ANOTHER DAY I ALMOST DIED

Lin reminded me recently of the times I crawled under our “house trailer” and helped my dad level up after arriving at a new destination. Underneath I was save and secure working along side my dad, even though he constantly yelled at me to push here, pull there, and go get me this or that, or how I couldn’t “drive a nail up your ass with both hands!” But, at least under there, I was still in our world and did not yet have to face all the new kids in a strange new world.

However, when the time came, there was no doubt in my mind that I could “set up” a trailer in short order!

Connie (wife #1) and Betty Anne were hairdressers and had operated a shop together that I christened “Two Hairdressers!” I think the name and the logo were one of the few things I ever got back from my college degree in “advertising!” (The photo is of the old location before the events below took place.)

Anyway, they paid high rent where they were and one day it was decided that they would buy their own lot and build their own shop. The whole idea sprang from an ad in the local paper about the Scottish Inns, a local manufacturing company that made modular motel and business units, was going out of business and having to sell their existing inventory.

The two beauticians decided that one of the little 12’X25’ yellow units would be perfect for a four-station beauty shop. So, bright and early on “auction day” I was elected to go and bring one home - alone.

The best I can remember, I paid about $3,000 for the unit, but I could have gotten it for around $2,500 had I not bid against myself twice! Hell, I’d never been to an auction before and I had no clue what was going on. However, I was determined to bring one home!

After winning the bid, probably because I frightened the other bidders by screaming out bids, even when it wasn’t my turn, I went forward to sign on the dotted line. “You have a week to have the building hauled away and bring back the trailer frame it is resting on. Otherwise, the sale is revoked and the sale goes to the next highest bidder. Do you understand,” the auctioneer asked.

Well, I understood, but I had no idea who to call to pull the trailer, with the building on it, to our lot, or even how to get it off the trailer. “Who do I get to pull it?”

The auctioneer pointed over my shoulder to a shady looking fellow wearing a frayed and dirty yellow CAT hat, a sleeveless shirt, and very dirty jeans. Basically, he looked like “Larry the Cable Guy!” As I approached him he spit out a long brown line of tobacco juice and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, the same hand he held out for me to shake!

Long story short, he was hired to do the hauling and then pull the trailer back to the Scottish Inn warehouse. The next thing for me and Squeaky (Betty Anne’s better half) to do was to coordinate the operation so that we could be ready to jack up and block up the building so “Larry” could pull the trailer out from under it. We picked a Saturday so we would have all day to figure it out!

On that faithful day, the day that almost became my last, the building arrived and Larry was anxious to "git’er unloaded" and be on his way. He worked under our command, though showing much frustration at our directions, but he finally squared up the trailer along the intended lines the building was to sit.

Squeaky and I sized up the situation and we deployed on the project while “Larry” watched us carry and stack blocks along the perimeter of the trailer, set up our two jacks on two opposite corners in the front, and distribute the wooden wedges used in leveling atop the cinder blocks. This alone took an hour of hard work and the sweat was pouring off us both.

The plan was to jack up the two front corners, build up a single stack of blocks, let the trailer back down on the stack, then move down about 10 feet and jack it up again, and continue down the length of the building until it was all about 2 or 3 inches clear of the trailer. We then planned to have “Larry” pull the trailer out slowly, and he could be on his way.

Following the removal of the trailer, we would then replace the corner stacks with double stack blocks all the way up…shim it, get the level bubbles close, and move on down the line. This plan worked well, at least for the trailer removal. The trailer was clear of the building and “Larry” honked his horn, waved his CAT hat, and was gone. We breathed a sigh of relief to be free of the trailer and the contractual obligation to have the trailer back in short order.

But now the long hard task of leveling and setting up the building permanently was ahead of us.

It was decided that we needed to get some support under the center of the structure before moving on to the permanent plan. So, I slid in under the building with no thought of danger, and began stacking block. Neither of us had noticed that the weight of the building was pushing the block stacks on one side slowing into the soft earth. Suddenly, and about the same instant, we noticed that the building was leaning hard to one side and was just moments from toppling off the blocks. Squeaky instinctively pushed hard against the side of the building, and at the same time I rolled to where I would at least be between two floor joists if it fell. Truth is, that would have meant I would have only been half crushed!

Strangely enough, Squeaky’s strength seemed enough to stop the slow tilt, or maybe he had some help from some angels, I don’t know! I took the pause in collapse to roll out from under the structure and jumped up to help him hold the building. The building seemed steady enough, so I also began to double stack blocks up about an inch higher than the bottom of the building. I then sat up one of the jacks on another stack of blocks, topped off with a cap block, and jacked until the building rested on the first double stack.

Soon we had one side, the sinking side, resting on four separate block pillars. We shifted to the other side and soon had everything resting comfortably and stably on double stacked blocks in permanent positions. The building, our pride, and my life were finally safe!

The building is still functioning today and rest beautifully on a complete block underpinning foundation. Every time I see it I’m reminded of what could have been.

Thanks Lin for reminding me, and thanks Squeaky for saving my life!

HOW I KILLED PAPA JOHN

So, I stood on a hillside overlooking a four-lane state highway and with a distant view of Interstate 40, which steeply slopes its way off Walden Ridge into and out of the Cardiff Valley that runs from Harriman to Rockwood, Tennessee, saying my last goodbyes. As I walked away from the grave, I thought of my dad saying, “When I die, I want to be buried beside the road so I can watch the traffic go by.”

I looked up and surveyed the landscape, and said, “Well dad, you can see it all from here!” That was the first time I really cried over the loss of my father.

It was only a couple of months later, at least in my mind, that my mom met and married John Sweeney, a short bald headed man that was born in Scotland and raised in Ireland. John and I had a few problems in the beginning because we were both so head strong, I suppose.

I must add here that John was only my mom’s second husband. She married Bill Lindsey after John died, and Bill is the gentleman I wrote “What’s It’s like to Die” (Chapter 123) about. Since Bill died, my brother and I often refer to mom as “the black widow,” having put three gentlemen in the ground!

First off, and I apologize to any of you from New Jersey, I have yet to meet anyone from that state I like, and John was not the first. John and I went head-to-head lots of times. He knew I did not like the fact that he and mom married so soon (at least in my mind) after my dad passed away. There was also the fact that he had a heavy Scottish accent and was Catholic!

The New Jersey thing started at the University of Tennessee, which I attended between the years of 1969 and 1972. I was back from Vietnam and very pro-American, as you can imagine, and that’s a state that I have yet to out grow!

In several of my Communications classes was a very hairy guy from New Jersey, and he was a very “in your face”, knew everything, kind of guy who always started arguments in class discussions about class assigned projects. I passed a rally one day where the “hippies” of the day were sitting or lying around on the ground listening to someone speaking through a megaphone. I recognized the speaker as the guy from New Jersey. I half listened to what was being said and it did not take me twenty steps to understand that we disagreed.

This guy was one of the leaders of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) organization on the UT campus.

Most of the shouting and ranting was about the war that still raged in Southeast Asia. It burned me to the core for people to be protesting and attempting to shut down my classes as a means to show their displeasure with the United States government.

One day I stood in a large open window in Ayers Hall, across from the Administration Building, and watched this guy standing, no he was blocking, the door into the public building while screaming, what to me was communistic, or at least, anti-American slurs through his megaphone.

The crowd faced away from me, listening to him, and chanting and jumping up and down in unison to his blaring cadence. Suddenly, I noticed the Campus Police lining up downhill from the Ad Building and I grew anxious and anticipated a dramatic encounter right in front of my eyes.

I grew so angry inside that my feelings began to swell and grow into a choking lump in my throat, but I held on, and just watched the police advance. Then the crowd hushed, and someone shouted “Just shoot them all!” The crowd turned and looked toward the window I was standing in and I suddenly realized that it had been me that shouted!

It came out before I even knew it and just when the crowd quieted and turned their attentions to the police effort. I had no idea that would be the instant my brain would choose to shout out its deep seated feelings!

A hot flush filled my face and I backed up into the shadows and waited to be arrested or attacked by irate protestors - neither happened.

I have met several people over the years from New Jersey and every time, while I attempt to give them benefit of the doubt, they do or say something to reinforce those college day opinions. It is just some arrogance instilled at birth there!

Meanwhile, back on the subject of John Sweeney, I suppose the Catholic part bothered me some as well.

I remember I finished the fourth grade in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. On the first day of school, mom took me by the hand and lead me into what she thought was the public school.

As we walked up a large winding staircase, with marble steps, we both began noticing the statues inset in the corners of Mother Mary and other saints. Even before we met any Nuns, mom looked at me and said, “Let’s get out of here!”

I do not know, but possibly that, plus a childhood friend who cursed constantly except on Sundays, set the stage for my early mistrust of the Catholic institution. Whatever it was, I did not like the fact that my little Baptist momma was marrying a Ca-thol-ic, as my brother and I often broke it down!

As it turned out, I grew to love the old funny talking man, and had I known about my own Scottish heritage back then, I might have gotten past his immigration to New Jersey, and we may have gotten on much quicker.

Today, I have an extended family of step-brothers and sisters through this relationship. Michael, the youngest, is now the priest at the parish my mom still attends in Harriman. I call him, “My brother the Father!”

I grew to like Papa John as being part of my family, and Corey, who first dubbed him “Papa John,” also loved the old dude, and they often spent time riding around town together. Too bad I killed him with a hamburger though!

John was seriously injured years earlier by getting into 440 volts at the steel mill where he worked before the medical retirement. He survived the encounter with the extreme voltage, but it left his heart muscles weakened.

One evening, several years after marrying mom, he stuffed himself with two of my grilled burgers, and some of my wife’s potato salad and baked beans! Later that night he woke up having a heart attack.

I really felt bad about the incident and begged him to forgive me the next day. He told me, sitting on the side of the hospital bed that it was not my fault, and the doctor reinforced that by stating it was just a matter of time anyway.

I went to work the following day, thinking the best of thoughts for John, but I got a call about midday – John had had another heart attack and died.

I was always thankful I got to speak to him and discuss the hamburger incident. My mind is at ease.

However, when I tell you I make a “killer burger” believe me – it’s true!

RECONCILING WITHOUT MY DAD

My dad died in July of 1976 and my son was by then twenty-three months old. Dad got to hold his grandson before he died, but Corey, of course, was much too young to remember him. Dad would have been fifty-seven years old that September.

Dad was very unhealthy from 1973 forward, and was forced to take an early retirement from his electrician job at the Kingston Steam Plant, in Roane County, Tennessee. The doctors told my father that he had a bad heart, but as it turned out, his heart was the last organ he had functioning just before he died.

Dad lived his life in a rush. He was never satisfied to just stay in one place and enjoy his surroundings or those around him for very long. I will always remember how he pushed us on the weekends he wanted to go “down home” to get in the car and get the trip started. That was the reason I always had to relieve myself in a soda bottle (see Chapter 25), and mom and I had to grab a quick sandwich at a drive-in and eat it while he continued to head down the two-lane highway at 65 and 70 MPH, passing everything he could, and cussing those he could not.

However, as soon as it was sun-up the next morning, at Ma and Pa Mashburn’s in Five Points, Tennessee, he was urging mom to get things together so we could move on down to Lexington, Alabama for our next visit with Grandmother Williams. Then, as soon as the sun was up on Sunday he was dropping hints about getting back on the road home.

Sometimes mom would lay the law down that she was “…visiting my mother for as long as I want this trip!’

This caused him to mope around the yard or in the woods, smoking Camels, until he again got the courage to plead his case that it was time to get on the road “…or we won’t get home before dark!”

A doctor once told my mom, a few years before he died, that his internal organs were about twenty years older than his chronological age. “He’s just living his life as fast as he can,” the doctor told my mother.

Thankfully I have learned to slow down and appreciate the life around me, and I think Vietnam taught me that lesson. Perhaps this is why I’m living a bit longer life, thus far, than he did.

Corey was born in August of 1974, while I was working as the advertising manager at The Roane County NEWS, and it was about this time that dad was diagnosed with bladder cancer. If you remember, it was about this time that Hubert Humphrey was also diagnosed. Humphrey elected to have his bladder removed, but dad decided he would take the chemo treatments, because he did not want to be stuck “peeing in a bag” for the rest of his life.

Looking back, this was a bit selfish on his part, because Humphrey lived until 1978, having elected for the surgery, giving his family that much more time to love him.

During dad’s final hospitalization, I juggled work, running home at lunch to see and photograph Corey, and dropping by the hospital to shave and feed him in the afternoons. I can remember the lotion smell and greasy feel of his skin as I leaned over him running the electric shaver up and down his face and throat.

I pray to God that I never live long enough to become dependant on someone like that, or to get that hospital sponge bath, and then be lathered up with some generic lotion. Please God!

I would often talk about Corey and show dad pictures I had taken and developed. One day he looked up at me and said, “Don’t love him too much son, it would hurt too much if something happened to him.”

I was shocked! I froze, looking down at him and holding a spoon full of mashed potatoes. A fury rose in me that I tried to choke down, but I could not hold it all back.

I had always been pissed at him for not doing more with my brother. Every time I mentioned that he should take Wade hunting or fishing, he would say, “We’ll do all that when I retire.” After he became sick, before he could retire healthy, I just held it all inside, rather than start an argument.

So, at that moment I could no longer hold it inside. I shouted at him, “So, is that what you did to Wade and me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, did you not love us ‘too much’ so YOU wouldn’t be hurt if something happened to us? Is that what you did?”

Frankly, I do not remember if there was any further exchange to that conversation. I do remember storming out of the hospital and crying all the way home. It was just too much to hear that your own father held back showing his love because he did not want to miss me too much if I died!

As he got worse, as the days progressed, he became more and more irritable with everyone, but, it seemed, especially with me.

“Do you want another bite of meat? Do you want another sip of milk? Do you need another pillow?”

“Don’t ask me so many damn questions,” be finally blurted out one day through his obvious pain and frustration.

This was a common exchange that I often overlooked, but sometimes I would drop the spoon, or fork, and just walk away.

After that final explosion of frustration, I went home. Later that night I got a call from my mom telling me that he had passed away. So, the words “Don’t ask me so damn many questions,” will forever ring in my head as the last thing he ever said to me.

I have since blamed the final exchanges on the disease, but I could not help taking it to heart. I am, after all, a little boy, even at sixty-one, still trying to grow up in many ways. I longed to hear my father tell me he was proud of me, that he loved me, and that I was a man. Somehow, I find it hard to really “grow up” without having ever heard that from my dad.

I have, however, endeavored to never let my son, or my granddaughters, feel that way. I want them to know I am proud of them and that I love them more than my own life. I have never held anything back, even at the risk of hurting more than I could ever bear should something ever happen to either of them.

My mother will read this and be angry saying, “Oh, your daddy loved you. He showed his love in many ways.”

My response is always the same, “So why didn’t he ever just say it - just once?”

People that met my dad loved him almost immediately. He was funny and engaging and never seemed to meet a stranger. I am not that freely engaging, but I do have his sense of humor.

I am appreciative of that gift, but it would have been nice to have heard those words, just once.

ONE IS THE LONELIEST NUMBER

Well, it's not Sunday yet, but here's my witness...it goes out to someone special:

How do you survive as an only child, or as a lonely person? You have to find someone to talk to, and maybe someone who will give you a hug at just the right time. But it was a little difficult in my situation, but I worked it out in my own way.

I was born in a little town in North Alabama, in 1946, in my great-grandfather’s bed. Mom had gotten too impatient at the hospital and came home early. My dad gave ol’ Doc Cotton a five-dollar bill for his trouble. I was an only child until my brother came along when I was ten. As do many only children I talked with myself and spent hours in the company of imaginary friends. I even knew at an early age that I was the marrying type. I wanted to be needed.

I often pretended to be Flash Gordon as I played on mother's bed, and fiercely protected a pillow propped against my back, as I fought off all kind of evil aliens. The pillow was Dale, Flash's beautiful girlfriend, and just as real to me. I was there for her, and she was there for me.

My family moved on the average of every 1.3 years, which meant I attended nine different schools in my first twelve years of education, it was hard to get to know someone well enough to let them inside your head. I used humor to break the ice during my many first days at school, or when meeting new people. And even though I could not carry a tune in a bucket, I have always used music and movies to validate my feelings, and it still seems to work today to a certain extent. However, today I have found a better way to cope with loneliness.

"One is the loneliest number you'll ever do,” is a line from a song by Three Dog Night. This and songs like, "Tears of a Clown,” and "Tuesday is Gone" were songs I easily identified with. I was "one" for many years. I think this had a lot to do with me latching on to God by age fourteen. I could talk to Him at any time. He got me through the dark and lonely nights in Vietnam, as I stood post on the airfield at DaNang. He helped me through the University of Tennessee, and was with me as I drove back and forth from forty miles away for three solid years - alone.

It was to God that I held my only son up to, on a beautiful starlit night, just like Kunta Kenta, in the movie “Roots,” and asked that He might use him in is work. He also helped me when my first marriage ended in divorce, after the sin of pride invaded us both. This was followed by a brief marriage born out of loneliness and lust that was barely consummated. Having been raised and baptized a "good" Baptist this second mistake nearly ended my life.

In a drunken fit and rage born of loneliness, I hugged a shotgun and contemplated the worst. After realizing that it would be my mother who would find my brains in Picasso like patterns on the wall, I quickly threw the shotgun aside and went boldly before the throne: "You said you would never put on me more than I could take...well this was almost it. I can't handle it anymore! You've got to take care of it from now on or I won't be responsible for what happens."

It was barely two weeks later, after being pressured into attending a class reunion, that I was prodded into speaking to Judy, whom I had secretly admired through my junior and senior years in high school. Since then Ms. Judy and I have not been apart in twenty-six years. And since then I have not done anything without consulting my Heavenly Father.

One is not a lonely number anymore. Judy and I are one, and you see, He is One too! The difference between what one was and what one is now, is His ONE includes us all. We are all the same. We are all His children.

I am only telling you this because God asked me to. I encourage you to seek friendships that are joined as One. Seek like minds, like goals, and warm hearts burning to share love, as He first loved us. I do think we are failing in the instructions of Paul. We do not greet each other enough in “an Holy kiss,” and I submit that you cannot give a proper kiss without first giving a proper hug!

So how do you survive being lonely? Find a buddy, talk to them, hug them, and most importantly, keep talking to your daddy, as a friend often refers to God. He will be what you need. You might even try going to Church, joining a social club, or even start a blog! Yes, you will be surprised at the friends you find in the blogging community. You will find brothers and sisters with common interest and experiences are what you need. And start greeting your friends with a hug and maybe “an Holy kiss,” at least on the cheek!