Being There
Which one’s the sock drawer? I’m momentarily stumped, standing in front of the dresser. Which is funny in a way, because I know every one of the ninety boards that comprise the ten-drawer archetype of Shaker beauty in our Davenport bedroom. Over the course of a month of nights and weekends, I built it way back when in Dad’s garage, after spending a full day picking through a stack of figured cherry for just the right pieces. Every splined dado, every drawer fitted just so, every dovetail and there’s a more than a hundred of em’ is mine. A quarter century of cherry aging and periodic oil and wax. It’s gorgeous.
I’m happy it keeps Marcia company. But that doesn’t solve the problem of which one is the sock drawer. Five days and four nights outstrips the carry-on bag that speeds me through airports, so I need to dip into the Iowa supply of socks. It’s one of the two bottom ones, I remember. I guess wrong, and long Midwest underwear greets me instead. As anti-climaxes go, it’s an easy one to recover from.
So are four Cubs losses, a flood that’s not much of anything and a brief stop at Modern Woodman Park where Dave Heller can’t be found in the time I have to spare before picking up Amanda at the airport. The Malin family is together and that’s all that really matters. New stories. Old stories. Home-cooked meals. Giggling at Sponge Bob. Fully stocked bedrooms. It’s the best. Mowing the lawn, washing every car, cleaning the gutter, some resto work on the Triumph, Culvers for lunch, a quick trip to City Hall. It’s all good.
Colin and me take the Triumph out for a shakedown cruise and end up at Rand Wonio Field, where he played his 13 and 14 year-old seasons. Colin notices there’s new and higher outfield fences now that the league allows 15 year-olds too, and he instantly does the math on exit velocity vs. fence height to declare that the all-time league record we set for offense can’t ever be broken now. We get some snacks and watch the start of a game.
Top of the first, the first three batters load up the bases. Pitcher is having some trouble settling in. Clean-up hitter (as Colin usually was) steps in and we’re set for some pitching strategy versus slugger excitement. Instead, the kid squares to bunt! Colin and me instantly look at each other and say (too loud) “what the …”. He misses, and then gets another bunt sign. Misses again. Takes a swing at the third pitch and misses. We are aghast at the small ball tactics (no way to live, especially in the top of the first, bases loaded and no outs) but leave the field fully satisfied our all-time league record for offense is quite safe.
Earlier in the week during a call, Marcia said she joked with Colin that the back of the Jeep probably is full of tools, baseball equipment and climbing gear. She knows me well. It’s like a y chromosome vending machine back there, in part because the FOS isn’t flush with storage space and in part because that’s just how – left to my own devices – I roll. Back in high school, it was hockey gear, an assortment of blunt force weaponry and breaking and entering tools. So make fun if you will, but there’s at least been a bit of evolution in the kitbag.
It’s the devolution that worries me. The singularity (hey, that’s a much better word than solitary) of the Seaside / FOS existence has some benefits. Make your own schedule. Any music, anytime. The Jeep stocked for adventure, with nary a Kleenex box in sight. Pie for breakfast. Belching without recrimination. But I worry about regression and distance created in a thousand small moments of me on station in California, and the family elsewhere. It’s the kind of thing that can make you angry as the libel lawsuit waits for release, and I see other empty-nester couples enjoying life together. But anger’s as pointless as small ball in the first inning.
Which I’m reminded of at home, when Colin says he is taking one of Dad’s duck decoys for his apartment. Dear ol’ Dad sold duck decoys to supplement his social security disability income, which wasn’t much. I pick up the duck and it has a profound effect on me. Here’s something Dad didn’t just touch. He made it. I caress the pine in my hands and feel the carving as he felt it, with hands about the same age as his at the time he made it. But for him, this chunk of pine would have had some other - less beautiful - fate.
Fate. Dad was dealt a bad hand. Tuberculosis. Unable to work. For a time, his sons in an orphanage. He turned to craft to help keep a roof over our heads. I tell Colin how I used to help with the carving when I was in college. Dad would mail me ducks in progress and I’d do detail carving and send them back. He sold them at art / craft shows. This one, the one Colin is taking to his college apartment, stayed in the family. It’s a talisman to the craft of surviving hardship and carving out a life. I’m happy it will watch over Colin’s upperclassman years.
The goodbyes are hard because they are, and I’m still back in Iowa in my head when I strap into seat 21E on the DFW tarmac for the second leg westward. The octogenarian to my left asks if I’m heading home. A friendly question, it deserves a friendly response. But I didn’t know there’d be a pop quiz. “Home. What’s home?”. It ain’t the place where the socks reside in a pull-out plastic bin. That’s where a city manager faces the days, and builds a team to carve a community's better future. Home is where we giggle along with Sponge Bob, watch our four-hole hitting grandson shake off the bunt sign, and pull socks out of the second to the bottom, left hand drawer, hand-crafted way back when.
We’ll get there.
