For the five years we lived in the town, Harley had either driven a long haul truck or had been a tour bus driver for Trailways Bus Company. As a tour bus driver he was gone 30 days at a time and a week at a time driving the truck. This is why I have such good memories of the town and refer to them as the golden years. He wasn’t home most of the time. But when he was my, our, life was a living hell. Our family, absent Harley, would touch normalcy, for just a moment and then he would be home destroying it in the wake of the chaos he always brought with him. Now he was moving us back to the country, on another farm where he would be there every day and night. We were part of the deal, free hired hands. Us kids worked the farm that entire first summer. By the time my sophomore year started that fall it had become a miserable existence. I chose to play every sport and volunteered for any after school activity just to avoid being in the same house or room with him.
We had come from southeast Kansas. A small community with tree lined streets, a river on the edge of town and hundreds of acres of rolling woods and ponds surrounding it. This was the best playground a young boy could dream of. Summers spent swimming, fishing, hiking and camping. None of it was further from home than a bike ride. Now we are on the farm in northwest Colorado which sits on the edge of the valley where the Burg is situated seven miles below. To the east It is flat and covered with endless miles of corn fields, treeless and some what barren. I missed the old Town terribly, the friends and history that were made there, but was finding a new solace in the open expanse that lay before me. On our first day there, around the first week in June, standing alone facing west and gazing across the valley below, the setting sun didn’t feel like the ending it always had. It felt like a new beginning. So I began again.
I was embraced by the majority of my new classmates when I started school that fall. I’m a funny guy who always has a sympathetic ear to lend, a confidante to be trusted with insight to be offered. I was the best friend a friend could have. I can say that now looking back but I didn’t always feel that way. Much of the time, I was just desperate to fit in. I didn’t see what I had to offer as being of any value. But then something wonderful started to happen. I began to let my guard down when around some of the members of my new “crew”. I was occasionally genuine. It turned out I wasn’t faking it all those years as much as I was simply being me in reaction to my internal and external circumstances. Maybe there was value in the experience that I drew upon and real insight and wisdom to share. My life, with all its twist and turns, started to seem like it might have a purpose beyond simply surviving it. Being a good friend was worth something. It was valued and I could feel good about it even though I felt bad about other aspects of my life. It was something “right” in a world that I felt so “wronged” by.
And just as significant, if not more so, I had begun to let a handful of people do and be the same for me. This turned out to be much harder than being a friend as it called upon me to trust a world that had always been untrustworthy. I had trust issues that I came by honestly. I don’t think I was as brave as much as I was desperate. Desperate for human companionship that didn’t revolve around damage control or navigating a minefield of possible dangers. After having been betrayed by so many, including God, why would I take another chance on people? What was there to gain…lose?
Everything, on both accounts. But it’s what makes life so worth living. The chance that you can have and lose it all. The possibility of what’s to come in spite of what was lost or sacrificed.
I remember making that connection on a deeper level as I stood on the valleys edge, watching the sun dip below the horizon that fall, as Thanksgiving approached. The corn had been harvested. The end of a season. The comfort of my memories of last years Thanksgiving, the last year I had Grandma and all she represented and then the sadness of her exit. Sunsets had filled me with dread since her passing and everything that happened that year only reinforced this. Undistracted by tasks of day to day life, the nights were an opportunity to wallow in self pity and regret. I would read and listen to music to fend off sleep. Sleep brought with-it the nightmares of my existence, past and present. Dreams were never pleasant. Nights were long. I dreaded them.
But not so much this evening. Something had changed over the summer. The dread wasn’t as prevalent even though I knew soon I would be summoned back into the house, to the dinning table where Harley awaited and the show would begin, I felt myself relax for the first time in a very long time, maybe ever. I could see the glimmer of a brighter future, any future as the sky dimmed. The impending darkness didn’t frighten me…as much. I found myself welcoming and embracing the night to come and had faith… hope in the sunrise. The night now promised a new beginning at its end.
I turned and walked back to the house leaving the day to wain and the night to descend. I had touched “peace of mind”, connectedness, if only for a few moments, for the first time in my life. It was good.
“Look at that sunset, Howard. It’s like the daytime didn’t want to end, isn’t it? It’s like the daytime was gonna put up a big scrap, set the world on fire to keep the night from creeping on.”
Rosalind Russell ‘Picnic’ 1955
You’ve done it again! ♥♥♥♥♥
Awesome.. keep going