by Bob Thompson
Without exception, they were my buddies and I looked forward to their regular visits, but Hog-Jaw, the big-boned RC Cola route driver, had, without doubt, the most impressive derriere and made the best presentation of it. All the drink vendors’ routines required bending over, but none of the others made any memorable presentation of their unnoteworthy duffs.
They each took up distinctive stances while collecting the empty glass bottles stored on the floor at the end of the drink cooler. Most got down on their knees or took a baseball catcher’s crouch position for the task, but Hog-Jaw remained standing, spreading his feet far apart and bending his thick upper torso low to the Nehi, Diet Rite, and RC bottles, reaching down as he sorted them into their respective wooden crates, and leaving his keister stuck straight up in the air. The stance reminded me of a giraffe bending down to get a drink. I couldn’t help but be fascinated by his gray uniform pants straining tightly across his caboose—so tight that in my ten-year-old estimation, even the slightest tap would split the seam, freeing his booty from its too-small confines.
One day, unable to resist any longer, I came up behind Hog-Jaw with Granny’s industrial-grade flyswatter and, as Dizzy Dean would have described it on Game of the Week, “He ain’t bunting, folks, he’s swinging for the fence.” As the heavy window-screen swatter made solid contact with his bum, I heard a ripping sound and let the swatter fall. Adrenaline rushed through me as I turned, let out a squeal, and beat a path toward the back door. My pace increased when I heard the yell and heavy footsteps behind me. Hog-Jaw was in full pursuit, bare butt, split pants, and all!
I flew out the back door, making a beeline toward the sanctuary of the box elder tree in Granny’s front yard, glancing back just as I reached it to see Hog-Jaw trotting off the back porch, headed in my direction.
I caught the first limb and swung up with the grace of a gymnast, vaulting myself up to the next level of limbs; up and up I scrambled skyward on the familiar trunk, up to the highest point I’d ever climbed. I had slipped the surly bonds of earth and was up where larks and eagles flew, on the edge of space, where oxygen was thin.
I was amazed at the view. I could see across the fields. I could see Humpy Morehead’s house and Raymond’s pond where Dad first took me fishing, and way over there was my best friend Crockett’s house.
I knew that Hog-jaw was too big to be much of a climber and I was safe up here in my favorite hideout from the troubles down on earth.
High in my safe house after my hurried ascent, I now took time to adjust my stance and remove my foot from its uncomfortable position wedged into a V where the tree trunk and a limb intersected. I tried to move it, but it was stuck hard. Uh-oh. That had never happened before.
My satisfied gloating quickly turned to horror as I looked down to see a large fleshy hand firmly grasping my ankle. Further down, I saw a huge face grinning up at me. The giant had not climbed the tree; he didn’t have to—he was standing on the ground reaching a good seven feet into the air and had a firm grip on my ankle! Everything looks bigger when you’re little.
A sudden loud crack at the backyard party brought me back from my fond memories of Hog-Jaw to the pine tree and my son. Evidently, while I was back at the grocery in Ragland, a pine branch had broken under Ian’s foot and I watched in horror as gravity tick-tocked him back and forth from limb to limb, down through the close-together branches till at last he slammed to the ground with a breath-knocking thud.
Time was blurred until I got to him. I could see no blood, punctures, or body parts at odd angles, just lungs temporarily without air and a few scrapes. At that moment, I didn’t care if he was going to be like me, as long as he was alive; but I did have doubts whether he’d ever be much of a climber.
It was a suspicion I held throughout his childhood. He would be like me in so many ways but, owing to his shaky start, climbing to high places was probably not going to be one of them. I accepted that. My proclivity for alternative experiences led me to a passion for travel, and that was something I could easily share with my son. My own father and I had been alike in many ways, but we had not shared the love of travel.
Dad’s Navy experiences in the Pacific seemed to have satiated his wanderlust, and except for a single weeklong trip to Pensacola, Florida, before the interstates were built, our family did not spend many nights away from Dad’s birthplace in Ragland, Kentucky.
It was far different for me. In college I’d hitchhiked to Florida on spring break, partied at Mardi Gras a few months before graduation, and backpacked around Europe the following summer.
As my twenties progressed, so did the pace of my travel: the Rockies, the West Coast, Mexico, and Canada all whetted my appetite. Then my corporate career took off and I crisscrossed the country from Maine to California, Key West to Seattle, racking up millions of frequent-flyer miles. I kept mental notes on my favorite places and vowed to take my family back to the ones I loved. Starting with the summer before my son’s senior year in high school, I took the family on the first of many trips to Europe. By the time Ian graduated from college he’d flown east across the Atlantic six times.
After his college years we continued to travel as a family, and during a lazy, shady picnic at the two-thousand-year-old Roman aqueduct over the Gardon River in southern France I made a discovery. Walking down to the river’s stony edge, I watched as Ian studied the high cliffs on the opposite bank, downstream from the ancient structure. Finally, he asked me to hold his camera. As I stood in ankle-deep water, he waded out and then swam across the river. To my great surprise he effortlessly climbed up the forty-foot cliff face, waved to me as I adjusted the shutter speed, and jumped!
I don’t know if it was his intention to prove something to me, but he did. I had to go back and rework all the memories tainted by that one rotten pine limb.
I had never climbed up a sheer rock cliff like that! It looked so easy for him, he must have learned that in college. He was more than a climber—he was a jumper too!
The picture I took of him, midway through his French cliff dive, hangs on my office wall … right beside a later one of him and me jumping out of an airplane together.
I turned out to be a lot like my son.
Catfish Throw
Rod Stewart famously sang, “Every picture tells a story, don’t it?”
Recently, I came across a decades-old photo of my son with an odd look on his face. His arms are extended out with palms up, supporting a catfish wider than his seven-year-old chest. The fish’s head and tail are sticking out on either side of him. In that picture I saw my own Huckleberry Finn childhood, where fishing was near to religion. Jesus fished—it’s in the Bible.
A fishing line is, after all, a connection to an unseen world, a parallel universe. It is also a form of meditation and a centuries-old bonding ritual between kids and their parents and grandparents.
On the day of the picture, we had settled into a grassy spot on the pond bank at what is now the Parklands of Floyds Fork near Louisville. I explained to my son that catfish feed near the bottom, so there was no need for a cork to hold the bait up. We’d just put a weight on the line above the hook, attach a nightcrawler, toss the whole thing out into the dark depths, and wait. I was gratified when within a short time his line jerked tight. “Pull back on it,” I coached, knowing the exciting sensation of feeling a mysterious foe from across a boundary to another world.
Reveling in the epic and timeless struggle, I watched his intense face, vicariously living the energy of the moment. He was doing well, keeping the line tight and working the well-adjusted reel. Nearing the bank, the kraken broke to the surface and revealed the head and whiskers of a colossal catfish as he roiled and muddied the shallow water. In my mind, I saw my son triumphantly holding the fish and having his picture taken for posterity to see his accomplishment. I knew this scene; I’d played it before. From somewhere deep in his DNA, the fish also remembered the script and through a crack in time, we made eye contact before he defiantly spit the hook
back toward us. The line went slack as time slowed into successive freeze-frames.
I saw my son’s face start to change as the realization barged into both our consciousness that this might not be a triumphant moment after all. I knew well the emptiness departing energy leaves in its wake as a struggle is lost. I knew there would be other disappointing moments in his life, but I did not want this to be one of them.
Before thought, I found myself flying, leaping out into the pond with arms extended and palms up, scooping them down into the murky water and then up over my head. I looked toward the heavens following the arch of resultant pond spray, and there, highlighted against the sky, was a startled catfish in mid-flight.
He landed in the grass and was flopping back toward the water as I jumped to the bank to block his escape. My son’s expression could be described as stunned elation.
Now, thirty years later, I showed my son the picture and we relived that long-ago moment. I asked about his facial expression. He explained it was one of confusion as he actively entertained the thought that his dad possessed hidden powers and might be a superhero.
At least on that day, I was.
Jump
The second time she woke him on the morning of his twenty-first birthday he still had a smile on his face. She had his favorite song, “Jump,” playing on the stereo: “You say you don’t know / You won’t know till you begin / Go ahead and jump.” Yep, that was his theme song, and his chosen persona. He was as hip and edgy as Van Halen or any other rock star.
Already up and dressed, this gorgeous girl, grinning at him, sat on the edge of the bed in a short strapless sundress. This was shaping up to be one of the best days of his life. He was a lucky man and knew it. “What are you up to?” he asked.
With a mischievous twinkle in her eye, she handed him an envelope. On the outside she’d written, “Finding love is a lot like flying. Happy birthday.” She explained that it was the first line in her unfinished poem about him, and it had given her an idea for his birthday present. As he opened it she said, “I know you’ll love this!”
As he read the gift card, his next few heartbeats nearly bounced him off the mattress. “One free skydiving lesson!” He looked up at her with wild eyes.
“It’s so crazy, and so are you,” she said, kissing his forehead.
“Uh, yeah,” he said, without much conviction. “Well, I’ll have to figure out when I can do this.”
“No, you don’t, silly—it’s for today! See here on the card?” She pointed.
He almost broke a tooth biting down on his latest lip stud. Trying to maintain his signature cool look, his insides were in fullstop cardiac panic mode; and if he heard those damn words “Go ahead and jump” one more time he was going to puke. He might anyway. “You paid for me to jump out of an airplane … today? You can’t afford that!”
“Yes, I can, I’ve been saving tips from the restaurant for months,” she said. “Get dressed. Let’s go.”
The day, he thought, was going downhill quickly.
She looked so happy and excited, a lot more than he was. He was an Earth sign and not so sure about this flying stuff. But this was a woman no man wanted to disappoint. He knew the nearby military base had an unlimited number of young men, his age, who would jump out of a plane for nothing more than a smile from her. And she’d paid $200. He was in a spot.
They were already in the hangar at the airport filling out paperwork when Ian, Brian, and I got there. It was hard not to notice her, standing by his side at the counter, helping him slowly fill out the legal forms. We finished our paperwork, paid, and went through the mandatory requirements: video, equipment orientation, and jump training. It wasn’t difficult to tell something was wrong. He was not as happy as a guy should have been with this gorgeous vivacious girl hanging all over him.
With hundreds of jumps between them, the instructors, parachute packers, pilot, and cameraman delighted in including multiple unsettling jokes in their pre-flight briefing. As the rest of us laughed, the boyfriend nervously grimaced at the sarcastic quips about what to do when your parachute doesn’t open as the crew fitted us into our two-man jump harnesses.
Since they had arrived before us, he was supposed to be the first one to jump, but everyone could see he was having a problem moving in the direction of the plane. Boldness might be a friend of his, but courage was only an acquaintance. “Come on, man. Let’s jump,” the instructor said from the hangar door. The boy was frozen white. The girl, unshaken in her affection, was hopeful. With all of us watching, it was more than awkward.
To break the tension, I made him an offer. “If you’d like, one of us could jump first and if we live through it, maybe it’ll make you more comfortable.” He nodded with a tight-lipped smile. “Fine, let’s go,” said the instructor.
The couple moved off to one side as the instructor rechecked my harness, pulling it so tight that it arched my shoulders down toward my butt and made my belly stick out in the last picture before I got in the plane, an open-door fifty-year-old Cessna 172. It took about twenty minutes for us to climb to twelve thousand feet. From two miles up, the hangar was just a tiny dot and I could see Louisville’s skyline, forty miles away.
As we sat on the floor of the seatless plane, the jokes continued, noting that I, not yet buckled into the instructor, was the only one without a parachute. I took that as my cue to slide back between the jumpmaster’s legs, allowing him to fasten the four anchor points at the back of my harness to his front, and together we scooted awkwardly across the floor to the door. This tandem arrangement meant that in order for my jump partner to sit in the open door, I had to uncomfortably dangle outside the airplane until he was ready to push off.
It was a relief when I felt him shove us out and down. I didn’t have the anticipated stomach-in-your-throat sensation in that first rush of falling. I enjoyed the feeling of weightlessness so much I forgot to extend my arms and legs in the spread-eagle position, causing us to tumble a couple of times until the instructor’s yelling in my ear reminded me.
I was flying, so consumed by the sensation that the instructor had to tap me hard on the arm, reminding me to pay attention to my wrist altimeter. We were already nearing the five-thousand-foot mark where it was my responsibility to pull the rip cord. The parachute opened with a hard jerk, and I was disappointed that the freefall portion of the ride was over. To the cheers of the small crowd, the instructor guided us into a soft touchdown in the pile of loose gravel near the hangar.
Exhilarated, I sought out the reluctant kid to tell him how awesome it had been. It didn’t help; he was still full of hesitancy and excuses. “I really want to do it, I really do.”
Adding to his misery and embarrassment, word had spread far and wide about the hot girl in hangar 3. A cold-footed jumper isn’t that unusual, but his girlfriend was drawing a crowd. Before long, every muscle-bound testosterone-laden instructor, parachute packer, pilot, and off-duty soldier from nearby Fort Knox were strutting through the hangar checking out the scene. Everyone was professional, supportive, and understanding to his face, but outside in small groups you could hear loud laughter, speculation about his and her body parts, and boasting of their own willingness to do whatever that girl asked.
Both Brian’s and Ian’s offer to go ahead of the boy were accepted. The large gallery watched in barely suppressed gleeful disdain as the fear-stuck boy repeated his mantra over and over after every jump: “I really want to do it, I really do.”
When Ian landed, the instructor came over and told the couple that the sun was too low for another jump; he offered perfunctory words of understanding and, despite company policy to the contrary, refunded the girl’s money. The poor boy was grateful for that small amount of face-saving. Grateful to be alive, he reiterated that he “really wanted to do it” and that he “would, for sure, do it on another day.”
We all nodded in sympathy. Maybe he thought he’d be back, but everybody else knew the truth and somewhere deep inside he did too.
>
Losing love is a lot like dying.
We also knew that the last line of her poem, when she finished it, would not be about him.
That’s My Dad
There were two outs with bases loaded in the bottom of the last inning with our team clinging to a one-run lead. The second baseman moved a little to his right as the Little League pitcher started his windup. The sharp crack of the bat left no doubt that the ball was headed on a laser line out of the infield, so fast that the infielders were frozen in place. On both benches and in the stands, all eyes had already moved to the outfield along the path of the white streak, trying to catch up with the ball. “Where’d it go?” Not seeing the ball where they expected, the spectators’ eyes quickly moved back along its last known trajectory.
The second baseman had not moved his feet, but he was out of his defensive crouch, standing straight up, his glove hand still above his head and a surprised and satisfied smile on his face. It had happened so fast that no one saw his arm shoot up full length in the blink of an eye. He wasn’t even sure what had happened—it was pure instinct. All who witnessed it let out a collective “Ooohhhh!”
I knew the feeling as the ball snapped perfectly into the web of his glove, driving his skinny ten-year-old arm back with its impact. I knew because it was the catch I’d dreamed of as a kid but never got to make. Like him, I had quick hands and was good with glove and bat, but we lived too far out in the country, decades before Little League moms in minivans; so except for choose-up games at recess, I had to live my baseball fantasies vicariously on our black-and-white TV, listening to Dizzy Dean’s and Pee Wee Reese’s folksy commentary in Game of the Week.