MIGRATIONS

MIGRATIONS

I don’t think there’s anything like moving into a new town for a nine-year-old boy--nothing more nerve testing nor alive. When we left Lewiston, Maine, for Keening, Vermont, the War had just ended. All sorts of stuff had happened. FDR had died in his fourth term; Mussolini was executed; and Hitler took his life in his mysterious bunker. And within the year, my dad, Lyle Miller, lost his job at the First Mercantile as bank examiner. He never said exactly why, but about a month later I heard my folks arguing during the small hours.

“Nat,” Dad said, trying to soothe Mom with his pet name for Natalie, “you are my first and only. I’d never do what they said. I mean, just listen to the song.”

I strained my ear toward the living room as Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive wafted from our old Philco radio.

“Don’t ya see the omen, Nat?” My dad was suave, handsome, and tricky. Everyone said I looked exactly like him, but I never recognized it until I grew older. One thing I knew though, we were opposites. He was flamboyant; I was an observer, quiet and simple.

“The only omen I would recognize is us leaving this state and starting fresh.” Mom’s voice cracked. “Oh, Lyle, I thought you were done with this.” Then she sobbed, torrentially.

A granite lump blocked my throat, and I wished more than ever for a sibling.

The next morning we picked the house clean as a soup bone and loaded our car for Keening, a town I’d never be able to shake.

I fussed about moving, but secretly I longed to see the world, discover things just like all the great explorers I was learning about in school like the Spanish conquistador, Balboa, the first European to stand in the waters of the eastern shore of the Pacific Ocean. My favorite, however, was Ponce de Leon, who roamed darn near every inch of Florida for the Fountain of Youth—a charmed drink I longed to bottle and sell for vast fortunes.

On October 11th we set off for Keening, a few days before my birthday. On the drive we listened to the Fifth Game of the 1946 World Series. My hero, the Boston Red Sox’ Ted Williams, was battling the St. Louis Cardinals’ Stan the Man. The Sox won the Pennant that year by twelve games, ran away and hid from the Tigers, cruising to 104 wins. As we whizzed down U.S. Route 5 in our ’39 Chevrolet Tourer, the Sox doubled the Cards 6-3 and now led the series three games to two. The Splendid Splinter was only one win away from giving Boston a Championship. Nothing would’ve pleased me more. I idolized Williams. His flawless swing had clawed the Sox to within a whisper of history, bragging rights for the first time since Ruth was tragically swapped to New York in 1919 to fund some hair-brained Broadway plays. I knew the distressing lore inside out.

“Only one to go, son,” crowed Dad, a diehard fan himself. After the last out was recorded, he dialed the radio to Perry Como’s, They Say It’s Wonderful.

“Yeah, Pop, I can’t believe it!”

Mom crooked her neck toward the back seat, her porcelain neckline decorated with fake pearls. Fake or not, they made her look pretty rallying with her bright red lipstick. Then she shared a rare, private smile with me before sinking back to her silent, grim thoughts. I could tell my dad felt them too, because he slid his hand over and tried to clasp Mom’s, but she was having none of that and quickly withdrew her hand to tweak her pearls.

Dad frowned while Mom’s eyes darted to a beekeeper in a field, his plump white suit swarming with insects as he harvested honey from his wooden hives. I pretended I didn’t notice the front seat tension and hypnotized myself with telephone wires as they galloped past like some electric beast in the Preakness.

That’s when I discovered grownups don’t often say what’s on their minds and aren’t as wise as I had been instructed to believe. It left me sad inside. All I wanted was to have my folks smiling with the other, but that was never going to happen like it once did.

On my birthday, four days later, Mel Allen’s voice crackled over our Philco when the Sox’ top hurler, Boo Ferriss, found trouble in the bottom of the fifth. The Cards pushed two runs across, and Boo, who’d gone 25-6 that year, left the mound as the fans in hostile Sportsman Park jeered him like barbarians. I knew with the Sox down 3-1 they didn’t have a chance. My eyes welled and I wished I could mind control the game by having Ted hit four homers and end this Red Sock jinx. But Williams folded in his only World Series appearance, and part of my innocence went with it. And, even when Boston tied it with two teasing runs in the top of the 8th, I knew in my already jaded Red Sox heart that they’d blow it. They did. The Cards pushed the winning run across in the bottom of the inning to win the deciding Seventh Game, 4-3. Tears flooded. I couldn’t contain them with levee sand bags. Williams, who was magnificent during the year, hitting .342 with 38 homers and 166 walks, batted just .200 for the Series and drove in just one puny run. “What a fraud!” I whimpered. “Ted might as well of not even showed up.”

My dad was bothered, too, but of course he was a man and didn’t cry. “Even the greats have slumps, son,” he said, massaging my shoulders. “No one is perfect. Not even the great Ted Williams.” Dad arose and grinned, brushing off the pain like it was lint. “Cheer up, slugger. It’s your birthday.”

I hated it when he trivialized anguish, used smoke screens and abracadabra to divert important things. I watched him do it a thousand times with Mom’s suffering. So, in vintage Lyle Miller, he tuned the Philco to Margaret Whiting’s Come Rain or Come Shine.

“Dad, that dumb ole song ain’t gonna make things better or give Boston the crown.” I wiped a little snot on the sleeve of my baseball jersey, the one I had dragged a red carpenter’s pencil across to form a faded red #9, Ted’s number.

My dad walked impishly out of the living room and returned a moment later, his voice entering the room before he did. “Well, maybe this will make things a tad better.”

Then he steered it around the corner, a spangling navy blue bike from Sears. Bulky as Alaska, it was an ‘Elgin Tank’ model. My dad had gone to the trouble to add his own flourish by hand painting The Blur across its metal gut in slanted, white lettering. (The bike was used, Monark manufactured it in 1940, but it was exactly the model I always wanted.)

Tingling, my tears dried.

Two minutes later I was pumping my greatest present ever into town. It never hit me until years later that Mom wasn’t in the room when Dad wheeled out my Elgin.

I hadn’t left our block since we arrived, and now I was eager to explore. I coasted down Chestnut Street, my tempo increasing as I crossed over the wooden bridge on Echo Canyon. I turned my head to see that my block had crunched into a sugar cube. A moment later, I might as well have been in Nepal. That’s when I started thinking about Ted Williams, how he had torn my heart out, betrayed me. How his .406 spectacular in 1941 meant nothing. “Phooey on you, Ted!” Fuming, I looked around to make sure no one could hear before saying it aloud for the first time. “Bullshit!” Boy, did it feel good, and sounded even better. My dad would’ve tanned my hindquarters for that, but with this bike, my spoked-spaceship, I could outdistance his wrath and do the truly important things a young boy needs to do to become a man. “No one runs my life anymore,” I thought, hormones spurring me. “I’m nine and in four years I’ll be a teenager.” This scared me in a strange way, and I recalled how I’d just cursed and wondered if juvenile delinquents started that way. Cuss words, next cigarettes, then doing time in Alcatraz because of accepting double dares. I’d read about them, JDs, in some cover torn off magazine I found in a barbershop the previous summer. It was all about teen boys who got in trouble and how society was decaying because of it. They claimed it was how Rome fell, which lost me like a marble rolling into a storm drain.

My mind was bucking from ghost images when I saw Lem’s Gas Station for the first time, the yellow Shell Oil clam perched silly high atop a white pole.

“That’s some bike, small fry,” said Lem, his name stitched on his greasy, olive jumpsuit.

“You Lem?” I asked, knowing it was stupid.

Lem pointed at his name. “Well, not if you are one of those backward readers. Then I’d be Mel.” By grinning, he let me know he had some Milton Berle in his pockets.

“That’s a good one, mister, er—uh, I mean, Lem.” Then we both laughed.

“You new, ain’t ya?” Lem walked toward the long, red, sidewinder soda box with Coca-Cola scrawled large on its belly.

“Yeah, just moved in a few days ago.”

Lem lifted the top to the soda box, sunk his hand into a glacier of ice, and snagged two dark brown bottles juiced with Coke. “Care for a soft drink?”

“I didn’t bring no money.”

“Money’s no good here, stranger. Let’s just say it’s a birthday present.” Lem grinned. He wasn’t particularly handsome, teeth pointy and tobacco stained, but his smile was disarming, genuine as a saint holding a door.

“How’d you know it was my birthday?” My face wrinkled with worry.

Lem popped off both caps using the opener attached to the side of the soda bin. “Dang, first time I ever used that one and it was actually somebody’s birthday.” Lem winked at me.

From that, I could tell Lem was all right. And he handed me the frosty soda and I let the sweet, carbonated fluid trickle down my throat and into my stomach, where it caused my body to debate whether it was the finest taste it had ever processed.

My parents had never let me taste a Coca-Cola before. Mom was dead against it, claiming it contained cocaine, which I’d find out later was true until ‘round the start of the 20th Century.

So there Lem and I swapped stories. He told me about how he and his five brothers used to build engines from scratch and race go-carts in Kentucky while growed men wagered, drank and swore. Then, whichever brother won, he’d get a quarter. But the brothers had a pact and whoever won always gave the other four a nickel, so no one could ever lose.

I remember thinking how swell that would be to have a brother like that.

I hadn’t pedaled far from Lem’s when I heard something I didn’t recognize at first. Lewiston was in short supply of them, but they had always fascinated me.

“Frogs!” I shouted, thrumming with delight, as I pumped my bike around a corner and came face to face with what I’d come to know as the Junkyard Pond, an algae dotted spill of water that eased out from beneath a column of abandoned cars and broken down appliances--washers, dryers, toasters, fridges, flat irons--you name it. It was as though a giant, invisible magnet had sucked in colossal chunks of goner metal. But trumping all that, the croaking frogs drew me in like tiny carnival hucksters.

I dropped the kickstand to my Elgin and rushed up to the pond, cracking some sticks underfoot as a dozen snouts and bug eyes dipped under the surface abruptly ending the symphony of chirps.

“Shit!” There was that word again, sneaking out easier this time, no pretense of looking around to delay its emergence in case of being found out.

Goose bumping to see the frogs, I bent down and waited, thinking I could out patient them. Five minutes passed and still no sign of a single hopper. “Dang, what do they have, periscopes?” I whispered. “Come on out, froggies.” After another five minutes I was about to give up when a single frog broke the waterline near the back of the pond. “Hi, fella.” The frog seemed to be looking directly at me, casing me, seeing what I was all about. I thought if I smiled at him, like I often did with babies, it might reassure him. So I formed my best grin and nodded. “It’s my birthday.” The frog was unimpressed and ducked beneath the water, which grilled me with a sudden rush of annoyance. “Shit!”

Now I began to worry. This new word was like nitro glycerin—it could go off without warning and cause powerful damage if I didn’t handle it with respect. I imagined it slipping out at the dinner table when I spilled my milk, or listening to Ted hit into a double play, or worse yet, at Sunday school for some unknown reason. I was thinking all that when what I swear to this day was the same frog reared up through some algae and stared right up at me within reaching distance. And don’t ask me why, but it was thrilling. Frogs and little boys have some secret, primal connection I saw repeat itself throughout my lifetime. Then this particular one chirped, and I tried duplicating the sound, and lo and behold it worked and the frog chirped back. Next, the weirdest thing happened, and I swear this is true, eight more frogs broke surface and began to chirp with their leader. And it dawned on me, there were nine frogs and I was nine that day and I’m telling you I don’t think I have ever been more spooked. And the ten of us sat and traded ribbit code back and forth for least an hour. I don’t think I ever had been more caught up in the wonder of being a boy than those sixty or so minutes.

A short time later I was back on my bike when I heard a clack of thunder and had to investigate.

“You must be the new kid,” said a man behind the counter when I entered. “Lem told me ‘bout you. First game’s on the house.” The man looked at my feet. “Size four, I reckon.”

The next thing I knew I had a pair of bowling shoes in my hands.

“Pick out a ball, young man, and have a blast.”

I’d never bowled before, but I did somehow manage a strike in the seventh frame. I jumped up and down like a fool.

“This town’s alright,” I thought, exiting the bowling alley. “Gonna work out just dandy.” Saddling my bike, I became the Cisco Kid, and headed home. I hadn’t gone a block before I abruptly skidded to a stop in front of the movie theater. The Best Years of Our Lives was up on the marquee. It had swept the Oscars the previous year. I slowed my bike and darn if my luck didn’t hold out with the manager outside tidying up with a broom.

“You’re new, aren’t ya?” he said, the bristles whisking away.

Five minutes later I was settling into my purple, crushed velvet seat, digging into a huge, free box of Milk Duds and watching the opening credits. Keening had given me the best birthday any kid could ever imagine—being welcome. The movie was the first drama I can remember liking. It was about this dad returning to his family after World War II and having trouble fitting in. And there was another part of the story about a GI who had lost his hands and couldn’t relate any more with his fiancé. All in all, it was top notch.

When I got home that evening my parents were furious about me being gone so long. But it was my birthday so I was spared a paddling.

Over the next year, I rode my Elgin over every inch of pavement and back road dirt Keening had to offer. I discovered things that would’ve greened Champlain and Jolliet. I found an old buffalo skull and took it to school. My teacher, Mr. Dyson, said it had to be from the pre-18th century. I also discovered a rundown shack in the deep woods that had a 20-cent piece from 1876 left cryptically under its front door mat. And of course I kept up my visits with Lem, the Junkyard Pond, bowling and watching movies. The next year I saw It’s a Wonderful Life for the first time. It’s still my favorite movie, and Jimmy Stewart instantly became my hero as an actor.

I made some special friends, such as, Billy Louie, a chubby kid with an incredible comic book collection. He was the first to invite me to a sleepover. Billy also had a mean-spirited, older brother, Frank, who used to light his farts with Firechief matches. The first time I witnessed it I nearly split a gut. “It’s a flamethrower!” Frank shouted, each time he ignited his gas. “Save the women and children!”

I started playing baseball in earnest that next spring and quickly became pals with Sam ‘the Melon’ Surnoy, nicknamed the melon because his head was preposterously gigantic. He was easy going and didn’t seem to mind the ribbing about his noggin’, 'cuz there was no denying the thing could’ve had orbiting moons. But let me tell you, Sam Surnoy could definitely wallop a baseball. He launched them out of the playground confines in a regular fashion, so when it came to picking up sides, Sam was always the first name called. Sam also got me hooked on baseball cards. We used to pedal our bikes down to the Fogler’s Five & Dime and buy us a pack every so often. The day I got a Ted Williams I nearly peed my pants.

“Golly! Will you look at that?!” cried Sam, who himself pulled out a Dizzy Trout card. “You got the Splinter hisself!”

I admired that card about as hard as an art historian could’ve appreciated the Sistine Chapel. I kept turning it over and over, alternating between Ted’s handsome grin and reading the back of his card: ‘Ted was born 8/30/1918 in San Diego,’ it began. Then it went on to say he hit .327 as a rookie with 145 RBI in 1939.

“Hey, I read that Ted has twenty/ten vision, and weighs his bats, making sure they’re always thirty-two ounces. Fact is, he can just pick ‘em up and tell how much they weigh by hand.”

“No fooling?” I said.

“Yeah, and he is also one of the best fisherman in the whole wide world, not to mention a fighter pilot war hero!”

I shook my head, not knowing as much as I thought I did about Ted. “Wow, how’d you learn all that?”

“Boy’s Life had an article on him. They also call him The Kid and The Thumper. I’ll give you the magazine if’n you want.”

“Sure, that’d be swell.”

Sam kept to his word and awarded me the precious magazine that same day. After reading the article--in which I learned that Ted handed his 1946 World Series paycheck over to a bat boy, saying, ‘Here, you take this, son. I didn’t earn it,’--I became fierce loyal to Ted the rest of my life. I also cut out the pictures of Ted and pasted them on the wall over my bed, looking at them every morning I woke up, praying I’d inherit his sweet swing. The hours I spent studying those grainy photos of his bat cutting a perfect arc are some of my fondest memories.

One day I came home from an afternoon of churning my Elgin through town and found my dad hustling down our porch, toting his worn, boxlike suitcase. There was a cab waiting outside, motor running. The driver looked serious with his cap tugged low to his brow.

“Dad?” I asked, hushed, coasting up. “What’s going on?”

For the only time in my life, I detected redness in my dad’s eyes. He walked up without a word, patted me once on the head, climbed into the cab, and within two deep breaths disappeared down Chestnut Street. It would be the last time I saw him.

“Mom?!” I shouted, letting my Elgin crash to the front lawn. “MOM!”

I found my mom in front of the Philco, listening to Jose Iturbi’s Polonaise in E-Flat. She was playing solitaire while silent tears plopped onto the cards.

I wanted to say something, but couldn’t muster words that made sense. So I kept quiet and watched her from behind as she twice missed red queens on the king of spades and had to restart a new game. I had learned, though, like the people in The Best Years of Our Lives, that things could go horribly wrong and putting them back together might be impossible. My mind swung back to my parents' wee hour conversation I overheard a year ago. It was only then I realized my dad had betrayed my mother. In my twenties, during a holiday night when my mom drank a little too much red wine, she confirmed it.

As I slept that night, not knowing if Dad would ever return, the full panic hit me: what is Mom going to do for money? She had never worked a day in her life. Now a cold sweat covered me. “What if we have to leave Keening?” Coiling into a ball, I centralized my gut pain and began to cry. I loved this place like no other. It was paradise, and I knew I’d never find its likes again.

A week later, we packed up for some place called the Napa Valley in California. My mom’s Uncle Dave owned a vineyard out there. He’d bring Mom into the business and we’d have a free place to stay. He’d never married and had a sprawling house on his orchard.

Mom explained all the goings on to me and what it’d be like. She tried painting a fancy picture but the pit of my nine-year-old stomach collapsed like a house of toothpicks. I never let my mom know it though; I was keeping the lip stiff and doing what I’d seen troopers do on newsreels for Uncle Sam while storming beaches and flanking Fascist-held Italian towns. Moving cross-country was the least I could do for her.

I eventually adapted, but Keening shone like a marvelous lantern the rest of my childhood whenever I shut my eyes at night.

Fourteen years later, in 1960, I graduated Cal Berkeley and had saved enough money for the one thing that possessed me: going back to Keening. A lot had happened in those years. I lost my virginity to Debbi Spencer in her father’s grain silo. We were only sixteen, so it wasn’t too serious, though I did end up taking her to the senior prom. She was a nice girl, but enjoyed being naked a little too much and went off to UCLA and got pregnant and married at nineteen. We exchanged Christmas cards through the sixties then lost touch.

Ted Williams retired that same year at forty-one. He hit .316 and banged out 29 homers, including one in his final at bat. Fittingly, it came at Fenway Park. When he circled the bases, he refused to doff his cap to acknowledge the fans. “Typical Ted.” I chuckled when I read about it in the Sacramento Bee. It seemed appropriate Ted retired the same year I graduated college, some karmic changing of the guards.

In all those years, I never even got a postcard from my dad. Mom never talked about it.

So I boarded my first jet plane and headed back to Keening, my greatest longing. Oh, the dreams I had a thousand nights during my time away, donning seven-league boots to stride America in a jiffy.

I landed in Boston and rented a 1960, cherry red, Buick Invicta convertible and cruised up the highway. It was early spring, the weather lettuce crisp, and the countryside brimmed with fauna.

When I reached Keening, the first place I aimed for was Lem’s. Seeing the familiar Shell sign from a block away, my body gushed with the same thrills of my first Keening foray atop my birthday bike. I couldn’t wait to greet Lem. Pulling up in a screech, I expected to see him hop out and gas me up. Instead I got a young kid, who hardly appeared to be out of junior high.

“What’ll it be, mister?” The kid’s eyes were vacant, his words as hollow as a stump.

I immediately got out. “Where’s Lem?” My eyes jumped to where the long red Coca-Cola tank used to sit. It was gone. I could see the concrete was darker where its massive girth once blotted the chronic summer sun.

“Lem who?” The kid shuffled to the gas tank. “Regular or premium?”

“Premium.” I stared into the office area, where Lem used to deploy a Dutch Masters cigar box as a register. A new Coke machine, the stand-up type where you yanked the bottle from rollers, stood a ghoulish, modern sentry. “Lem, who used to own it, that’s who.” I didn’t like this kid already. Disrespecting Lem’s memory wasn’t helping.

“Never heard of any Lem.” The kid stuck the nozzle into my gas tank and squeezed the trigger while humming Alley-Oop by the Hollywood Argyles, a song I thought was about his speed.

A minute later he topped off my tank. I paid him $2.37 for nine-and-a-half gallons and drove away praying to find the rest of my touchstones.

They were all in tact.

The Junkyard Pond was exactly how I remembered it. Not as many frogs, but I sat down and was slingshot back to the days where I had no worries, no thesis looming, no money problems, and my parents were still living under the same roof. I wished I were nine again for a moment, to see what the world really looked like from my naïve perspective. So many things had tainted, skewed, and massaged it into new bents. The Cold War; The Rosenbergs; Elvis; Sputnik; Playboy Magazine; Bikini Atoll; The Beat Generation; The Kennedys; civil unrest; American Bandstand; while the baby boom exploded with 76 million births in an eighteen year period. All calculated, the world was changing too fast. Heck, TV had even gone color.

I left the pond and drove to the bowling alley. Not recognizing anyone, I sat at the counter and ordered some fries and a cherry coke and watched some teenagers struggle to break 100. Just hearing the pins crash brought back memories worth my coast-to-coast trip. Then, for some reason, my mind funneled to my mom and dad, how their love had vanished early on, smoldered into cold soot. And I wondered if they ever really loved each other, if they married cause maybe she got pregnant. I found myself considering what love was and how I’d spot it someday for myself. I concluded it was as undeniable as a single flower pushing through a city sidewalk. “That’s how unstoppable love should be,” I thought, as the ice cubes to my polished soda tumbled from the alley’s stuffy heat.

A half hour later, I walked the two blocks to the theater, bought a ticket for a quarter, a box of Milk Duds for a nickel, and watched West Side Story. Not much for musicals, this one gripped me, and I nestled back into the same purple, crushed velvet seat I watched Best Years in for what seemed like yesterday.

When the movie ended I drove to Billy Louie’s old home. His bitter sibling, Frank, the flatulence igniter, answered the door.

“Yeah?” he said gruffly, while a toddler with an egg-shaped dome peeked around Frank’s left leg. “What is it?”

“Um, is Billy around?” I smiled as if goodwill might spark Frank’s memory.

“Who are you?” Everything about him became agitated.

“I’m Andy Miller. Billy and I used to be pals, remember?” I leaned toward their screen door, hoping more light would jog recollection. “I lived here fourteen years ago.”

The little boy grabbed his father’s pants and tugged hard. “Knock it off, junior,” Frank warned, keeping his attention on me. “Look, Billy died in a car accident long ago. And I sure as hell don’t recall your name or face. So why don’t you git.”

Intuition told me Frank was responsible for Billy’s death. I had never been so sure of anything and wanted to ask, probe, to find out for certain, but the look in Frank’s eyes told it all. So I left.

I had never known anyone who died, not a pal my age, anyway. It struck me hard as I drove away. Images of me and Billy goofing around, fishing, playing ball, gluing models, climbing trees, biking through town and eyeing girls on the sly all rushed me and made me consider my own mortality for the first time in my life. For a moment I felt old, like maybe I’d lived my own best years, that life was all downhill once a kid became an adult. And it scared me.

Now my car was on autopilot toward Sam Surnoy’s home, but I was afraid what I might find.

Parking, I got out of the car and approached his parents’ home. They’d always been nice folk and I hoped they hadn’t moved.

I knocked.

Mrs. Surnoy answered and immediately hugged me. “Andy Miller!” she cried. “Bob! Come quick! It’s lil Andy Miller all grown up!”

We sat for two hours catching up. They fed me fried chicken and carried on like parents I always wished for. The home burst with love and smiles and a slew of melon won trophies. They told me Sam had signed on with the Cleveland Indians right out of high school and was now hitting over .300 with their AA club in Elmira. I was excited for him and even subscribed to The Sporting News for the next few years to follow him in the minors. Eventually, he was waived for his inability to hit a major league quality curve. When I left, Mrs. Surnoy loaded me up with brownies and hugged me like my own mom never did. “Now you drive careful, you hear. And we’ll let Sam know you stopped by.”

A couple hours later I was back in Boston, where I stayed overnight at Howard Johnson’s and flew back to California the next day. The entire return flight I kept thinking about how ironic it was for me trying to get past my past in an attempt to relive my golden snapshots. But it frightened me because I knew I never would and Keening would always throb a sweet, ungraspable ache.

Over the next twenty years, I worked my way up the corporate ladder, starting as a young buyer for a chain store before advancing to VP. At thirty-two, I married Carla, a loud Italian girl who was the opposite of my mother. We tried to have kids, but she had three miscarriages. Within ten years we divorced. We never said it out loud but I’m sure we blamed the other. The burden of losing all those pregnancies was too much for us to overcome, especially with me always gone, gunning to make more money, hop-scotching to another promotion, striving to become more important, and acquire more possessions.

One morning, a few years after the divorce, I was in another one of my huge self-applied ‘hurries’ and nicked myself while shaving. Blood streamed out, forcing me to look into the mirror to contain it. It was a nasty cut, but that’s not what caught my eye. It was my face. I wasn’t young anymore. I was in my mid-thirties, out of shape, my skin looked like I hadn’t eaten from the right food group or felt a splash of sun in a decade. But mostly, it was my eyes—dull as the kid’s back at Lem’s old garage. There wasn’t a glimmer of life, magic, hope, passion, or love anywhere inside their reflection.

I walked to the phone and cancelled my un-cancellable meeting. Then I dialed United Airlines and did what I had waited too long to do: fly back to Keening.

It was 1973, Nixon and I were in trouble. Difference was, I believed I could fix it by fixing myself.

This time, I hardly recognized Keening. The bowling alley had been replaced by a shopping mall. Lem’s was a bagel shop. The Junkyard Pond was smack under some Golden Arches. No trace of Sam, not even next of kin.

All that remained was the movie theater, for that I cannot relay my gratitude. I bought the Milk Duds, a dime now, and relaxed for what would become my second favorite movie of all time, The Sting. Henry Gondorff made me forget life for two hours, and I settled back into the same purple, crushed velvet seat, images of my childhood weaving throughout the film, my Elgin gliding me to places I yearned to touch and smell once again.

When The End came up, I found myself crying, though there was no reason to weep at this great yarn. I wiped my eyes and strolled around Keening, recognizing next to nothing.

“Excuse me,” came a woman, walking her dachshund. “Don’t I know you?”

I stopped and studied the lady, who appeared to be in her sixties. “I don’t think so.”

“It’s just that you look so familiar. Are you from here?”

“Actually, I’m not. I live in San Francisco.”

Her dog tugged at the leash. I figured that was both our cues to move along.

“Really, that’s strange. I’m one of those that never forgets a face.”

I nodded, knowing what she meant, and tagged on a friendly smile.

“So what are you doing out in Keening, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Well, I did live here for one year when I was nine. And I’ve never been able to shake it.”

The woman drew closer. It was dark and the streetlight’s halo was weak. “Your name wouldn’t happen to be Miller, would it?” Her eyes searched as if she was matching fingerprints. Suddenly, she reared back with a gasp while the truth registered.

I wasn’t the naïve boy anymore. I figured it out, too. She was the one who tore our home apart. With nothing said we walked separate directions, my heart thumping loud enough to attract apes.

After a block I wanted to go back and ask her a dozen questions, but mostly I wanted to shake her and say, ‘Didn’t you know he had a family?! A little boy who painfully wanted his father?! Who needed a man to teach him the important stuff?!’ But I also knew it was ultimately my dad’s betrayal, not some strange woman’s--no matter what charms she had to offer. My dad turned his back on my mom and me and found something he preferred. And as much as it hurt, that was the truth that haunted me throughout my life and inevitably soured my ability to form lasting relationships with women. What was even more crippling, I knew all that yet didn’t have the mechanisms to fight through my issues.

The years began to spool past.

I had several fiancés but I always found a new method to gum it up, alienate them through calculated inattention, allowing my boredom to sabotage. I’d take up golf, though I never enjoyed it; I’d play poker to all hours; I’d go on long fishing trips with the guys; or I’d just stop conversing. Gradually, I’d erode the trust I’d worked so diligently in the beginning to develop, grind it down like timeless sand on the Sphinx until there was nothing left for her to give. Then I’d flip it to fool myself into thinking it was her fault for not understanding complicated me. I was a grade A asshole, and deep down I knew it.

Why did I do it? I’d lay awake asking myself that $64,000 question night after night, year after year, parading a list of reasons a mile long that all shoveled the blame back to my dad’s disappearing act. In the end, however, I knew that was all bullshit, that I could change if I truly cared. “What’s blocking me then?” I’d finally ask, angrily twisting the covers over my side. That’s when I’d really panic and stop probing any deeper for fear of what truth might lie under the next layer. It was a pitiful cycle.

Oh yeah, I was making big money during my thirties and forties, but I masked more misery than you could’ve fit in a fleet of wheelbarrows.

A week after I turned fifty-one, my mom phoned and said my father had died. Somehow she was contacted through his side of the family. She asked me if I was going to the funeral. My immediate impulse was to tell her about the woman walking the dachshund in Keening some seventeen years ago, but I fought it back. “Mom, I don’t have a father.” Slamming down the phone, my mind burned to ask a thousand questions about what his life became since I’d last seen him pull away in the backseat of that cab.

Now, middle-aged, I had one more nagging thought to jackknife to under my covers. I thought I had always been a happy boy growing up. As an adult, my demons lapped me.

The next morning I found a few drops of blood in my stool. Concerned, I scheduled a doctor’s appointment. The results came a few days later: an omnivorous cancer had overtaken my liver. The prognosis was terminal. “I’ll beat it,” I told my doctor, looking him bravely in the eyes. But as I looked for a slightest crack in his medical armor, I weakened and broke down weeping.

A week later on my last trip to Keening, I raced my Honda Civic to the movie house, desperately hoping that whatever was playing, along with a box of Milk Duds, would mollify my raging self pity, if for just two hours in the darkness.

The wrecking ball took its first tour through the lobby as I approached the old theater. A crowd of people sadly watched from a cordoned off point across the street while the mighty iron ball pulverized the wooden planks into kindling. I didn’t even hear the demolition, my mind soundproofed by images from The Best Years of Our Lives.

Four months later I was in charge of my morphine drip as I died alone in my two-story mansion in the Bay Area’s ritzy Pacific Heights. I could see a sliver of my nurse in the next room skimming through Cosmopolitan while Vanna White flipped a vowel up on the Trinitron.

Keeping my lip stiff to the end, I never even told my mom I had cancer. And as I labored through my final breath, I heard Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive wafting from the old Philco along with Dad’s fetching laugh back when my parents were young and happy and the burdens of sharing a long life hadn’t crumbled the fairy tales we are brought up to believe.


THE END