Chapter 25
It was Flag Day and grampa was up early. He amused himself by conducting a private little ceremony as he mounted his flag on the front of the house. The Concord Hymn by Ralph Waldo Emerson was the greatest poem ever written in grampa’s estimation. He recited its opening lines aloud to no one, but himself, “By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.” Then he saluted the flag and went back in the house; he had repeated this routine annually since moving into the house some fifteen years ago.
The June heat in Albuquerque can be pretty hard on older people and grampa was sure feeling it. Even the refrigerated air going longer than usual didn’t seem to ameliorate his fatigue. He sat in his office in his recliner and occupied himself with his thoughts. His children and grandchildren were all seemingly doing well. He and his wife were showing signs that the golden years were slowly wending their way into the sunset years. Grampa felt that their finances were in order in spite of the vagaries of the stock market. Smartest thing he ever did was fall in love with and marry a gal two years his senior. They found themselves walking in lockstep through life’s inevitable travails, yet both felt so grateful as to how they had been blessed.
Grampa was ‘resting his eyes.’ Really! He was not asleep. He was entertaining himself thinking of our current day education system. While his generation had moved beyond the three Rs, one-room schoolhouses, and knuckles rapped by a ruler, discipline still had a front and center role in his schooling and he felt ‘progressive education’ had somehow lost its way. He laughed to himself as he recalled his fourth grade teacher’s recess instructions: First row, slide, stand, pass; Second row, slide, stand, pass... perhaps a bit Germanic. People now talked of a baccalaureate as the current equivalent of the old high school diploma. Granted that there had been a zillion-fold increase in knowledge in all kinds of fields, but kids also had computers nowadays. He was thinking the problems lay more with attitudes.
He was pleased that his wife’s major had been in English literature. He envied the effects that those many literary works had on her capabilities for reasoning. Grampa kiddingly called her his goddess ‘Erudite’ with an extra ‘e’ sound at the end. While his own education had been primarily in scientific and business fields, he found that many of his thoughts as of late referred to earlier schooling in poetry.
Some of the lines rang through his head. He had learned these oh so long ago, yet he could still recite them easily. Famous lines from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Hiawatha, and Evangeline coursed through his brain. From the opening stanza in the last poem that Longfellow ever wrote, grampa quoted to himself, ‘What say ye, Bells of San Blas, to the ships that southward pass from the harbor of Mazatlan? To them it is nothing more than the sound of surf on the shore, nothing more to master or to man. But to me, a dreamer of dreams, to whom what is and what seems are often one and the same - to me, they have a strange, wild melody, and are something more than a name’.
He wondered what bells were saying to the current generation.
He dwelled a little longer in his mind’s eye on the words by Robert Frost in The Road Not Taken... ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, -- I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference’. They had always had a haunting effect on grampa; he wondered which road he had taken. Was he leaving a world to his kids not only not less than, but better than the world left to him? Or had he spent a lifetime in Walter Mitty’s shoes?
Grampa had tried his own hand at poetry too. His best lines were from his Ode to a Family Tree where he wrote ‘You are you and we are we, yours alone your destiny; but don’t count us out, for we will be – born again in your progeny’. Thank heavens he hadn’t tried to make a living writing poetry. All in all, he felt appropriately chastised as per Clint Eastwood’s famous line, “a man’s gotta know his limitations!” Anyway, he concluded, it sure wouldn’t hurt modern day school kids to study more poetry.
He thought of the more signal events in his academic career. Certainly, the reading of The Philosophy of Kant had a fundamental impact on grampa’s views. Immanuel Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’, that essentially ‘one ought to conduct one’s self so as to be a role model for others’, had in great measure affected his life’s efforts.
The moral lesson from Homer’s Odyssey with its tale of Scylla and Charybdis suggesting moderation in all things had not been lost on grampa.
He was proud of all his grand kids. He had imbued them with his personal philosophy that ‘your life is what you choose to make of it’. His guidance was that there were a lot of different worlds out there; be careful to choose one that’s right for you. He had provided seed money for an IRA for each of them. He frequently wondered what else he could or should do. It was then he remembered his promise to grandma to add more decoration to the poolroom. Grampa was indeed grateful for Keith’s addition of Arkansas’s Pinnacle Mountain. Grandma and grampa had driven by the mountain numerous times in their earlier years together while driving back to ‘swamp-east Missouri’ to visit her parents. Since the painting was to be in the poolroom only temporarily, however, he felt a bit more was required. He placed a call to a calligrapher friend of his who agreed to get the ball rolling on a little project he had had in mind for some time.
Then he returned to his recliner and did, in fact, doze.
Chapter 26
Clark had started immediately in search of a new job. Yes, times were hard as far as employment was concerned, but Clark said he would take minimum wage as long as the hours could be flexible and he didn’t have to flip burgers. As he had an outstanding employment reference, it didn’t take long. He got a job the next day as a stocker with Office Depot. Grampa kidded him because he thought he heard Clark say he got a job as a stalker. Jenny was delirious with Clark’s suggestion that they go out for dinner to celebrate his new job.
Keith was most pleased upon opening a letter from Harrell Wade Harrison in the days following. It contained a check for $550 and a thank you note for the loan and for taking care of his souvenir. Wade and his pa had settled their differences over the Teton affair and Wade planned to be back through Albuquerque next summer after graduation on a trip to Los Angeles for his pa. Keith sent the promissory note off to Nashville and thanked his lucky star that he was spared being the owner of a muscle car. Keith, wanting to celebrate, called Kayla with an invitation to a concert at the Hard Rock Entertainment Center.
Unbeknownst to Keith, Wade and his pa had had a real knock-down-and-drag-out upon Wade’s return home. Wade’s pa had told Wade that Wade could be of little or no use to the family if he couldn’t ‘stay in the shadows.’ Being detained by law enforcement personnel was totally unacceptable.
Wade had countered in the Donneybrook that his father had bamboozled him on the painting pick-up in Mena. Upon spotting Young Corn hanging on the back of his pa’s bedroom closet door, it was obvious to Wade that the east-bound runner had picked up the painting the day before Wade arrived with the pay-off – so much for ‘relying’ on Wade to get the job done. His pa had just run him through his paces.
His pa said the job was simply too high-risk to trust Wade’s inexperience on this one and the Teton fracas proved that his caution was indeed justified.
Wade yelled that he had done everything his pa asked of him while he was ‘under the gun’ and his pa had even complimented and congratulated him.
As the end of June approached, things were relatively stable. Romance was flourishing with the grandsons. Grandma and grampa, while sharing a dream of wedding bells for their grandsons, were having more difficulty communicating. Oft repeated was the phrase ‘if you want me to hear what you are saying, you’ll have to come where I am’.
About ten-thirty in the evening on a Friday night, the front light at grampa’s house was blinking on and off. Grampa, complaining about chest pains, had awakened grandma. She, in turn, had
taken immediate action by calling 911. The ambulance was on its way. She also alerted Keith and Clark. Thank heavens for their cell phones. Their mother was out of town that evening.
Keith and Clark met grandma in the emergency ward. The hospital visit, which proved to be nip and tuck for an hour or two, finally got grampa safely through the crisis. His potential demise, however, had triggered a more sober outlook on behalf of both boys. They suddenly had a new perspective on the extent to which their grampa had impacted their lives.
“Weef, we almost lost grampa,” said Clark looking at the floor of the waiting room and using a pet name from childhood. Keith nodded his head, but said nothing. Clark continued, “He told me several months ago that his aches and pains were gaining on him and that his ‘bucket list’ was just about taken care of. He asked me if I would watch over grandma and mom if anything were to happen to him.”
Keith sniffled. “He told me that he’d be ready to go when the last grandchild was graduated from college, so maybe he will hang in there for another couple years anyway. He seems pleased with his life although I know he hankers to see a great-grandchild or two. I know he would be tickled to see his genes show up in future generations. And so would I – especially the genes that reflect respect for all people of whatever station in life. Pops has been a super role model. Emulating grampa would be a formula for success in life, I think.”
Both Keith and Clark stayed with grandma that evening until she was ready to go home and then stayed the rest of the night with her at her house. The plan, of course, was to return to the hospital early the next morning. The breakfast that the boys prepared was waiting for her when grandma awoke the next morning. Since the boys had already eaten, she suggested they enjoy a game of pool while she got ready. As they arrived at the foot of the circular staircase, they spied it immediately - the new wall decoration for grandma that grampa had long promised. On the wall opposite the neon Mi Querencia and next to the Pinnacle painting, grampa had surreptitiously hung a newly framed quotation,
‘When the Great Scorer comes to mark against your name,
He will not mark won or lost, but how you played the game.’
Grantland Rice, 1880 – 1954
In retrospect, June passed rather quickly that year and life went on.
FINIS
Epilogue
Somewhere along the line, I had read that manhood was conferred upon the accomplishment of siring a son, building a domicile, or authoring a book. This novella was undertaken as an attempt to complete the trifecta.
It was envisioned as a philosophical treatise rife with allegory and replete with intimation aided by cleverly constructed characterizations. The reader was to be alternately vexed and assured by the unanticipated development of substantive events. I doubt that even my most ardent admirers would say I achieved such a lofty goal.
It being an initial effort by the author, family members, friends and neighbors were sought out for critical inputs. Most telling, of course, was the realization that a significant number couldn’t be bothered. For those few who succumbed to the ordeal, the author is indeed grateful. The one suggestion that I burn the manuscript was surely in jest. Another suggested that, if I insisted on the story line as presently pursued, the final chapter should be rewritten for grampa to suffer a tragic accident followed by a smallish, but tasteful, funeral. Still others reported that a replacement work would be in order entitled as either LITTLE KNOWN GEOGRAPHICAL TIDBITS OF CENTRAL NEW MEXICO or THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF LINDA SUE BYERSON.
My more astute critics descried the work as lacking a real plot followed by an appropriate denouement. I researched the short story as an art form and take solace in the words beginning on page 145 of The Critical Reader – words so perfectly chosen that an attempt on my part to interpret further would be ludicrous.
There are also those who demand identification of a main character. The truly perspicacious reader will have been schooled in the children’s pastime of ‘Where’s Waldo?’. I claim that perhaps the work is best described as a quasi-memoir narrated in the third person. Indeed, the adage that ‘when Peter tells you about Paul, it tells you more about Peter than it does Paul’ has never been refuted. I’m satisfied if the reader still respects me in the morning.
Needless to say, the work triggered considerable criticism in that the dialogue between young people as presented by and large is a far cry from the way they really talk. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. Please allow me to apologize on behalf of American youth everywhere.
The foregoing statements conclude my professed defense against my critics. Alas, the returns are in. My fondest hopes for immediate literary acclaim have been dashed and I don’t see myself holding out for some level of posthumous fame a la Edgar Allan Poe.
If, dear reader, I have, however, triggered a moment of introspection or even just a smile, I feel amply rewarded for my time and effort. The author salutes all who helped bring this composition to fruition.
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