I majored in Communications. Looking back, I probably should have looked for a college with a solid Creative Writing program or a degree in Television or both, since what I really wanted was to write books or work at a TV station.
My college promised that they were working on getting a TV station and that they had a great radio station already. A full 10 years after I graduated, they finally got a semblance of a TV station (half an hour from campus) that only broadcast college sports. We had that in my high school.
Still, I’d gotten a scholarship of $500/semester that was only good if I majored in Communications – and I loved that school. It was tons of fun, plus the school colors had purple in them! I loved purple.
So I got a degree in Communications which, at the time, meant that I could try to find a job as a newspaper reporter. Since I had zero TV experience and never did an internship, I wasn’t quite sure how to get where I wanted to go.
I imagined myself on TV, standing in front of ruins in Kuwait some other war-torn country, reporting on the situation. I thought I would cover the Oscars ceremony and interview famous people on the red carpet. But one night, very late, I was flipping through the channels and I saw a news interview that changed everything.
A couple of teenage girls near Pittsburgh had disappeared. Vanished. No one was sure whether they’d been picked up by a stranger, or run away. But the reporter for the story feared the worst – and wanted us to know that.
REPORTER: Did you know the victims?
AUNT OF VICTIM (obviously distraught): Yes, she was my goddaughter. And her friend. We just really want them to be safe and come home.
REPORTER: Do you have any idea who could have taken them? Did you see any suspicious characters?
AUNT: No, of course not, we just want to find them and get them home safely.
REPORTER: Do you know what they were wearing at the time of their disappearance?
AUNT: Well, they’d just had softball practice. I guess they were probably wearing their softball uniforms.
REPORTER: Can you tell me what their softball uniforms looked like?
This went on and on: the crying godmother, desperately wanting to get the word out to her beloved niece that she was loved, and the young, merciless reporter who was going for the jugular with every question.
I sat up on the couch, my jaw on the floor. Even at 20 years old, I knew this was not the kind of reporting I wanted to do. I wanted to tell stories about the girls coming home, about war heroes, quintuplets being born, and puppies being rescued and given new homes. But wherever I looked on TV, even in the 1980s, the only happy stories on TV were at 11:27 – the last three minutes of the news cast – as if the only feel-good stories they could find were only worthwhile if they made the newscasters laugh before everyone went off to bed for the night.
This week, a report was released about COVID and how the U.S. news coverage was far more negative than the coverage in other countries. I thought: how could it take 30 years for them to realize what I knew after watching one story of two missing teens? We report bad news because it gets good ratings.
I have no idea if those girls ever made it home. I stopped watching the news for decades after that. Now I remember why.
I stood in the “yard” – a patch of mud, really – staring at the unpaved driveway, the non-existent sidewalk, and the patches of grass that would someday become a place to play badminton.
I held my newborn in my arms. Shane and the house had been due on the same day: January 15. Shane was eight days late; the house was three months late. But now, finally, we were a family living in our forever home.
Dylan skittered about on the gravel, running for a minute, then stopping to pick up a rock and examine it more closely. Then he’d drop the rock and run some more. Dylan was three and had the energy of a scared rabbit.
In the background, there was a hum – a distant sound that was both soothing and deafening. Every few minutes, the hum would get louder and louder until it became a roar… and at those points, Dylan would stop moving, throw his hands over his ears and beam at me.
Isn’t this CRAZY? he seemed to say. I smiled back at him. Yes, Son. It really is!
As I stood there listening, watching Dylan spin, holding tiny Shane, I thought to myself: This sound isn’t going to happen for another 17 years. That number of years seemed infinite.
Where would I be in 17 years? Would we still live in this house? Would Bill still have the same job? Would I have a job? And what about the children?
I looked at my smiling toddler. I thought: If he lives that long – because, as a new mom, it was always a question of “if” – Dylan will be 20 years old! How could that even be possible?
I looked at the baby in my arms. Shane will be 17! I nearly gasped. How could this baby be a teenager? Shane would be able to drive! Dylan would be able to vote! That little three-year-old spinning kid with a smile as bright as the sun – voting? And this little ball of joy in my arms – driving?
It just couldn’t be.
And yet, it is. This year, the roar is happening outside my window as I write. The cicadas are back.
Seventeen years have passed.
The driveway’s been paved, a sidewalk created, and the muddy yard is now covered in grass. Where I once stood holding a baby is a Sycamore we planted, now taller than our two-story house. We’ve had four basement floods, replaced the washer, dryer, refrigerator and dishwasher. Our dog – who didn’t exist 17 years ago – came into our lives, brightened it immensely for more than a decade, and then died. A new dog is now part of the family. Kitty – with me since college – also died. We’ve had five fish, a guinea pig, half a dozen hermit crabs and three petsitting businesses.
Bill has the same job, still. I’ve gone back to work several times. Even “little” Dylan has now had numerous jobs. He survived Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, was diagnosed with ADHD, somehow survived school, and got into the college of his dreams where he’s getting great grades, making wonderful friends and planning a career. Last week, he bought his first car. Shane survived dental surgery, successfully treated a vision processing disorder, wore and outgrew glasses, tackled OCD, learned to play ukulele, drums and guitar, and is a TikTok video star. He takes his driving test this summer and he graduates from high school next year.
Meanwhile, the cicadas huddled underground until, finally, it was time for them to emerge and remind us how very, very fast time flies.
I didn’t always feel like I couldn’t trust doctors. In fact, there was a definite turning point in my attitude.
Sometime after the kids were born, the gynecologist said to me: “Your left ovary is just dust. You should have it removed.” This was before the gallbladder incident (when I didn’t actually need surgery) so I got the (outpatient/laser) surgery. It was over quickly, and I slept through the whole thing.
When I woke up afterward, a nurse was standing by my cot saying, “She’s already had six bags of fluid. What should I do?”
“She’s young and healthy,” said a voice. “She can handle it. Just keep giving them to her.” Someone added another bag of fluid to the pole by my bed, attached to the IV in my arm.
I didn’t care; I went back to sleep. Awhile later I woke up and went home.
That night, I woke up gasping for air.
I alerted Bill. “Can’t….” I gasped. “Can’t… Breathe.”
Bill stood up, wide-eyed, and realized quickly that we needed to go to the Emergency Room.
I was in the hospital for three days.
Immediately they discovered fluid in and around my lungs. They gave me pills to remove the fluid. Then they kept me overnight for observation. When I could breathe normally, they wanted to locate the source of the problem.
I repeated the nurses’ conversation about “she can handle it” but no one believed me.
“No one gets seven bags of fluid,” they said. I told them I was sure about what I’d heard, and I had no idea how many bags a person was supposed to get.
Plus – maybe they’d noticed – I had fluid in my lungs immediately afterward.
“Let’s just make sure it’s not something else,” they said. They kept me for another day. After two days, I volunteered to go home.
“You still need to get a scan to rule out congestive heart failure,” they said.
“I don’t have congestive heart failure!” I said. “The nurses gave me too much fluid, so it’s your fault that I’m here in the first place! I just want to go home!”
“You can go home after your scan,” they said.
But no one gave me a scan. I asked every nurse, every hour, why I wasn’t getting a scan but no one could tell me.
“I don’t even need a scan!” I said. I really do know my own body.
Late in the afternoon on Day 3, I got the scan. Finally.
“Sorry,” they said afterward. “All the doctors who can read the scan have gone home for the day. They’ll read it first thing tomorrow morning.”
At that point, I blew a gasket.
After lunch on Day 4 of my hospital stay – after an outpatient surgery that should have lasted three hours – they read my scan, determined that I didn’t have congestive heart failure, and sent me home.
I nearly died, spent four days in the hospital, had all kinds of unnecessary tests, wasn’t allowed to go home when I was feeling fine, and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the surgery I’d had – that I didn’t even need – and the mistakes made in my aftercare were the cause of all of it.
I wrote a letter to the administration, not just to complain but to make sure someone trained the nurses not to randomly give seven or eight bags of fluid to anyone else, no matter how “young and healthy.”
The hospital never billed us for any of it.
And that is when I stopped trusting doctors.
Shane and I have come to an agreement: we will meet weekly about colleges.
I have been looking at colleges for either Dylan or Shane for five years. I was already making lists for Shane back when Dylan still hadn’t decided where to go, and both boys spent their spring break in 9th grade on college road trips. I tried to make the road trips fun, of course, but still: college romps were included as part of the package.
I say “romps” because “tours” didn’t start until junior year. We would go to a campus and run free, testing the vibes and getting a feel for what was – and wasn’t – enticing and attractive. Campuses that “fit” were often just grassy and open areas surrounded by regal buildings – and honestly, there are hundreds of those since I knew where to look.
Dylan looked at 87 colleges, all told, but he pretty much knew he wanted to go to Belmont University from the moment he stepped onto campus early in 10th grade. But it was fun to keep looking.
Not including the campuses Shane toured with Dylan, Shane has already seen 81 colleges in person – about half during the pandemic. In addition, he’s toured dozens more via YouTube, and done admissions sessions with a few dozen that he hasn’t toured – including Juilliard and Edinburgh, just because he could. Shane has been Zooming with colleges of interest since last summer, and done several sessions with each of the colleges he really likes.
Shane has “gone to” at least three college fairs, and met with admissions officers at at least twenty schools. He’s serious about this search. Since some colleges re-opened for tours, he’s done six official, in-person tours as well.
Shane has done enough. He has a good, solid list of colleges he likes, and he plans to visit his top ten schools in the fall and/or spring next year. He’s even already asked his teachers for letters of recommendation.
But I am out of control.
While Shane has done all of these sessions, and tours, and fairs, and road trips – and been an absolute stalwart through the whole thing, I haven’t quite slowed down yet. He’s getting mail that intrigues me, so I research the colleges that I don’t recognize. I create stat sheets for colleges that may or may not be anywhere in the realm of possibility for Shane. I present the stat sheets to Shane as if they are golden, and he decides if they’re worth a virtual visit.
Then I spend time organizing and reorganizing information as if it will make any difference at all.
Shane isn’t quite done with his junior year. He’s preparing for AP exams and considering topics for his college application essay. He would much rather play guitar and make videos for TikTok. But he’s primed for completing his applications early and getting a couple of responses before Christmas.
Meanwhile, I’ve had to limit my college-related interactions with him, so it’s not all I talk about. We meet on Mondays at 8:00 instead.
Shane’s done great at getting ready to apply to colleges. I’m excited to take him back in the fall to (hopefully fully open) campuses to tour, meet students and interview with admissions officers. Everything is so exciting!
But then … he’ll be gone. They’ll both be gone. And I will have nothing left to research, tour or organize. Instead, I will be utterly and completely alone.
No wonder I am keeping myself thoroughly distracted.
My last post got one comment: Please go see a real doctor.
Oh, how I understand this sentiment! Real doctors are the ones who know, who have studied, who understand things our mere mortal minds can’t comprehend. They are the saviors, the confidants, the gods in human clothing who know the answers to our ailments, who fix what is wrong….
But that’s not what I’ve experienced.
For example, I had a sporadic pain in my right side for years. It started during my first pregnancy, when I assumed my son’s foot was lodged in my rib cage. After he was born and I still felt a foot in my rib cage, I learned that this pain was probably from my gallbladder.
So after years, I finally went to a doctor – a GI specialist recommended to me by several people. The local “expert” asked me some questions, took my vitals, poked and prodded, and gave me his ruling.
“Your gallbladder has to come out,” he said.
“WHAT?!?” I shrieked. “You want to take it out?!? Isn’t there anything else I can do? Don’t I need it to live?”
“You don’t need it to live,” he said. “Lots of people live long, healthy lives without a gallbladder, and they also live without this kind of pain.”
“But isn’t there anything else I can try first? Couldn’t I try a special diet or something?”
“No,” he said. “Get an ultrasound. I will call you when I have the results and we can talk about next steps.”
I left his office shaking. Surgery? I couldn’t believe it. I was terrified.
So I hopped on the internet and found a list of what foods are good – and bad – for the gallbladder. I ate the right foods and avoided fatty foods like ice cream, which (coincidentally) I hadn’t eaten for seven years before my first pregnancy. I took a plant-based supplement: milk thistle. The pain disappeared immediately.
After two months of eating right, I got the recommended ultrasound.
“I got your results,” the doctor said a week later. “Everything looks good.”
“I don’t need surgery?” I asked, incredulous.
“No,” he said. “You have a normal, healthy gallbladder. Can you remind me why you came to see me?”
I almost laughed.
My diet has caused me numerous problems. After years of researching and trying very specific diets, I’ve tackled all of these issues without a “real” doctor.
But I needed a primary care physician to prescribe my natural thyroid medication. Finding her took six years. At my first physical in more than a decade, I had a bandaid on my palm. I’d opened a container of lettuce too quickly and gotten the equivalent of a paper cut.
“You’ll probably need a tetanus shot,” my new doctor said, gesturing to the bandaid.
She wasn’t kidding. Maybe she’d also offer to cut off my hand.
“I don’t need a tetanus shot,” I told her.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s your choice.” That’s how I knew this was the doctor for me.
This week, with agonizing arm pain, I asked my husband for help. I pointed to where my neck hurt and he pushed on those places. It was horrifically painful and caused my head to spin. I actually believed I might die.
But the next morning, my arm worked for the first time in weeks. Astoundingly too, my right leg – which I’d assumed would never lift properly again – felt like it did when I was 14. My body is in perfect working order for the first time in years.
I’m not sure any real doctor could have done that for me.
I crashed my bicycle a few weeks ago. One of my friends said, “Don’t you know you can’t crash at our age? It takes too long to heal!” And I ignored her.
Fast forward to three weeks later, maybe a month. I’ve lost count. The cuts on my skin are still there. That alone says one of two things. It either says, Those were some pretty deep cuts! or it says, It takes too long to heal!
The cut on my leg, which was not deep because I was wearing pants, is almost gone. I wonder if Shane had gotten the same injuries, if he would have been healed in a week. He’s only 40 years younger than me.
When I crashed, I landed on my right arm. Somehow this jarred a portion of my core; my entire right side hurts when I stretch. This is an improvement. It used to hurt when I moved even a little, and that went on for a week.
The landing also appears to have slammed something in my neck onto a nerve. A week after the crash, I woke up unable to lift my right arm. It took me several days and some consultations (with softball players, not with doctors) to realize that it was a pinched nerve. The giveaway: Bill pushed on my neck in one specific spot, and my brain spun. The whole room went around, and I was just lying still. It was insane.
After the room spin, though, my arm lifting got a little better. Unfortunately, at the same time I was revisited by sudden spells of vertigo. This morning when I woke up, I couldn’t hold myself upright. But hey, I can lift my arm! Not as well as I could a month ago, but … I can lift it.
If I stretch my neck a certain way and lie very, very still for a long time, my vertigo goes away. Mostly. This tells me that I’m correct about the pinched nerve. My softball buddy says he was told by two neurosurgeons that a pinched nerve requires immediate, drastic surgery of the neck. He chose to go to a chiropractor instead – something he didn’t believe in – and after three weeks, he was functional again.
Bill is my version of a chiropractor. He is very kind about trying to “fix” me – although I shudder to think what I would do without him. I sure wouldn’t be lifting my arm yet. To be honest, I’d probably have given up sports long ago if he didn’t assist with my ailments. He is a saint.
I suppose I would go to an actual doctor, or a chiropractor, if he weren’t around. But I trust Bill more.
So while I wait for him to come home from work so that he can work with me, I will just rest. (This, of course, is also thanks to Bill.) I am glad that we don’t have softball today, because playing without my throwing arm is unacceptable. By next week, I expect to be fully healed. Or at least by next month.
What I have learned from all of this is: don’t crash the bike.
After Dylan returned from college last spring, we all knew that something needed to change.
For Dylan, he preferred to never come home again. And he really, really tried to accomplish that. In four months of college, he barely spoke to us, almost never returned our texts, and complained whenever we called that he was “really busy.” We got the idea – and backed off.
We didn’t bother him, but he didn’t notice we were living our lives without him. Even now, he still hasn’t asked about our lives over the past four months. A lot has happened, but he knows nothing about any of it. He isn’t interested.
When we were making plans to pick him up from college, Dylan decided that he would rather put everything he owned in storage than to come home even for a few days, and instead drove with his girlfriend to Texas to spend three weeks with her family, vacationing.
Eventually, he came home.
In the meantime, I prepared. I didn’t want to spend another summer arguing over Dylan’s inability to get out of bed by noon, his dark and smelly room, his constantly being late – and making everyone else wait – even though his dinner was ice cold.
In fact, I didn’t want to argue with Dylan at all.
So I got a book called Failure To Launch: Why Your Twentysomething Hasn’t Grown Up … And What To Do About It. While Dylan has “launched” pretty darn well, he hasn’t taken charge of some aspects of his life, and I wanted to know what to do about that. Because what I’ve been doing has never – not ever – worked.
And sure enough, like most parenting books, I learned what I’ve been doing wrong to cause his persistent behavior. The gist is: I’ve been doing too much for him, “helping” when it’s no longer my time to help. If I do everything for him, he will never learn to do what he needs to do for himself.
It’s pretty much been the answer to everything since Dylan turned 12. I just keep re-learning it.
The best thing I learned in this book is that I am now more of a “consultant” than a “supervisor.” It’s not my job to tell Dylan what to do – he already knows. And he is doing a pretty great job, actually. His grades are great – all A’s and B’s – and he’s keeping himself healthy. He may have forgotten how to shave, but he is feeding himself and will probably work this summer. He’s careful with money, he’s careful with people, and he’s kind.
Somewhere along the way, though, he stopped thanking me for virtually everything. He thanks everyone else – he’s very polite – but he sees me as the enemy. It’s as if he needs to completely ignore me in order to “prove” that he’s an adult, instead of learning how to have an adult-to-adult relationship.
I assume that will come in time, if we try.
Meanwhile I am supposed to treat him not like “my child,” because he’s not a child, but more like a distant relative who’s come to visit. So every day I imagine that my cousin’s son, a delightful young man named Graham, has come to visit me for the summer. When I am deciding what to say to Dylan, I think: Would I say that to Graham?
The answer is almost always: No.
To be fair, Graham would not need any of the reminders I think Dylan needs. But for now, I remain a consultant, living with my distant relative.
And so far, we aren’t arguing about anything.
It’s quiet in here.
Bill has gone to get the pizza. Dylan – who is finally home from college – has gone upstairs to his room. Shane was already upstairs in his room. The dog has been walked and is resting on a chair in the living room. Unlike our other dog, Loki rests in another room sometimes. He isn’t glued to my legs.
I have checked my emails, played my daily SongPop, browsed a bit through Facebook, and ordered some probiotics online. It’s cold and rainy outside, so I am staying indoors. I await pizza – and movie night, a tradition we’ve had since before the kids were born. (Even though I can no longer eat pizza, we have “pizza and movie night” regularly.)
Until it starts, though, I have nothing to do. I’m thinking ahead to the “empty nest” that is coming, and I’m looking for ways to control the outcome (the kids don’t grow up and leave home?) and I’m realizing that it’s going to be quiet in here a lot of the time.
So I am turning to the internet for help.
I spent many years shopping on eBay for everything I owned as a kid, so that my kids would not be deprived. I spent years after that shopping on Amazon so that I could get anything I wanted just a little more cheaply than in the stores. After I realized that Amazon was being taken over by international sellers and knock-offs were rampant, I shopped on the Target site.
After all those years of online shopping, I then browsed the library catalog. At some point, I found Facebook. At another point, I realized Facebook was emotionally more painful than it was worth. So I started looking for other things to do.
And that’s where I got stuck.
There are more than a billion websites available to me. I can find a job or a friend. I can date or complain about a bad relationship. I can travel virtually or explore new cuisines. I can take classes or learn how to change a flat tire. I can fix my printer, my washing machine, my toilet or my picture hangers. I can build a bookshelf, a closet or a new engine for my lawn mower. I can watch videos about cats who play piano, or I can teach myself a foreign language.
I can jump into dramas of all kinds: support groups, educational meetings, animal rescues, environmental groups, political masses or musical theater. I can delve into the dark web (assuming I could find that) or practice fly fishing in my living room. I can download recipes, calendars, ancestry photos, old restaurant chain logos or TV theme songs from a prior century. I can color, study horticulture or become acquainted with any species of wildlife ever in existence.
But you know what I did today – like every day? I hopped onto Facebook, looked around, then hopped back off of Facebook. I wondered what the heck I should look for on the internet, and then realized I have not one single reason to go anywhere on the internet.
There are more than a billion websites and I can’t think of a single one to browse. I don’t feel like learning. I don’t feel like virtually traveling. And I sure don’t want to get to know any more people.
So I wrote my own blog post instead. After all, I have one of those billion websites. I may as well use it.
I ordered some items from Target for pickup. I masked up, and went to get them.
At the store, I grabbed a couple of grocery items. I bought them, then went to get my pickup order.
I didn’t have the Target app, which apparently has an essential barcode feature for pickups. Still, they located my order and I headed out. But…
I had ordered a small wallet that was, I noticed immediately, way too big for my purposes. So I walked four feet from the pickup area to the return area.
The woman behind the counter said, “Do you have a receipt?”
“I just picked it up 20 seconds ago,” I said. “They didn’t give me a receipt.”
“Okay well, you will have to go home and within 24 hours, you’ll get a receipt. Then you can return the item.”
“But I don’t want to go home and wait for a receipt. I’m here right now! Isn’t there anything I can do?”
“I guess I can give you merchandise credit,” she said. She held up a little black card labeled merchandise return, which I could use the next time I shopped at Target.
“I don’t want to carry around an extra card,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s the only thing I can do.”
I looked at my bag of groceries, which cost way more than the $12 wallet I was trying to return. “What if I return some of these items?” I asked. “Then I can buy them again with the merchandise credit, and I won’t have to carry around the card.”
“You can do that,” said the girl. “But you can only use $75 a year of merchandise credit.”
“Huh?”
“Well if you have to return something else this year, you might go over your limit. You can only spend $75 a year on one of these cards.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Someone walked by and said, “Just give her the card.” This made both of us happy.
She “returned” the little wallet.
Meanwhile I pulled out a couple of things from my grocery bag, which she also “returned.” Then I watched her re-scan and “buy” the grocery items.
Finally, she handed me my receipt – and my little black gift card. “You have $12.22 on the card,” she said.
“I still have to carry the card?” I asked, perplexed.
“Sorry!” she said. “It didn’t come out even.”
I took the gift card, and picked up my bag of returned-then-bought-again things. I was too tired to argue.
I was halfway to the car before I realized what had happened.
She’d returned the grocery items as merchandise credit, instead of crediting my account. Then she “bought” them again with the same merchandise credit. So I still had to carry around the little black gift card.
Worse yet, I got back slightly less than what the item actually cost. That’s because when I bought the grocery items, I’d used my Target credit card and gotten a 5% discount. So I paid more for the same items the second time I bought them.
I didn’t have the energy to go back inside and re-do everything. I puzzled and moaned the whole way home, but I’d reached my limit. Let them keep their 75 cents.
I forgot all about it … for three days. Then, out of the blue, I got an email from Target.
The email said: We have refunded the full cost of your order. Thank you for shopping at Target!
I am not even going to ask.
In my quest for understanding, I frequently think about a guy who, when I was incredibly young, showed me how the other side lives. And by “other side,” I don’t mean politically. I mean, he had a perspective on life that was so far removed from what I believed, I literally thought he was joking.
I lived with Larry for three years. I was a 20-year-old college student, and he was a 36-year-old biker. College was never in his life plan, and I’d never lived a blue-collar life. I learned a lot while living with Larry.
I learned that loyalty and friendship are as important as blood; once you trust someone, you never turn your back on him. I learned that family is forever. I learned that what you do and where you go aren’t nearly as important as brotherhood.
I learned that when you live from paycheck to paycheck, there isn’t any more money if you’re hungry or – in my case – if you want another beer. Until you get paid again, money will not magically materialize.
This lesson boggled my mind, since I’d always had everything I wanted. I had to learn to do without, so I also learned that I could live with much less than I thought I needed.
In Larry’s world, every day was an adventure. He never complained about his job. As a machinist he said, “I’m a skilled laborer. That means I have a skill. I can work anywhere in the world!” I just thought it was cool that he could wear yesterday’s jeans and t-shirt to work.
On warm weekends, Larry would say, “I’m going out to work on the bike.” This was a regular event which required him to sit all day amidst small metal objects and oil. People would stop by and chat, standing and staring at the motorcycle. They stayed for hours.
We ate burgers and pizza; we never cooked. We watched football at the VFW. Larry had a country band, so we played guitars and sang together, often on dark, tiny stages. We were always out.
Larry’s beliefs were dramatically different than mine. Larry once told me he was addicted to cigarettes because his mother smoked when she was pregnant.
Did you smoke when you were an infant? I wondered. Larry was serious.
Our world was lily-white, mostly bearded men. The few women were “old ladies” like me: scantily clad trophies who didn’t talk much.
Once, while sitting at a stoplight on the back of Larry’s motorcycle, I pointed out a Mazda Miata convertible. It was my dream car.
“You like that piece of [bleep]? Get off my bike!” Larry roared. He wasn’t kidding; I had to walk miles to get home. That’s how I found out that Mazda is a Japanese manufacturer. This apparently was not okay – especially for a machinist who wanted to continue working “anywhere in the world.”
I was supposed to be terrified of Hell’s Angels (“they’ll slit your throat”), but to ride without a helmet (“freedom, Baby!”). Everything required some risk.
But living Larry’s life – because he never lived mine – offered me a pinhole peek into the anger, the ignorance and the upheaval that is pouring from some people lately. Larry never struck me as a White supremacist, but his concern about race, foreigners and skin color baffled me.
So I doubt that Larry is following that movement; he’s likely just still singing and keeping his head down. I think about him, though, and I thank God I survived those years – and that I have the life I have today.
