1 - The Soapbox Racer

Hanging in the rafters of the small, white, detached garage was a soapbox racer from when my uncle Dayne was a kid. The racer was wood-framed, black fabric covered, and had no wheels. But it looked fast, just the same, as if it were flying up there in the rafters.

Inside the open cockpit was an official Soapbox Derby tag which gave the name, age, and height of the driver. My uncle, it said, was 6'2" at the age of twelve. And there was other information as well, but the only other part of it that I can remember was the name of the sponsor, Dailey's Chevrolet, in nearby Erie.

I'm not sure how old I was, myself, when I saw this or how I got up close enough to read the tag, which was probably not much larger than the registration stickers found on cars today. I remember that I'd seen the racer once or twice before, when I'd walked down the hedgerow along Fremont Street with my grandfather who kept his old Chevy in the same garage.

What I do know is that I was younger than twelve, the age I was the summer when my grandmother died, and that this was also the last time that I saw the soapbox racer.

After that, I remember watching the smoke curl upward from the bonfire in the driveway, where my mother and father and uncle burned miscellaneous papers and other expendables while clearing out the house for its impending sale.

I remember watching the smoke and I remember the bus rides I took from the city, to be there after school, while the house was gradually emptied of my grandparents' lives.

I watched this from the window of the second floor apartment, where my mother and I had lived while my father was in Europe during the war, watched the smoke curl upward, into the still air, while the soapbox racer flew like a time machine, in the rafters of the small white garage, at the end of the driveway, far below...

LPK
LiveJournal
11.15.2013 (a)

2 - Jesus Wept

More than fifty years afterward, I still feel that I've never properly grieved the loss of my grandmother. She was the one that my mother and I had lived with, in the town of Wesleyville, Pennsylvania, while my father was away during the war.

I'd held a special place in her heart, according to my father who spoke with me about it on the afternoon she died. And I remember how, in the days that followed, as relatives gathered and plans were made and services held, I sat in silence, away from the others, on the front porch of the house at Fremont Street and Station Road.

I remember also that my great aunt, my grandmother's sister, came out on the porch and said to me, with worry on her face and in her voice, "Do you know what the shortest verse in the Bible is?"

I didn't, and so she said, "Jesus wept."

I'm pretty sure that, in the days before her funeral, I cried. And know that  in my dreams I've sometimes grieved. Even so, it's never seemed enough. Maybe it simply never is, in the face of incomprehensible loss...

LPK

LiveJournal
11.15.2013 (b)

3 - A Soul Left to Wander

A few nights ago, I walked through the attic of my grandparents' white, asbestos-shingled house at Fremont Street and Station Road. In the many years since they last lived there, in the many years since I'd last seen it, it had been cleared of all the familiar things that once resided there.

Inside the house I felt oddly disoriented, unsure of how to get, from where I'd entered, up to the attic which I remembered from my childhood. Afterwards, I recalled that there'd been two sets of stairs, one from the front of the house and one from the hallway off the kitchen, which met at a landing, and then a second shorter flight which led to the floor above.

In the second floor hallway there was a door and, behind it, a few more steps up into the attic. Once there, I knew I should have found, hanging on a makeshift rod below the rafters, my uncle's Army Air Forces jacket, brought home from his wartime tour as a B-29 propeller mechanic in the Philippines.

Maybe it wasn't that I'd forgotten how to get there. Maybe it was simply that, in the inexplicable manner of dreams, I'd actually gotten there without traversing the vaguely-remembered hallways and stairs. Even more perplexing, once there, was the absence of the dark and rough-sawn rafters overhead, the soaring ridge boards and plunging valleys, the dormer rafters angling into them, that I remembered.

Instead, it was a sterile and empty place with straight, gray hallways lined with rows of closed and locked doors, much like those storage spaces that people rent when what they've come to, in their present lives, is somehow out of sync with where they've been.

And I wondered afterward if all of this was shown to me as a way of saying that, because of how I'd lived my own life, what I'd hoped to find was now irrevocably gone, the space it once occupied now empty and gray, like a life long lost and a soul left to wander among the sterile tombs...

LPK
LiveJournal
11.15.2013 (c)