It's grey today, over cast and sprinkling just a little. It's also much too cool for the first week in May. I did my laundry today, not that exciting but when I was done and heading home, for some reason I turned right instead of left. Left was home. Right was a trip through a ghost town. I was the only one who could see the ghost or hear the echos, but they were there.
I drove past the Harley dealership. It used to be Roy's Western Store. My FAVORITE place to stroll when I was a child. Even before I got my pony, I knew that store well and they knew me. There was this turquoise suede Western saddle that I would drool over every time I went in there. I bought my Breyer farm horses from there. I only had two or three. I wasn't into collecting plastic horses, not when there were real ones to ride. I saw all that with just a glance over there. I saw the parking lot with beige puddles of water that you had to dodge when walking into the store. I didn't see all the yellow lines that are painted on the now paved parking lot of the dealership. I saw my first duck, Peeper, in the bottom of a cardboard box with a big red light on him. I bought him for 50 cents. I had so much fun with that duck. I saw my friend, Tammy Schafer with her wiry strawberry blond hair, being my shadow, as usual, running her hand along the silver on the fancy bridles hanging on the wall. I saw all that with one glance.
Further down the road another left turn had me driving past Scott Picardy's house. Scott was a very special best friend of mine for years. I met him in 2nd or 3rd grade. I was in trouble and my punishment was to stay inside and miss recess. Cruel and unusual punishment for my crime, whatever it was. Scott was inside because he was sick. He had Cystic Fibrosis. It was years before I understood that it was a death sentence. Riding past his house I heard his laugh. OH he had a beautiful deep, raspy laugh. His smile was big like caricature drawings of Jerry Lewis smiling. Almost all my memories of Scott involve that laugh. He died at 22 years old. They said that was a long life for someone with CF. But it wasn't long enough.
I drove on past the very elementary school where Scott and I met. I heard the voices of my childhood classmates, smelled the hamburger and gravy cooking for our lunch and felt my feet running out through the battlefield, as we called the back field. I played SO much baseball there and kickball and tag, lotsa lotsa games of tag. My friend, Sandy, fell from the swings and broke her arm. The chain broke and she went sailing through the air. Learning about the accident my dad stated the obvious, "Why do they have pavement on playgrounds?" The cracks in the pavement were great for playing marbles. I wonder whatever happened to my collection?
A right turn at the corner had me passing Luana's childhood house, the one where we went for Brownie's and Girl Scouts. GOD I hated Girl Scouts. I could hear her mom and Patti's mom as they tried to teach us how to sew on buttons. Whatever. I hated doing that girly stuff to earn patches on a sash that I hated to wear. On meeting days we were supposed to wear our uniforms to school. It was a dress, no WONDER I hated it! Another left turn, then another and I was at the corner where my ex-husband, my high school boyfriend's house was. His parents moved away years ago. The lot next to their house was sold and a much too big house was built in the place of my ex-father-in-laws beautiful vegetable garden. He was a funny man, I liked him. My ex-mother-in-law, not so much. I could hear Rob's voice, his nervous chatter the night of our first date when he took me to show me the house. It was being built and didn't have the flooring. He talked SO much, which is really funny because he truly is a man of very few words. The pine tree his parents planted in the front yard the year they moved in, is gone, cut down. Rob's basketball hoop is still up. He played on the school's varsity team. Yup, I was the girl from the other side of the tracks' and he was the rich jock. His dad was my dad's boss at work. That romance/marriage was doomed. Our son will turn 30 this May. The marriage didn't even last 3 years. We were SO young. I still had my braces on when we got married. One quick look over and I saw the first date and smelled the fresh paint of that new house, back in 1979.
I followed the curve and crossed over Borton St. to pick up the drive where it continued on the other side. I drove past Luana's house that she lived in when we were in high school. OMG, the nights bringing her home when we were SO drunk. Her mother hated me. She thought I was a bad influence on Luana. The truth is Luana is the one that taught ME how to drink. She taught me how to sit outside of a party store and pay someone a buck or two, to buy for us. Our drink of choice, Slo Gin and Orange Juice. We would pour out part of the juice from a gallon jug of OJ and then dump a 5th of Slo Gin in. We would drink from the jug while driving around town. We would sometimes end up at parties where everyone knew what we drank because we had reddish/pink stains around our mouths. She was popular in school. Her dad was the Biology teacher and coached Forensics and Debate. Hanging with her I met the 'theater crowd.' I went to some weird parties with the drama group, lol. Luana died February 2nd, 2011 of Pulmonary Hypertension. She was only 48. Just by glancing at her house, I saw us parked outside 7-11 waiting for the right person to ask if he would buy for us.
I knew where I was heading, to the river. I just took a trip through my memories to get there. I hadn't been back at the river since the day we buried my dad. Everyone went to the graveside service but me. I couldn't; not give him up again. I said my goodbyes at the church. I said my final goodbyes by the river where we used to launch our boat. If we weren't there launching the boat, we were there on his motorcycle, seeing how many boats were going out. His motorcycle rides always led to water. Sometimes they were a 10 minute ride to Smith Park Boat Launch in Essexville, sometimes they were 3 1/2 hour rides up the the Mackinaw Bridge and Lake Superior, then taking the long way home along the shoreline of Lake Huron. In the fall it would be riding along Lake Michigan to head over to deer camp to see how the site was and what would be needed for October 1st, opening day of bow season.
I turned off the van. The water was so brown and rather choppy. One small green motor boat was making a slow go of it heading back in to their boat launch. This boat launch didn't get used much anymore. A new one was built on the other side of the river with a large parking lot, three docks and security to watch your vehicle while you were out on the Bay. There were large chunks of ice here, the day we buried dad. I remember watching seagulls walking on several ice floes. I looked at the dock and I remembered the April dad couldn't wait to get the boat in the water. So here we were, maybe 51 degree weather, another cold dark day and dad wants to put the boat out. We were all bundled up. My brother David had his snowmobile boots on. I remember we all had big jackets on too. It's dangerous to go out on the river that time of year because there is SO much debris in the rushing early spring waters, but dad wanted to go out. The poor man had to launch the boat himself with three kids, 5, 6 and 9. NOT a lot of help for him. He was barking orders and giving directions but we managed to get it done. Went out on the water but only went out to the mouth of the Bay and back. It was just too rough and there was just too many logs floating in the water. Now came the process of putting the boat back on the trailer, again, with three kids. Dad was trying to tie the boat to the dock and explain to me how to direct it onto the trailer, once he gave me the signal. Mark and David just stood around staring, not knowing what to do. Dad was starting to lose patience because every time he backed up, he stepped on David. So he kept saying to David, "Back up, move, BACK UP...out of my way.." Suddenly, there was a sploosh sound. No one saw it happen, but we all heard it. We turned around and there was only a few ripples in the water where David went right to the bottom. His snowmobile boots might as well have been made of cement! Without missing a beat my dad said, "Damn it." He knelt down calmly and stuck his hand down in the water where the ripples were. He grabbed my brother by the hair and pulled him out of the water and onto the dock. David was screaming as soon as he cleared the surface. That water was cold and murky, brown like today. Dad was laughing. The whole thing didn't shake him up until he looked at me and said, "Don't tell your mother!"
I sat staring at the dock, thinking of all the fishing trips, all the sunburns, all the days of swimming that all started with that boat launch. It started raining a bit more but I got out of the van anyway. I walked over the the cement benches, the ones boys from my senior class made in shop for the park. They are sinking and you can't even sit on them. I looked around at the park and how it changed. It had a Merry-Go-Round, a swing set, a tire climber and one of those odd swinging gate contraptions that make you dizzy, when I was a kid. All the tires are gone and the wooden boat they built in the 80's is gone as well. No Merry-Go-Round and no swinging gait. I remembered all the bike rides to that park. I remembered walking my beloved Golden Retriever, Lacey, to that park. How she'd start to shake as we got close. She LOVED the water and couldn't wait to jump in. I started looking at the trees. There were still some huge willows but many of the biggest branches had been sawed off. The trees were odd looking, sorta like a cactus and a willow tree had a baby. I tried to remember where in the park was the tree I used to climb. Then I realized that theses gnarled, old willows were baby trees when I came to park as a child. With all the ghost I saw today, realizing HOW much time had passed from my first visit to that park until today, I started to weep. In an instant I could slip back there and watch my brothers and I as ghostly images, playing in the park. I felt no sadness all day, even though it was grey, even though I saw ghosts of people who are no longer in my life and some who are no longer on this earth, I wasn't sad until that very moment, looking at that old willow. I felt a rush of loss, a rush of panic, a rush of wondering if anyone else had any of these memories. Would they all disappear when I'm gone, taking all the ghosts with me. That made me terribly sad because they were such beautiful memories. I decided that my son Nathan is right, it's time to write them all down. I'm not sure where to start but I do know that I started today, right now, as the rain still falls and the laughter of my ghosts still echos in my mind.
