Sometimes the shots would pass through the net with a pleasant “swish” but most of the time they would thump off of the back board and I would have to run the ball down before it rolled off the end of the driveway.
Mrs. Beshears walked down her driveway next door, thumbing through the mail as she passed. She paused and began telling me all of the wonderful things that Ginger was up to. Ginger was her daughter and she was one day older than I. She went to school and worked two part time jobs. She had recently been signed with the Ford’s Modeling Agency in New York City and would be moving shortly. “So, what do you plan to do?”
I hated the question because I didn’t know the answer. “Well, I’ll graduate in two weeks, then I’ll go to work and work until I’m sixty five. But for a couple more weeks, I’m just gonna shoot basketball!”
The spring of 1974 was the spring of my life. I was working part time at A&P and counting the days until graduation. I disliked school with a somewhat irrational passion. At eighteen years old, the thirteen years of kindergarten and school had consumed a major portion of my life! But now, as the long awaited time approached, I had no idea what I wanted next. I didn’t consider myself university material and yet everyone seemed to expect me to have a ready answer and a well-conceived plan.
That was forty years ago. Think about it. Forty. I stare at the number as though it doesn’t belong to me. Forty years should be a reference point for some old person that I may become someday. Not now! And yet, there it is!
The sixties was an incredibly long decade. I entered it at four years and left it at fourteen. That’s an amazing amount of growth and change for ten years. The summers were almost eternal and even the two week break at Christmas seemed to stretch forever. As I entered the seventh grade, it seemed strange and somehow foreboding to think about writing 1970 in the coming January when dating a paper. My whole life I had written nineteen “sixty-something”.
The seventies took me to twenty four years. From a kid who could not yet drive to a married man struggling to survive the Jimmy Carter economy. Remembering this time, I not only can recall the year a song was popular. I can tell you who sang it and what season of the year it peaked on the charts. After an unremarkable year of Bible school, I came home and got a job on a framing crew. In less than two years, I talked Dwight into going into business with me and forming our own crew. I had never even cut a set of rafters, but I had made notes on the subject while watching an experienced carpenter do it. I figured we could make more money learning as we went than we could while waiting for someone to teach us and we did. Eventually we became experts at it and could build anything someone could draw. Framing was a lot of fun as long as you didn’t mind blistering under the summer sun or shivering on a bleak, cold, windy day. As a matter of fact, no matter what the circumstances, I never, ever wished I was back in school.
The eighties took Dwight and me to south Florida where we spent three and a half good years working for the folks who were collecting the twenty per cent interest rate instead of the broke folks back home who were trying to pay the twenty per cent! My two daughters were born in that decade and it ended with Dwight and me working in Charleston, South Carolina helping to repair the devastation wrought by Hurricane Hugo. Though it was picking up speed, time still seemed somewhat manageable as I taught the girls to ride bicycles and how to swim and enjoyed the days with the other young couples at church.
The nineties were a time when the roller coaster of life was just beginning to cross the crest of the giant hill and the energy was gathering for the plunge. For years I had contemplated the fact that I would be forty four years old at the turn of the millennium. And in much the same way as I contemplate my own mortality today, it seemed a little surreal, as though I would never really be that age. In 1996 Dwight and I went our separate ways in business. He wanted to go into the inspection business full time and I kept plugging with construction. It was good for both of us and in the next few years I built some very nice homes for some great clients and grew a lot, business wise. All too soon, it was New Year’s Eve 1999 and I was greatly relieved to learn that at the witching hour, the computers of the world did not fail and I would not need to stand guard over my bottled water and Beanie Weenies to survive. That seems to be the last clear concept of “orderly” time that I experienced.
If writing “1970” felt odd after two thirds of my life having been spent in the sixties, the year “2000” seemed even more unreal. And with this change came “warp speed”. We buried Dad and then just ten weeks later, Mother passed. We lost some great friends and other kin folks as the years began to blur past. We also celebrated marriages and anniversaries as they flew by. And my, how they did fly by!
And now we are into the fourth year of yet another decade and I have the most incredible reminders of the brevity of life and the swiftly flowing days. They are my grandsons Elijah, (two and a half years old as I write this) and Myles (seven months). Not only can I see them changing on an almost daily basis, they bring a joy that is beyond understanding. I see myself as the bearer of the baton in an endless relay. I saw my grandfather pass it to my dad, who passed it to me. And now, as I begin to slow down a little, I need to see that it is safely passed to those who follow.
Forty years! Reunion, anyone? You might as well have posed the question to me as we rode the Tilt-A-Whirl as kids. Spinning round and round on the axis of the half shell in which we sat, the whole platform spun and heaved up and down as it turned. With teeth clinched tightly and hands gripping the rail with all our might, the world around us was a blur! There went the road and the cars, the operator leering at us with the controls in his hand, folks standing around the rail, watching and the other rides at the carnival. Just blurred images that were gone before one could really focus on any of them.
I visited with Mrs. Beshears for a little while last summer. A sweet ninety year old, recently widowed lady living alone for the first time in seventy years or so. She has since passed away, too. And as for that dreaded question of so long ago? Shucks, I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up!
Hal F. Leary
May 30, 3014