The Rest of Her Life

Four years before Rachel was born, we had decided on her name. We had gone to a black-and-white English movie about a little girl and boy. The girl was named Rachel. Betty said, "If we ever have a girl, I want to name her Rachel."

I thought that was fine. At the time, the idea that we would ever have a girl had not yet hit me. In my family, there were five boys and no girls. I knew nothing about girls.

Four years later, I started learning. Rachel was an easy child; she slept all night through from the start. And she was pleasant - laughing and smiling when she was six weeks old.

And she was a whizzer with words. When she was nine months old, she gained renown in the neighborhood for saying "hippopotamus" in front of witnesses. People came over just to see her do that and she always obliged them. There was a rumor that she wouldn't talk unless you gave her a quarter, but I don't believe it.

Over the years, I learned that girls are different from boys, although Rachel and I always thought the same things were funny. She has a little sense of humor that's all her own.

When she hit high school in the early eighties, the world had changed from the one we knew. Her high school generation was the first one to go public with obscenity - the autograph pages in her annuals can not be examined in mixed company, even today. On a more positive note, her generation adopted the word "heinous" as a universal adjective, indicating a general state of opprobrium.

Those were heady days. Then came graduation and, following that, the yawning maw of the rest of her life. Rachel showed no particular inclination or enthusiasm for going to college. Betty was sympathetic to her feelings, but I was adamant that she would go.

Rachel said, "What's so important about going to college?"

I said, "It's important because, if you don't go, then for the rest of your life, you'll wonder what it was all about."

"That's all?"

"That's it."

"Why can't I just get a job?"

"Do you want to work at McDonald's for the rest of your life?"

"Heinous."

So, it was settled. She went to Georgia for a year and then finished at Georgia State, magna cum laude. And she hasn't wondered about it since. But there was still the matter of the rest of her life.

The summer before her graduation, I took her to CDC and helped her get a job. On the way home, I asked her how it felt to be employed. She was reading the qualifications on her job description. She said, "I didn't need to go to college to get this job."

But she enjoyed working in an office. Still, it didn't seem like something she would want to do for the rest of her life. Then she met this guy. All during high school and college, she had not shown much interest in any particular boy. So I was surprised, when Betty told me, one evening: "Rachel has met somebody." He was Rob Merritt, a Health Scientist at CDC.

They hit it off. They were suprised to learn that, even though they grew up in different places, they thought the same things were heinous. She brought him home to meet us and he took her home to meet his parents. His father said that he never thought a son of his could ever attract the interest of a girl as fine as Rachel.

So, when everyone had been informed, they got married. Now, they have three children - William, 13, Andrew, 9, and Molly, 7. And for the rest of her life, Rachel hasn't wondered about the rest of her life.

Yonge Sonne

Tristram Shandy's father had a theory of names, regarding one's offspring, which for me boiled down to the idea that it's good to have a good name, and bad to have a bad one. Before our first was born, we had several conversations on this topic.

If it were up to me-

It is up to you-

Well then, if it were up to me, and we have a boy, I would name him after Bertrand Russell.

Bertrand?

No, Russell.

I thought Russell was a fine name, and still do. Betty agreed, so we went with that. And it was a boy. But Betty trumped my effort at naming with her choice of an epithet, as she was being wheeled out of the delivery room, still a little giddy from the ordeal. As I took her hand, she managed a sleepy smile and whispered, "He's a yonge sonne."

I didn't get it. Later, she reminded me of Senior English when we had to learn the opening lines of the Canterbury Tales and recite them in the original Middle English...

...Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye....

And so it stuck, as one of the several names by which we refer to Russell. But, since Middle English is not well understood, these days, I prefer the American rendition: I call him Son.

Anyway, he grew up and was a good boy. When he was about six years old, we discovered that, through some strange chance, he had been born an engineer. We had given him a train set for Christmas, complete with transformer, tracks and smoke tablets, and later we found that he had taken the transformer apart and rewired it, for some purpose of his own.



Then, when he was twelve, he came home from school one day with a book he had found in the library. It was a technical manual, describing all the inputs and outputs of the pins on the 8080 Central Processing Unit. He read it every day and soon knew it by heart. We took him to the doctor to see if anything could be done, but the doctor said, rejoice, he's wired for double-E.

So we sent him to Georgia Tech to get the education he needed for that. And soon he was waiting for offers of work to come in. But, for a week or so, after graduation, there weren't any.

He said, "I'm a loser."

But then, the next day, IBM called with a career in designing computer chips, which was just what he wanted to do. It all worked out.

But he wasn't through: he married one of those Nashville Portnoy girls. They have two boys, Matthew and Jared, 12 and 8, both born engineers. Lynn had a difficult delivery with the first and was worn out and recuperating the first few weeks. Russell took over the task of dealing with child and household at the same time and managed them both handily, to our amazement. He bathed, dressed, and fed baby, and changed dirty diapers 24 hours a day. He washed dishes with one hand, while holding the baby in his other arm like a little football. We couldn't believe it. There's nothing in the engineer's manual about dealing with delicate little creatures. Or maybe there is: when I complimented him on his parenting skills, he shrugged it off with an observation. He said, "Even computer chips need a lot of care."

Before it's too late

The word went out: the man was coming to town. This might be the last time, they said. He can't live forever.



Saturday, they started coming in. They came in ships and boats. They came in planes, trains and automobiles. They came in, biking triking and hitch-hiking. They steamed and streamed from every direction.

There were the aged and the infirm, the halt and the lame, the sore in spirit, ancient faces and bad cases, old codgers and draft dodgers, long-time slackers, hackers and safecrackers, double dealers and ballerinas.

They came to pay their respects. To see what kind of moves he had left. They didn't have to wait long.

He showed. With his men behind him, he started it up and it was loud. Everybody grinned and turned up their hearing aids. He labored long and hard, and then he was gone.

Everybody streamed out, gratified. Going across the parking lot, I passed an old mariner with a plastic cup of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He had on a T shirt that said, "I can't march anymore." His hair in back hung in a little ring around his bald head like a little curtain down to his shoulders.

When he saw me, he said, "It wasn't too late! I hope I'll get to see him again!"

I said, "I'm sure he'll be back."

The old grizzler said, "I hope I'll be back!"

So do we all, brother.

Reunion Autobiography Blues

I think my reunion autobiography is pretty funny. What do you think?

I think you didn't mention either of our children by name. Or their children.

You told me you didn't want their names on the Internet.

That wasn't the Internet - it was Patsy Bradley.

I want to make it right: I will dedicate a couple of blogs to our children. I will mention them by name.

Oh, no.

My Kingdom for that Picture

Betty went to Burton and I went to Stokes. We didn't know anybody who went to Woodmont. So, at Hillsboro, she kept seeing Burton People and I kept seeing Stokes people and we never saw any Woodmont people. It was like we were on these tectonic plates that moved around and bumped into each other, but never really came together.

I went to Woodmont once, after school. It was early fall and I remember being out on the basketball court. I had a camera with me. I cannot imagine why I would have been carrying a camera around, but I know I had it because I took a picture with it.

I took a picture of Cam Talley and Trish Champion. Both standing together, in angora sweaters and sheath skirts, holding their books in their arms, and smiling. I pointed my kodak at them and took their picture. I can't believe I had the guts to do that. Cam, I had blown my chance with in first grade, and I never even spoke to Trish Champion until we were both in our forties. But somehow, through gestures and signs, I guess, I conveyed to them both that I wanted to take their picture.

I kept that picture for forty years. It was in a big cardboard box in the attic with hundreds of other pictures, taken over the years, but I knew where it was. One day, Betty told me that she had thrown out all the old pictures in that old box, except those of our immediate family. She knew what she was doing.

But I still have that picture in my mind. It was late afternoon and the sun was behind them, low in the sky. And there were leaves on the ground.

Civics Lesson

In the fall of 1956, we were brand-new seniors. And, throughout the land, a presidential election was coming to a head. At Hillsboro, we had a mock election. It meant nothing to the national body politic, but it kept our minds off studying, for a while.

It was Eisenhower against Stevenson. People started making signs and taking sides. The first inkling I had that it was going to be anything more than that came when I ran into Jeter, coming out of Study Hall. He pressed a little card into my hand. The card said:

Vote Early and Vote Often!

for

T. Coleman Andrews

Jeter grinned and said, "We'd appreciate your support." That afternoon, four other guys gave me the same card. The last one gave me a stack and asked me to hand them out.

Before long, word spread through the school that certain scurrilous miscreants were trying to turn the election into a three-way race. Indignation was raised in the halls and there were calls to have those responsible ousted from the county. Other high-minded individuals countered that the injection of a third party was a positive example of democracy at the grass roots level.

Reason prevailed and write-in votes were allowed for the additional candidate. The campaigns then proceeded with vigor until the mock-election was held, the week before the real election.

It took a couple of days for the votes to be tallied. Then, with some fanfare, a special assembly was convened to announce the results. As expected, Eisenhower won handily and Stevenson came in second. T. Coleman Andrews came in third with a total of 0.00 votes.

After the assembly, a meeting of Andrews' supporters was hastily called in the second floor boy's room. I was permitted to attend because I had handed out the most cards. The main discussion centered around the mathematical impossibility that no votes had been cast for their candidate. Jeter said, "I personally voted for him 17 times." The others agreed. When the number of times that everybody had voted was tallied, it was clear that several hundred votes had been spirited away. Stolen, as it were.

Outrage ran rampant in the john. Throats became hoarse with a general call to accuse the election commission of fraud and demand a recount. Just as things were getting ugly, Jeter came forward and said, "Wait a minute - we can't do this."

"Why not?" everybody wanted to know.

Jeter paused for effect, then said, in tones of civic virtue, "It would tear the school apart."

He was immediately pummeled by the whole group.

The rest is history, or something like it.

Funny Stories

If you gotta play at garden parties
I wish you a lotta luck
But if memories were all I sang
I'd rather drive a truck

I'm thinking I've run this reunion thing dry. What kind of person goes around telling funny stories about people he knew fifty years ago? Our high school class is just a tiny sliver of the people we've known in our lives. And when we were at Hillsboro, a lot of the people we hung with were in classes other than ours, anyway. I'm thinking that I might want to talk about some of them, sometime. And I've known a lot of people who've never heard of John Koen. I might want to get sentimental about some of them, too.

Just a little earlier tonight, I started thinking about a guy I used to know at work. He was five or ten years my senior; big, tall and hulking, but also an incredibly gentle human being. I never saw him without a smile on his face, but he always seemed sad to me. His name was Tom Leonard.

I decided, just now, to google his name, with "CDC" as a qualifier. The first hit showed a URL for a CDC site and this citation: "There has been no official Tree planting for Tom Leonard." That didn't sound good. I went to the page and, sure enough, it was all about the suicide of Tom Leonard. But, on closer examination, the Tom Leonard who committed suicide was a teenage boy. It was a wrenching site, but it wasn't the Tom Leonard that I knew.

The funny thing is, if it had been the Tom Leonard I knew, I wouldn't have been surprised.

Golden Words

Oh Shenandoah
I long to hear you
Far away
You rolling river!

Oh Shenandoah
I long to see you
Away
I'm bound away
Across the wide Missouri.