railroad or shifted gears in eighteen wheelers across miles and miles of highway, those men from the shops and the stores and yes, even the schools, all took their turns with that hammer and a hunk of metal that symbolized so many dreams.

It would later be reported that the car smashing event was a complete and total success.

As for the auction I recall nothing of what was sold there that evening other than the item that I found myself involved with. And to be totally honest, to this day I can't tell you whether or not there was a sale. But I can tell you there was a question.

You'd think that one of the last things to be put up at any auction is a kitten. Oh sure, you're in some fancy place with a bunch of folks looking for only the finest in felines then I get it but this wasn't the case. In fact I'm pretty sure that even the richest of the folks living in my little town had more or less the same opinion of cats and kittens, they were a dime a dozen and why would anyone want to buy one? And yet here I was with kitten in my hands holding it up before a crowd of folks.

Now the truth is I'd never even thought about cats while I was growing up. I didn't even think about dogs well, other than Lassie that is. I didn't have any pets, except the goldfish that I managed to suffocate when I was about four, and none of my friends had pets. Oh sure, Billy Rabuck had a couple coon dogs we'd go out hunting with but nobody I knew had dogs or cats running around in their homes. Farmers had dogs and cats but I didn't have them, I wasn't around them and I sure didn't know much of anything about them. And therein lay my ultimate humiliation.

So I'm standing there on the stage with this kitten that really doesn't want to be there and for sure doesn't want to be held up in front of a noisy auditorium with a bunch of folks looking up at it. I'm doing my best to try and keep this poor critter under control while being fully aware of the fact that I don't have a clue as to what I'm doing. And for the inexperienced holding an unwilling kitten is something that at the least can be a challenge and at the most an experience with perpetual motion complete with razor sharp claws. I was inexperienced and can attest to bleeding red.

If you've never experienced a thing before, or something somewhat similar, you more than likely don't have any way of being prepared when it comes your way. If you're a young and naive teenage boy you almost certainly don't have a chance. Had I known what I know now the odds would have been at least fifty/fifty that things would have turned out alright. On this night I had walked into a situation that would haunt me for ever. Not because I did or didn't do something but because I didn't know. For me on this night it was a single question and a question that in that little more or less rural town should not have been a problem for most anyone, but it was for me.

I didn't know who he was, never would come to find out who he was, and yet he forever left his mark when he yelled out his question. In the end the not knowing was bad enough but the laughter was worse. All these years later I still can hear the laughter.

He asked a simple question and I suppose I should have had the answer but as I stood there trying to figure out the answer for him the smile started on his face and then the chuckle and finally the laugh that said it was alright for others to join in and so they did. They laughed while I stood there holding a kitten in my hands and completely unable to answer his question. Unable to the point of being paralyzed.

It's maybe hard to understand today but in that world and in those years some of us really didn't know anything about sex. All I really knew was that girls were somehow different from me and yet I wasn't exactly sure how. After all, the best player on our Little League team had been a girl and she was just like us only different somehow I guess. Well, I did know they were different enough that I was strongly, and I mean strongly, attracted to them but beyond that I can honestly say on that night in that high school gym I still wasn't really clear on what some of the details were on the differences in sexes.

"Is it a male or female?" That was the question he asked. An honest question to a young man without a clue. Well, I sort of had something of an idea but it wasn't based on fact, more dumb luck guesswork than anything else, so I started to try to figure out the answer. In my memory I must have looked the ultimate fourteen year old boy without a clue as I tipped the poor cat this way and that trying to come up with an answer. As I recall I never did, someone else tried to rescue me, and in the end I never would have a cat as a pet.

It wasn't the cats' fault, it was just an unwilling particiapant in the whole event. But to this day I remember that moment standing on that stage in front of all those people and feeling those feelings because I didn't know and they laughed.

For whatever reason and however things work in life today I remember standing in front of people and having them smile and laugh too. The difference comes in the fact that today I sort of know what I'm doing when I stand there. And I always make sure no kittens are part of the act.

Some Dogs Don’t Swim

The last time I was back there was a chain across the walkway of the dam over the Lemonweir River in the little town I spent my first eighteen years in. That would have been along about the summer of 1988 if I recall. Twenty years since I’d stood there in that high school gym and was told that the life I’d always known was over and good luck in the future.

That day in ’88 I stood there in front of a chain across the walkway of that dam that once was the pathway to a day of yelling, hollering, splashing, daring and in later years girls in two piece bathing suits. On the far side of that dam was the old swimming hole, the place where who knows how many generations of local kids had gone to learn to swim. That place where someone, I was never really sure who, once the ice had cleared would drag that old diving platform out into the middle of the river and anchor it there for the summer.

There were two ways of measuring who you were at that swimming hole and one of them was to be big enough and good enough to swim out to that raft. The other was to jump off the diving board just beside the spillway.

I’d never wondered about that dam, it had always been there and the why of it for me was obvious, so that on those hot and sticky days of summer I could go swimming all day long. There likely had to be another reason for it being there but in my case over the years it would serve a threefold purpose and that was more than enough work for any one dam as far as I was concerned. One of those purposes was to take away a fear.

The diving board attached to the side of the dam was long gone the day I stood on the other side of the river and looked across to that old memory. I’m sure someone had decided that there was something in the river and so for the safety of all swimming was no longer allowed. Kids would no longer get the chance to run out into that little shallow part, feel the sediment ooze up between their toes and always make sure they stayed away from the bloodsuckers waiting for them in the cattails. That was of course unless someone dared you to walk over there. No more would a kid stand there in water just over their mouth and nose, bouncing up and down while the river waters ran by them, one minute warm and the next mysteriously cool. Whoever makes those decisions had decided that what that town needed was chemically treated and government approved swimming pool and so no longer did that river and that old dam get to teach the little ones how to swim, the older ones how to not be afraid and the oldest to sit there on the grass listening to the shouts of joy and excitement of kids being kids.

But kids will be kids and back in the days when there was no chain across that dam, when the diving board was still securely attached to that wall, when the raft still floated in the middle of the river there came a moment when two boys, a dog, that diving board and the river would meet, or so the story goes.

Sometimes the best intentions of young boys go terribly askew mostly because they just don’t know any better. I don’t doubt they thought they were doing nothing wrong and everything right the day they walked their English bulldog down to the dam to see if he could swim. If you’ve ever seen an English bulldog you’ll know that they have rather stout bodies and not a whole lot for legs. Though I’ve never followed up on it I’m told that some of the breed does swim but others simply can’t.

They led their friend and companion out to the end of that diving board rising some eight or more feet over the river and not more than thirty feet from the closest spillway. I’m sure they were certain that everything would be fine when they picked him up and released him to gravity and his fate. I suspect they ran down to the edge of the water anticipating their trusting friends’ swift emergence from below the water and they would yell and holler for him to swim back to them.

Like I’ve already said, I’m told some English bulldogs can swim and others don't.

I miss you Nat King Cole

Trying to figure out why is probably impossible but I just heard Nat King Cole singing "Unforgettable" in my head. I haven't thought of Mr. Cole in a long time but right there, in the dark, as I'm heading to the bathroom, I hear his unforgettable voice singing to me. It made me happy and sad all at once because that's when the floodgates of memory suddenly kicked in. And so there I was, in the bathroom in the middle of the night with a montage of sounds and sights charging one after another toward the front of my mind, each yearning, no demanding, my private attention.

"Unforgettable" by Nat King Cole may have been the very first song that triggered something akin to passion inside me.

Mr. Dalke ran the shoe shop and in the summer the radio in his workshop could be heard a half a block away. I use to love to go into his shop and look at all his tools and the machinery for polishing and shining shoes of all shapes and sizes. It didn't hurt that he sold minnows for fishing either along with red wigglers and night-crawlers. Those were the sorts of things an eight year old boy could literally get his hands into.

But it was the music that day coming from his shop as I was walking across the dusty, empty except for the propane tanks, lot. And to recall it today I was walking toward the music and nothing else. That voice and those instruments that suddenly filled my head with something new, exciting and for an eight year old boy life changing were sounds that got me to feel something I wouldn't understand for years to come.

Today it seems we're constantly being assaulted with sounds and images but in those days, in that little Wisconsin town, sounds consisted pretty much of semi-trucks shifting gears through town, the occasional distant sound of the train whistle as it approached another crossing and in the summer robins singing. Mr. Dalke's radio always broke that rhythm but not with loud and raucous "look at me!" lyrics and sounds; rather something that was far less intrusive and much more an addition to the world around me rather than a subtraction. There was no yelling and screaming, cussing and cursing, not from Mr. Dalke's radio at least.

So, as I sit here tonight I remember a world and a time that maybe all these years later I'm finally realizing was a world that wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination but was a world where an eight year old boy could feel something inside coming to life while trucks shifted gears out on US 12 & 16, when the wind was just right the "thump, thump" of a farmers' tractor out plowing fields, where robins searched for worms on greener than green lawns and Mr. Nat King Cole sang "Unforgettable."

Yes, I miss you Nat King Cole.