Just Another Day

Swish!

"Good game," Eddie said.

I held out my hand and waited for the slap. "You, too," I replied, trading the sweat on my hand for the sweat on his as I pulled the grey Sports Illustrated sweatshirt over my head. "See you next week?" he asked.

I looked at dad, who was pulling on his own sweatshirt. He nodded. "Yea, I guess so," I said.

"You're turning into a pretty good ballplayer," dad said as we drove away from the high school in his new Olds '98. He'd started up Saturday morning basketball the first Saturday after we moved into the area back in 1971. It was now September of 1992 and it was still going strong.

"Thanks," I said. "I'm really enjoying playing with you guys."

They'd started playing at what was then called Radford College. They'd been kicked out of all kinds of places, from the community center in Blacksburg to the Blacksburg Armory to the community center in Radford. Now, since he was the varsity wrestling coach, Dean Underwood was able to get us into the high school.

"Well, your game is really getting better. You shoot well and you pass real well," he said. "That one you made to Norm today was a beauty." Dad always knew how to make me feel good about just about anything.

Smiling from ear to ear, I settled comfortably into the leather seat and closed my eyes. It was a short ride home, but it was always one of my favorite parts of the week. Dad would usually turn on the radio and we'd listen to Click and Clack, the Tappett Brothers, laughing their heads off about some person's car problems. After getting home dad would invariably cook scrambled eggs with cheese. Sometimes he'd throw in a side of bacon to go along with it.

"Uh, oh," dad said suddenly over Ray's prolonged guffaws. I opened my eyes to see him peering nervously in the rear view mirror.

"What's the matter?" I asked, sitting up abruptly and looking behind us.

"This guy's going to hurt somebody," he replied, as a maroon-colored Jeep Wrangler whizzed dangerously by us on the right-hand shoulder, mere inches from dad's outside mirror. "Better to have that guy in front of us, though, so we can keep an eye on him."

I sat transfixed by the speeding Jeep as it passed car after car, weaving in and out of traffic as if trying to make up laps in a NASCAR race. The driver must have been doing at least 75 in the 45-mile-an-hour zone, but it didn't appear that he cared about much of anything besides getting to the front of the slow-moving pack.

He must have passed at least five or six cars, when, as he passed yet one more car on the gravel shoulder, one of the driver's right-side tires caught the edge of the road. Jerking the wheel too hard toward the left, the Jeep raced violently across the two lanes and into the grassy median. Skidding from one side to the other, the driver desperately tried to regain control, but turning too far sideways, he flipped the Jeep and it careened seven or eight times before coming to rest in a drainage ditch between the four lanes of asphalt.

Dad and I were about a quarter of a mile behind the Jeep when it rolled, and as we neared, dad pulled the Oldsmobile to the side of the road, and throwing it into Park, jumped out. Traffic had slowed to a crawl, everyone rubber-necking at the Jeep that was now sitting on it's rag-top roof, tires still spinning toward the sky.

"Come on!" dad yelled, racing across the road, deftly dodging the tortoise-paced traffic. "We've got to help him!"

I followed as quickly as I could, shaking nervously, still not believing the accident I'd just seen. I didn't know what we were going to do for the driver, but I had complete trust in my dad. He'd know what to do, even if I didn't.

Racing to the ditch, we saw the driver lying unconsciously, face down on the concrete. He'd been thrown from the Jeep after its second or third flip in such a way that, on it's next flip, the Jeep actually rolled over him, coming to rest about ten feet behind him. Luckily for him, he'd landed face down in the ditch, which was six to eight inches lower than the grass surrounding it. Had he landed in the grass itself, he may have looked like a bug after it hits the windshield of a speeding car.

Dad raced to the man's side, held his finger on his neck and felt his thready pulse. Jerking around he yelled, "Call an ambulance!" to a man who had stopped to look at the carnage.

Turning his attention to the Jeep, dad's keen eye noticed a golden-brown liquid seeping from beneath the hood. It was rolling slowly but surely down the drainage ditch toward the bleeding and unconscious man.

"Battery acid!" dad bellowed. "It'll burn him! We've got to stop it!"

Almost instinctively dad ran toward the acid and grabbed a large handful of dirt. Throwing it into the ditch directly in the acid's path, he looked up at me and said, "Come on! Throw some dirt on it!"

Kneeling next to the ditch, legs quivering from the adrenaline, I threw handful after handful of earth on the ever-expanding pile. After the acid started to pool behind the makeshift dam, dad and I looked at each other, took large, deep breathes, and immediately heard sirens in the distance.

We waited there until the EMT's had things under control. Since we saw the whole thing and were the first ones on the scene, dad figured we'd know better than anyone what had happened. Better than anyone, that is, except maybe the driver, and he wasn't talking.

We drove home that morning and I told the story to mom, who was amazed beyond belief. Dad cooked his eggs and bacon, too, throwing in a little extra cheese along the way. After breakfast he went out and did his usual Saturday morning things, like watering the garden and raking some leaves. I don't think he gave our adventure another thought. And I'm pretty sure he never checked on the man's condition. He almost acted like it was no big deal, like it was just another day in the life of a super hero.

Curse You, Roy Clark - Part III

Sunday was the longest day of my life. I went to the phone on five separate occasions and listened for a dial tone. We hadn't been there very long, so figured maybe the operator didn't have our number yet. I called and asked.

"You don't know the number you're calling from?" she asked. I didn't have a very good answer. She gave me the number anyway, and I slumped in the kitchen chair and pondered.

"Something's not right," I said to myself. "She should have called by now."

But she didn't. She hadn't called on Saturday night and she didn't call all day Sunday.

"Maybe her parents won't let her call a boy," Donnie said that afternoon after church.

"What? Why not?"

"You do live in the Bible Belt now, you know. People are just that way here. Girls don't call boys. It's not right."

I narrowed my eyes and looked at him with a large amount of skepticism, but when you're in a varitable storm, you take any harbor you can find.

"Yea, maybe that' it," I said, getting back to the football game we were watching.

I didn't sleep too much that night. My mind would not let it go. Why hadn't she called? What would she be like on the bus in the morning? What would school be like?

Monday morning dawned cold and rainy. Standing at the bus stop in front of Carol Robinson's house in the rain was never a fun proposition, but today I got up early and headed down a full 15 minutes before the usual time. Of course, I was alone for a while, but I did not want to miss the bus today. After all, I had to give her the opportunity to sit with me.

The rest of the kids finally joined me at the stop, and when the bus finally came I got on first, taking a seat toward the middle. "This way she'll be bound to see me quickly and will sit with me before she sits with someone else," I thought.

But when the bus got around to her stop, she was not there. I furrowed my brow and scanned the road. She was nowhere to be found. "No! This can't be!" I thought. "She's got to be here!!"

I wondered what it would take to get the bus driver to stop and let me off so I could knock on her door, but by the time I'd come up with a quick plan, the bus was rumbling down the road toward the front of the neighborhood. It was just vicky Carroll's stop and then off to school.

Perplexed and very upset, I slumped down in the seat and waited for the bus to get to the last stop. I put my knees up on the top of the seat in front of me and crossed my arms. The bus ground to a halt and the rest of the kids got on. The door closed with a soft metal clang and the we started rolling again.

I looked up and saw Vicky Carroll, our class's answer to Lucille Ball, standing in front of me in the aisle.

"Lisa said to give you this," she said with a certain amount of melancholy, extending her hand toward me.

"What is it?" I asked hurriedly.

"It's your ring."

I opened the small, lined-paper package I recognized very well and dropped the shiny Yankee ring into my quivering hand. I don't remember the rest of the ride to school, but I do remember sitting there utterly dumbfounded, long after everyone else was in class. I never saw it coming.

Mrs. Pollet finally came out and asked if everything was all right. I looked around me, totally unaware that all of the other students were gone. "I know it doesn't seem like it now, but there will be lots of others," she said.

Her face was contorted from the tears that filled my eyes. I made no response but put my shaking head down in my hands and sobbed.

We sat there for several minutes until I could control myself, then I followed her down the steps and into the trailer that doubled as our classroom.

It wasn't the last time I tried to convince her. For years I'd ride my bike back and forth in front of her house until one day the left pedal on my bike broke off. I raced her dad around the big block and actually won by a foot or two. No dice. She still wanted nothing to do with me. Or so I thought.

Several years later I found out from Vickie that Lisa had started writing my name on her notebooks the day I moved in. She'd thought I was relatively cute, too, but I'd blown it with my ring plan. And I was so sure that it would work.

After the 8th grade, Lisa went away to school at some religious boarding school. She only came home for holidays and during the summer. After we graduated from high school, she went off to college and I went on my mission. She got married and lived in Hawaii for a while and then got a divorce. I came home from Argentina and went out to BYU for a while.

Shortly after I graduate I was at mom and dad's old house playing ball with my nephew in the front yard. Lisa walked by with her dad. We stood and chatted for a little while and I muscled up the gumption to try one more time.

"Would you like to go out tomorrow night?" I asked.

She said yes.

The dream date I'd been trying to get since I was 12-years old unfortunately didn't go very well. We had a good enough time at dinner, but afterward I drove over to the duck pond to see if the ice was thick enough for skating the next day. After jumping on the ice a couple of times, I raced back to the idling car, into the shining headlights, and hit my face on a large, low-hanging limb. It cut my face, chipped a tooith and knocked me out for several seconds, and I never saw it coming.

I honestly don't know where Lisa is today. Her parents still live in the same small house, but I haven't seen her in years. It doesn't really matter, though. She had her chance. Lots of them. Now, after years of dreaming, scheming, asking and trying, I have finally let her go.

I am married to the most gorgeous woman I've ever known and the best wife a man could have. I have three terrific children, of whom I'm very proud. I'm happy beyond compare. And it hit me like a ton of bricks when it did happen. And you know what the best part is?

I never saw that coming either.

Curse You, Roy Clark - Part II

That very night I began the search.

It had to be here somewhere. I'd actually seen it just a few days before, but like always, when I needed something I couldn't find it. Otherwise I was stumbling over it every couple of minutes.

"Doggone it," I whispered to myself. "I know it's here somewhere."

I unlocked the padlock on my footlocker and started digging around through the years. Signed baseball from my old Little League team, the soap-on-a-rope I'd gotten the Christmas before, and my blue plastic bottle of marbles.

Then I brushed aside last November's copy of MAD magazine and there it was. I'd bought it at Yankee Stadium the day my dad took me to my very first major league baseball game. It was the same day a firecracker exploded next to Ray Fosse of the Indians in the afternoon game of a doubleheader. It was one of my favorite possessions; an engraved New York Yankee ring, complete with Yankee logo.

Of course, it was a perfect plan. I'd take the ring down to Lisa's house and give it to her and we'd be together forever. She'd fall madly in love with me and would be my girl forever thereafter. I mean, what self-respecting 12-year old girl could resist such a gift? After all, it was the Yankees.

Oddly enough, though, it didn't turn out that way.

I took the ring out of the trunk and looked at it closely. There were a few dings and scratches, but all in all, it was still in pretty good shape, especially when you consider that it had made the trip to Virginia in my trunk sandwiched between a bottle of ink and an empty plastic piggy bank.

Rubbing it gingerly between my thumb and forefinger, I shut the trunk and went looking for a piece of paper. I fancied myself a relatively good writer, so taking pen in hand I laid down the greatest love letter anyone had ever written, folded the paper with the ring inside and stuffed the luv-soaked package in my back pocket.

"Mom!" I shouted, bounding down the stairs. "I'll be back in a few minutes!"

Mom stopped what she was doing and leaned up the stairwell. "Where are you going?" she asked. "It's almost dark."

"I know. I'm just going out for a ride around the block. I won't be very long." I turned before she could protest and ran out the front door, closing it with a slam.

After Donnie and I had finished our riding that afternoon, I'd left my bike sitting in front of the garage. Grabbing the handlebars and jumping on, I pedaled as fast as I could down the hill, this time bending down like a skier on a Giant Slalom. I was very anxious to get there, so I wanted to go as fast as I could.

The wind whistled through my hair as I sped down the hill. Even climbing the next to get to her street was easy. I'd gained such momentum that I went halfway up before I actually had to pedal.

Finally coming to rest in front of Lisa's house, I quickly scanned it for lights. There were none. No one was home.

"Dang it," I said out loud.

But this couldn't wait. I was on a mission.

Dropping my bike beside the road, I walked across her front yard and onto the porch. It was the first time I'd been this close to the front door. It made me wobbly. The aromatic smell of dinner still emanated from the house. She'd been there, I thought, and had left again. And it hadn't been long.

I rang the bell, just in case her parents had decided to leave her home, but there was no answer. I stood on the doorstep for several minutes, wondering what I should do. Finally, I took the package out of my pocket and looked at it. I suddenly found myself wishing I'd written it on plain paper instead of lined, but I shook my head, brushing that thought to the side, and looked down the street. No one. No cars, no people.

"Rats."

Bending over, I took a closer look at the welcome mat. It had rained some lately and there was still dried mud towards the center of the mat. I brushed it off and gently laid the package down, quickly saying a 12-year old's prayer. I took one more look down the street and ran across the yard, jumped on my bike and sped off.

It was just a matter of time now, I thought. I smiled and imagined the years we would spend together, what our children might look like and how we'd look together when we were eighty. "Beautiful," I said as I pumped hard to get back up the hill to my house, a huge smile crossing my lips.

That matter of time would take less than two days.

Coming soon - Conclusion