first, there's a good chance that they will leak out the bottom. Ronnie's plan was to remove the stool, fix the floor, and reset the stool in a different location. If it wasn't one of Ronnie's houses, I probably wouldn't have done that floor; not at least, without the water turned on, in case of a piss spill. But I moved the stool, and did the floor, and it was a beautiful floor.
Another time, I was driving up Main Street and saw Ronnie in front of me, hauling something in the back of his old brown pickup truck. I laughed, because I knew Ronnie, and knew that he had a plan for whatever it was that he was hauling, which looked to me like road kill, hanging over the tailgate and bouncing along like a dead animal. Anyway, a while later, he stopped by the house.
"Hey," he said, "I've got a piece of carpet for the Big House [that's what he called his house out on the North Road, next to the old Trophy Shop, a couple of blocks away from my house, out on the very Edge of Town] that I want you to install. Whenever you can get to it, I'd appreciate it."
Well, needless to say, the road kill he had been hauling was the piece of carpet, an old, used, [at one time, long ago] fifty two dollar a yard chunk of rug he'd bought at an estate sale in Saint Louis, and had obviously kept in one of his pole barns.
But, hey; it was for Ronnie, so I installed it; and it cleaned up well.
Ronnie was a gentle guy. He was an old codger and a horse trader. Ronnie was one of those older guys that I could never pin an age on; to me, he could've been anywhere from fifty six to seventy three. My only clues to his age came from his stories, which were amazing; he'd been in the service, had a front row view of the Cuban Missile Crisis; he'd been all over the country; he dreamed big, and took great pleasure in winding yarns. Listening to him tell his stories, I never had a problem visualizing what he said. Even after his stroke, and had trouble with his words, I could understand him, and sometimes could finish the sentences that gave him trouble. A couple of years ago, on Christmas Eve, he stopped by the house, apparently knowing that we had no food, and gave us a ham. Another time, he brought us a case of frozen fish from Dots, out in Mount Sterling, a grocery store two hours drive from here. Knowing that I was a beer drinker, and trying to get me out of the house, he'd always throw this at me: "Hey, the coldest beer in town's out at the Bowling Alley. You need to come on down some time and try it." I wish I had, Ronnie; I wish I had...He and his wife had five kids together: a daughter and four sons; every time he spoke of his kids, I could see the love; his sons, he referred to as Numbers: "Number One Son; Number Two Son; Number Three Son, and Number Four Son"; this would always make me smile, because I understood the reference [to that old TV detective, Charlie Chan]. He was a Republican, yet I didn't know it, and almost didn't believe it, when he told me so; so close were we in agreement on the problems facing America these days. He was a very decent man. To my mind, it's people like Ronnie that make this world go 'round; people like Ronnie.
"Hey," he would tell me, smiling, his pirate smile and blues eyes, old hat and white stubble painting a personal picture of a Scots-Irish captain of the African Queen, "for an old man..." never finishing the sentence, but smiling...smiling.
Once, a few years back, I was out at the Big House on the North Road working in his basement, laying some bricks. The big house was an old Second Empire home, and the house that he raised his family in, and where he lost his wife. The house, long abandoned, yet clearly once beautiful, now needed a lot of work. Yet, as he described his vision of the finished house, I could almost see it finished, too; even more wonderful and poignant to me, however, was that I could see the memories he had; all saved up in his mind from days gone by, days when he was a younger man, when his wife was still there, and his kids were young, and he had a long life ahead of him.
When he showed up, of course, he had a story for me. We went out into the yard, and stood under an old, ancient oak tree, one of two or three on the property. Among the piles of bricks he'd spent the summer before cleaning the snot off of, and the stacks of wood and empty drywall buckets, sat an old '59 Ford Edsel, rusting. It wasn't in bad shape, yet it didn't run. Ronnie had big plans for that Edsel, and even then, even with all his other projects going, he had busy calling shops around the country, pricing parts and making plans to get it on the road again.
He told me that he'd gone to the wake of an old friend a night or two before, about thirty miles away, and had brought one or two of his kids along. He then went on to tell me about a date he went on in high school; the last date of his senior year. His story just seemed to flow as naturally as a clear, cool creak. His date was a girl that he really liked, he said, and proceeded to paint a picture of late 1950's America in my mind; sock hops and rock n' roll and romance. He said that he and his girl stayed out til five in the morning, and had a great time; he didn't tell me what they did or where they went or even what they talked about, but that, when he pulled up in front of her house to drop her off, that they both knew that they would never see each other again, for she was going to become a nun.
"So," he said, getting back to the story about the wake, "I was standing there, waiting in line to pay my respects, when the woman in front of me turned around and glanced back. She looked familiar. We looked at each other for a few moments. 'Ronnie?' she said."
He smiled. I smiled. It was a beautiful day.
"It was her?" I asked.
His broad grin was wonderful.
"It was her. And we hadn't seen each other in fifty years. I looked at her, and she looked at me. I asked her if she was still a nun. She was. She asked about me; how my life was. I told her how I'd married, and told her that we had five kids together, and that I'd lost my wife."
He looked down and then raised his head and looked at the old Edsel.
"I know that some people might think me just a crazy old man, working on this house, working on this car. But it's important to me."
I was listening so intently it almost hurt, taking in what he was saying, because it was important to me, too. He looked at the old car again.
"This isn't the exact one, but it's close enough. This was the car that I had in high school."
-Shared memories.
You will be missed, my friend. You will be missed.
-
-Tuning-
-----
If life is like a sound, or a heartbeat in the mind, then habits, especially old ones, are like strings that run, from tuning key to bridge.
And so it is that this has become the way I now look back.
Once in tune and out of tune at the same time, I have since become aware that my precious time is now being spent, not so sharp, nor not so flat as I once was.
Unlike most, my now practiced fingers never learned to touch the body very much; only the strings.
...EEE...;BBB...;...GGG...[flat];...GGG... [these old strings on this old flat top box retain their eternal four-forty quite well, and so, as I check the tuning, like an old friend, pull an old familiar smile from me];
...DDD...AAA...
...E...E...E...
Tuned, once more.
Thank you.
Old strings on an old wooden guitar, yellowed with age, with an old body as worn as my body; as familiar to me as any old habit is to anybody.
My hearing ain't as good as it used to be. That's the bad thing. The good thing is that my memories are growing stronger.
The strummed chord sounds good; beautiful, in fact; as sweet as a sweet bird's song. An E. After the familiar pause [rest], the slow strum comes along, steadily.
I am aware of myself and this instrument; its rhythms, aware that this particular habit of his, carried away by us, his younger brothers, so innocently, so naively, so naturally, so gratefully, yet without, ever, a single gentle thanks, so many years before, was once a habit we shared together. Now, one dead and one long gone, whenever I sit and strum, here, or there, or anywhere, I am aware of their presence somehow, even this long thirty years later.
Of their presence, I take what I can and imagin
e them here, doing three-part harmony, and, beginning again, strum, and sing this song, which seems to age very well, and both with them and alone, we sing again.
-
-Heroes-
We get our heroes from the rooms we run through as little kids. We get our heroes before we even have a concept of 'heroes'. We get our heroes through osmosis, as we look up at them with loving eyes. Before we even know it. We look up to our heroes because that's the original way we saw them; by looking up at them from our highchair, our cribs, our strollers. Our heroes come to us naturally, through time. "Like father, like son". 'The apple never falls far from the tree". "A chip off the old block". "When I grow up, I want to be like my brother [my father, my other brother]". We have our heroes before we can even talk.
We gather all that information, all that stuff that helps form who we are, all that stuff that informs us as, even as we squirm in our cribs, helpless. We pick up on the visual: the electric light on the ceiling, the sunshine through the blinds, the colors, the walls, the patterns of the wallpaper, the layout of the rooms. We also pick up on the auditory: the quality, the richness, the rhythms, the tones of those we love and the sounds they make, all around us, or down the hall; in the kitchen; in the frontroom. Our senses are working overtime to form thoughts, organize our world. They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. They