Away from Home

Sophomore year was over.  I hadn't even bothered to order a yearbook.  I did not participate in the annual love fest.  Two more years.  That is what I was thinking.  Two more years.  

Tommy and I had begun playing acoustic guitars together.  It was an outgrowth of playing with his father's country music band, maybe, and a practical matter as well.  We were practicing harmonies and learning to play all over fret board.  We were Simon and Garfunkle, we thought.  We would be famous.

But as soon as school was over, I had to go away.  For part of the summer, I was going to the coast to stay with my aunt and uncle.  I would help my uncle in the afternoons with the odd jobs he had, mowing lawns and painting houses.  The big thing was that I got to take my car.  My parents drove over in their car with me to make certain I got there alright, but when the weekend was over, they were gone.  And suddenly, I thought, I was an adult.  I would not be reliant on my relatives.  I would have a car.   

I was not very good at the work thing.  I hated it.  I would go with my uncle to big estates with acres and acres of lawn and walk the mower around for what seemed eternity while my uncle edged and weeded and did the other odd things.  One day, he told me that one of his clients, an old woman who lived on the water, had said something about my hair.  He wanted me to cut it.  I had no stomach for that, but he called my parents and they told me I would have to.  I would have to cut my hair for what?  To walk behind a mower in the heat of the afternoon, to do something I didn't care to do at all?  

The good thing was that I could escape after working.  Each afternoon, I would get into my car and drive to a rocky point surrounded by white, sandy beaches and blue-green water for as far as you could see.  I would sit there and dream uninterrupted about the life going on about me, about the yachts and mansions and beautiful, sophisticated women.  

I knew no one but my relatives, so at night I sat with my aunt and played cards or board games which she loved, and we would drink ice cream floats made with some strawberry flavored pop you could only get in Ohio.  She kept it stashed under her bed and made a big deal out of getting it on those special nights.  

My aunt was pregnant and expecting while I was there.  This was her third child, unplanned and unexpected coming late in her reproductive life, and it all seemed odd to me, for I had known her my whole life as the mother of two children slightly younger than I.  Weird things could happen in the world, I thought, things unexpected.  

My uncle had contracted with a neighbor to paint his house.  The man suffered from polio, and his legs were withered, but he swam every day and looked as though he worked out with weights, and he was gruff and didn't take to me at all.  When he talked to me, everything he said sounded like a dog growling or worse.  

The house was old and wooden and the paint had cracked and peeled, so we would have to scrape it.  My uncle gave me a sander and showed me how to take the paint down to the wood faring the sides so that it was smooth.  He wanted me to start the next day while he was at work.  

And so the next day, miserable as I could be, I took the sander and began to work.  I had never done anything like this before.  I had two jobs in my life, one selling magazine subscriptions and the other working in a record store.  I mowed the yard at my house, sometimes, and whined enough when my father wanted me to help him work on the car or around the house that he had taken to not asking me at all.  But here I was standing in the sun, my shoulders aching, listening to the sander as it buzzed and whirred its awful song.  

When my uncle came after work, he went nuts.  My sanding skills were not very good, I guess, and I had put little pits in the wood all over one side of the house, sanded concavities that looked like bomb craters on a World War II battlefield.  

My uncle finished the job alone.  

Which was fine with me.  Now I had more time to go to the beach and sit alone on the rocks and dream.  

When my aunt had her baby, my parents came over to see.  My summer "vacation" had come to an end, and when they left, I went with them.  

But I had figured out a new skill while I was away.  I had discovered how to pick a guitar with my fingers rather than merely strumming it with a pick.  And I couldn't wait to show Tommy.  

A few days after coming home, Apollo 11 was scheduled to land upon the moon's surface, and I, like everyone else, was fascinated.  It was like all those science fiction movies come true, I thought, like The Incredible Journey and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and 2001: A Space Odyssey combined.  There was hope!  One could leave his life and find adventure, I thought.  One didn't have to remain in the same place forever.  That night, I stayed up with my father's 8mm film camera watching TV, and I filmed everything.  I would, I thought, capture the moment forever.  

A month later, something else happened that would change the world as much or more.  We were all talking about it.  I had a car, I thought.  Maybe I should go.