“And there’s nothin’ short of dying, that’s half as lonesome as the sound, of a sleeping, city sidewalk, and Sunday morning, comin’ down.” – Johnny Cash
Requiem
By Darren King [copyright 2008]
So Saturday night we had a campfire as I said we would. The air turned cool. The fire wasn’t as good as I had hoped for. Still, it was nice enough. Brief. As we didn’t start until after a late dinner. But my younger son and I stayed out later than everyone else. And though he is eight years old now, he climbed up into my lap and let me hold him while we looked at the stars. We saw three satellites and stayed out long enough so that he began to think out loud, just the two of us, in the cold and dark, asking me about planets and weightlessness and whether or not I thought the flag the astronauts had placed on the moon was still there. I do. He was considering space. Whereas earlier, while I was preparing the fire, I had considered an outdoor lifestyle. One where after a campfire such as this, everyone would go inside, and I would stay out, poke the last glowing embers a bit, maybe throw a little sand on them just to make sure they went out. I would wake the next morning and walk down to the shoreline, flip over my kayak and paddle across the lake before everyone else woke up. But I digress…
And as I also said I would do, on Sunday I cleaned out the garage. Of course it was after I had slept in, then woke to make cappuccinos. And then, with my wife, to watch ‘This Week with George Stephanopoulos.’ So I purposely got a late start. And while I do enjoy the program and George, the way he so capably moderates, I always brave myself to watch his ‘In Memoriam’ segment where, among the political and public figures who have passed away, George lists the names, released by The Pentagon, of men and women who were killed that week in Iraq or Afghanistan. For many families, some day last week will mark a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. Husbands and wives. Brothers and sisters. Children. Moms and dads. Family and friends. Years from now, there will be a family gathering during which someone will remember another gathering when everyone came and everyone had such a good time and everyone was there and there will be a debate about what year it was.
“It was 2007,” someone will say. “I’m pretty sure it was 2007.”
“No, it was 2008,” someone else will say. “I’m sure it was 2008.”
And the room will become gently divided and some brave person who wished he didn’t remember telephone numbers and dates so well will reach down into the depths of his soul and ever so delicately correct them all and say,
“No, it was 2007. Because Chris was there.”
And then the room will grow silent, because Chris isn’t here now, as he should be, because his name was listed some years ago on ‘This Week’, after being released by The Pentagon, and the conversation will change to something lighter. Someone will call to the kitchen to bring out the food, or more coffee and the guys will switch their attention to the game on television, the weather.
So after George, I leave my wife, grab my second cup of coffee and began my due diligence in the garage. And after about an hour it looks like my house has barfed out onto my driveway and my house looks like Fred Sanford’s yard, less Fred Sanford’s little red pickup truck. My dad had a Fred Sanford truck when I was little. A 1951 Ford, pickup truck. Just like Fred Sanford’s. It even was the same color. Red. And every week when ‘Sanford and Son’ came on, our neighbor down the street – my dad’s friend Dave, would come over and when the character Lamont drove that little red truck up the driveway during the opening theme, Dave would say, “There’s your truck Jerry!” And like the week before, he and my dad would laugh.
Those years, I vaguely remember, just pictures really, like flashes from a dream. I remember sounds and smells and my dad’s old truck, sitting on the long bench seat, that old truck smell, a mixture of gas and oil and seat cleaner. And then the big, black knob at the end of his stick shift, projecting out from the steering wheel counsel. I couldn’t see over the dash, I looked directly at the radio and stared into the dials that tuned in my dad’s country music. Sometimes we used his truck when we went ice fishing, which I didn’t get then and I don’t get now. My dad had an ice shanty. When I was three, maybe four, he tried explaining to me that we could walk on the water because it was ice and it would hold us and it was safe. I wouldn’t go. I just stood there and said, “I don’t know Dad.” Eventually, I went.
And I remember helping him on Sundays, such as this, in his workshop or in our basement. Cleaning and sweeping and organizing. Those were my jobs. His Johnny Cash 8-tracks looping as we worked. Songs that told stories, they were some of the first stories I heard and even though I was very young I could hear and sense deeply the sadness and the hope, the melancholy which sticks with me now, forever imprinted, perhaps a little too easily, into my character. And then there would come a point when my dad would make us lunch and we would eat at the bar he built when he finished our basement and I’d get to drink a Coke with my PB and J.
Shortly after he died, my mother gave me a picture of him. One I’ll want to keep safe, because it’s the way I want to remember him. Bearded and strong. Wearing a cowboy hat. Smoking a cigarette. The same cigarette that authenticates this picture that will do him in, some thirty years later. He’s kneeling by an open fire pit on Dave’s property. One hand is holding a black iron skillet, the other is resting over his knee. The cigarette hangs pinched between his lips. A wall of thick, dewy trees in the background. It’s morning. Dave’s then new truck, the one he will eventually sell to my father, sits to the side of the picture. They’re up north surveying Dave’s property. Grand Traverse Bay. Circa 1972. I was four years old and back home with my mother and older brother.
My brother and I lived with our parents four hours downstate. But really, we grew up on the lakes and rivers of northern Michigan. There, our father gave to us the values that come from experiencing first-hand, nature and wildlife. Hiking through the Porcupine Mountains seeing black bears, camping along Grand Traverse Bay, fishing the flood-waters of the Au Sable River. We always stopped for lunch on a sandbar. And the evening always ended with a roaring campfire, which my father prided himself on starting with the strike of one match. So many camping trips and hikes, a singular memory for me now. And the campfires too. All one memory now. That always leads to the glowing white-hot coals somewhere around the quiet and still of midnight. A faint glimpse of the peace my father holds now.
