“Life is full of guys who never knew what hit ‘em”
--Eugene O’Neil
It was the mid Sixties and I was in my mid teens and my dad was in his mid forties. He had worked his way up in the textile industry and we had landed in a very comfortable ranch style home in a respectable suburban neighborhood in a quaint little southern town .
I was in a scout troop with a couple of other guys, Bobby and Jeff and my brother and a couple of others. We explored a lot of stuff but mainly we explored ourselves and our interests and various careers that we might like to pursue. I remember touring the plant where my Dad worked and being proud of my Dad’s position with respect to the other boys fathers.
There was also another group of boys.
They were from a nice downtown neighborhood and were a little further along in their explorations than I was at the time. They had already discovered beer and cigarettes and midnight carousing. I could just have well have been with them that night, and would rather have been , if I knew them yet. But I was still a year or two away from that meeting.
Circumstances conspired that night to bring our two groups together in a most unexpected way.
Jeff and Bobby, and others I no longer remember ,were driving into town early one morning and stopped by our house to see if my brother wanted to go into town with them. But circumstances conspired to give him chores to do instead. About a mile from our house, their car was struck in the side by a large truck. The truck driver had driven right through an intersection usually protected by a stop sign. But someone had removed it during the night; a boyish, drunken, tragic prank. Jeff was hurt badly, but Bobby Price died there on Highway 97 at 15 years of age .I doubt he ever knew what hit him.
I can still feel the heavy pall I held in my hand as we bore him to the church and I thought “Bobby was never this heavy when he was alive”. I barely knew who Bobby was until he was killed. Then somehow he became a close friend, at least in my mind.
A couple of years later I met a group of guys who seemed to have a good reason to drink heavily every weekend, though I never heard the reason spoken aloud . I don’t know if they were the ones who pulled that stop sign up, but they seemed to be carrying a burden as heavy as any pall. I was just
grateful to have found a group of explorers willing to explore what really interested me at the time. Drinking.
I drove through that intersection , and my old neighborhood the other day, as I do every time I go anywhere near that place. I am drawn to the place where those events conspired. And as I drove through this time , I did the math and was struck by the fact that I have nearly reached the age my Dad was back then. And my son is now the one who is becoming, in the mid Nineties, approaching his teens. I have worked my way up in the counseling industry and we have landed in a very comfortable ranch style home in a respectable suburban neighborhood in a quaint little southern town.
And Bobby Price is still 15 years old. And no matter how many times I drive through that place , I will never find him there.
But I am still here , having come full circle, waiting for events to conspire again, though the older I become, the less comfortable I am with the unexpected .My son loves it , though. The Unexpected .He can hardly wait to be smacked in the face with it. I guess I can understand, from where I stand now ,why my Dad was so afraid of upsetting the status quo of that place.
And why I was so thoroughly unafraid.
Dave Seward
October , 1995
No comments:
Post a Comment