Friends and Neighbors Day, part 1

I've been writing a bunch lately--and surprising myself with all the stories I've been discovering--and thought I'd share a short one here about my family's move to North Country. This is part one.


Friends and Neighbors Day

We were like the family in the Christmas story, only then there were four of us in an old Rambler station wagon working our way up through the plains. We were on I-29, having come from Altus, Oklahoma, in the middle of June. My dad was in the Air Force and had been transferred again; this time to Grand Forks, North Dakota. Mom, Dad, my brother and I--with our dog, our cat and her four kittens--were all hunched over, watching the scenery go by. We had driven a long way, through two states, and now we were in Fargo, stopped out front of a Holiday Inn while my dad was inside the lobby, talking to the man at the counter. Our plan had been to stop by seven, have some dinner, and take a little swim in the pool.

When Dad came back to the car, he told us the hotel wouldn’t take pets. We couldn’t stay. But he was optimistic, unshaken. As always—he was a sergeant, after all—he seemed like it was his idea all along.

“Hey, that’s okay. I think we can make it up to Grand Forks tonight anyway,” he said to Mom, who was now wilting against the passenger door. My mom is an even five feet with short curly hair and a feisty way about her. I know a little more about her heritage now; she’s a mixed-blood—Winnebago Fox and German and Irish. She never seemed to fit in with the other Air Force wives. She used to tell me she hated getting together for coffee klatches. She hated hearing the sound of defeat in the voices of the other young women who followed their husbands from SAC base to SAC base, leaving their hometowns and extended families and life dreams behind.

The kitties were starting to mew restlessly and the mother cat, K.C. (we named her after Kansas City, one of the many places we’d called home), looked about as wilted as Mom.

“Oh, Keith, how far is that?” She turned to look at him and you could see from her eyes that her voice was hiding the frustration and fatigue.

“We should be able to make it in an hour and a half. The man at the Holiday said there’s a place that takes pets and it’s not too far to the base after that. We’ll still get there in time to swim,” he promised.

I was tired and hungry and my brother kept sticking his elbow out at me whenever I started to fall over toward him. I was about ten and Dave, two years older. My mom told me when I was little I used to chatter away in his ear, inside the kitchen, in front of the TV, on the way to the backyard. And he would interrupt me and say in a long, deadpan voice, “Shut up” before I could finish whatever it was I was telling him. He was born in England, in Hunstanton, and had a bit of that Englishness to him. Mom said he was a little fuss-budget before I was born and worried a lot after she brought me home, but I don’t think he worried about me per se, just that I was going to be a lot of bother and intrude on his long-held space in the family. I could tell this from another story she told me.

One day she was doing dishes and she felt a kind of strange silence in the house. I was just a baby and was taking a nap. Dave was supposed to be playing with his Tinker Toys in the living room. Dad was away on a month-long alert.

She picked up another dish to wash and then, thinking about this eerie silence in a way mothers do, dropped it back in the sink and ran to my bedroom. Dave was holding a pillow over my face, reaching his arms up and over the crib sides, standing on his tippy-toes to reach. He must have had some strength despite that precarious position because when she pulled the pillow off my face I was blue and gasping for breath. And then I let out with one big wail.

“Davey, WHAT are you doing?” she screamed.

“Sis was crying and crying and she wouldn’t stop crying and I tried to make her stop.”

I’ve known many other families who tell their funny stories in crowds at reunions and weddings and funerals and I’ve heard my mom tell this one over and over. She sees me laughing at it, too, but lately I’m not that keen on being the one gasping for air anymore. Lately I’ve been feeling like I'm always racing to keep up with my life, never getting ahead long enough to stop and know a place, stop and take a deep breath.

But I held my own in this brother-sister act and remember one day, six years later, when Dave was giving me a lot of guff in the kitchen. He had broken his leg on the cement wall in the backyard and was standing in crutches near the basement stairs. He had a full-length cast; it had been a bad break. I guess I had had enough of the teasing and pushed him with the back of my fingers, easy—like aw, knock-it-off easy. And he fell over the edge of that top stair, widening his eyes at me, scared—like pull-me-back, you-still-have-time scared. But I didn’t pull him back and watched him row his arms back and back like you do when you’ve just been pushed off the end of the dock. He was okay, amazingly, but had to have a new cast.

Still, we were siblings and constant companions for each other in a world of ever-changing friends. In the Southwest, we would race off on our bikes to the base swimming pools, hot air filling the cups of our lungs and throats. In the mountains, we would camp with Mom and Dad, roasting marshmallows on whittled green branches over fires late at night. In the North here, we would face a lot of new terrain together.

(to be continued)