Early Risky Behavior

I don't mean to say that I was always safe and secure in the strip between the Marches and the Shaders. I remember a summer evening when a bunch of us, my brother Steve, my sister Mike, and Tom and Jerry, the older Shader boys, were playing in our front yard. I think I was four.

I was waiting for my mom and dad to come outside, for they'd told me we’d be going to Kresge’s soon. Kresge’s (pronounced “Krez' gee’s) was the dime store. With its toys, soda fountain, live animals (turtles, parakeets, and goldfish), and its “Ring for Service” bells, it was a place I truly loved. And I was growing more and more impatient with mom and dad. They should be out here by now. Dad’s 1953 Ford Sedan sat in our driveway. Maybe I’d just have to go to Kresge’s myself.

Maybe someone saw me climb into it. Sitting behind the wheel I reached up to the stick, just like I’d seen my dad do. I remember saying, “start up the car!” I remember yanking the stick down.

A bunch of stuff then happened real fast. I felt the car roll backward. I heard my sister Mike yell “Roger!” She somehow opened the driver’s side door, avoided being knocked to the ground by it, and pulled me out. We watched the car roll down the driveway, across busy Gulley (how was it not hit?!), and onto the lawn across the street.

I wonder if most people can remember the first time they felt that terrible onrushing fearful feeling of being in big, big trouble? For me, this was it. My dad would be out soon, showing his hot Kentucky temper, no doubt whipping his belt from around his waist. I wanted to run, but my sister held on to me. Though I expected that this worst sort of behavior would draw my parents’ worst possible punishment, my mom and dad acted in a totally unexpected way. I suddenly sensed their relief that I had not been killed. So, instead of the belt’s sting, the next thing I remember was being sat down at the end of the dining room table. My dad sat at the other end, brother Steve, sister Mike, and my mom sat around it. Dad gave us not a safety lecture; not a “Roger, you could have been killed” lecture, but a lesson in how a car gearshift worked and what the letters PRNDL stood for. I guess I had mastered the N.

This was neither the first nor last time my parents felt relieved that I hadn’t been killed. In fact, I was barely born; sick and in and out of the hospital for the first three months of my life. Years later I would learn about my “subdural hematoma,” my collapsed lung, and how my brother and sister, hearing my mom’s tears, used to hold each other and cry themselves to sleep. Around the same time as the driveway incident, I fell through a weak board in my Aunt Orie’s living room. I remember how after falling into her basement, my aunt, dad, cousin, brother, and sister rushed down the basement stairs - and I remember their amazed faces when they saw I'd landed on a cushy sofa. In later years, there’d be the living room fire, the car crashing into my bedroom wall, the gun on the dorm room floor (though I don’t think they ever learned of that one), and various other incidents.

But back to Gulley. Another drama—much less dire, but nearly as scary for me as the car rolling backward—unfolded one day when I pedaled my tricycle two doors down Gulley, just past the house of the old bachelor. Pausing, I stuck a few small twigs into a bare spot at the corner of his lawn. Without warning, the old bachelor came out of his garage. He was a gruff gray haired guy who worked for the Wayne County road commission. He had a rough sort of voice that today makes me think of a carton of Chesterfields.

“Looks like I’ve got some grass growing!” he growled. I just sat and smiled. He came closer “Sticks!” he bellowed. “Those are sticks! Don’t you put sticks in my yard! You go put sticks in your own yard!” Other than my parents, I don’t think I had ever been yelled at by a grown up before. I was shocked and embarrassed before I even knew what those words meant. And it seems kind of funny now, but for the next 20 years, the rest of his life, despite the fact that he lived so close and was always sitting on his porch, despite the fact that I continued to cut through his back yard to get to the Marches, I never spoke to him again. I don't think I ever even looked him in the eye again.


Next: Mason - The Final Battle