By Grant McGee
It’s a
Sunday morning. It has rained. The clouds that brought the rain are drifting
off to the northeast, going wherever clouds go.
I’m
remembering summer mountaintop mornings,
mornings after a rain, how the clouds hugged the ridges then lifted off to give
way to a bright, sunny day. I remembered
one place where I saw such mornings, a mountaintop hotel where I had a summer
job as a desk clerk. That’s when I
remembered Bob.
I
remember Bob because he was probably the first guy I’d ever met whose nice
“American Dream” life had turned into a giant train wreck. He may have been derailed but he kept smiling
and would tell those who would listen how great it was to be alive.
Bob was
the groundskeeper at the hotel. He mowed
the grass, trimmed the hedges, swept the driveway. Just like me, he was working six days a week
for a room, three meals a day and probably less than $75 a week for pay.
After a
day’s work most of us who’d put in a full day would kick back on the front
porch of the employee’s bunkhouse, talk about the guests and shoot the breeze
in general. Most of us were just out of
high school or on summer break from college.
Not Bob, he was probably approaching 50, his age revealed by stories he
told of days gone by and his grizzled salt-and-pepper beard.
“I had
it all,” Bob said one evening. It was
just Bob and me watching the sun go down on another day. “Three beautiful daughters, married to my
high school sweetheart, my own business, nice home in the suburbs, country club
membership.”
Bob
went on to tell the story of how his business partner had siphoned off money
from the business leaving him bankrupt.
“I lost
it all,” Bob said. “I couldn’t touch my
ex-partner, I couldn’t find work, I lost the house, my wife packed up the girls
and moved back with her parents. Then I
started drinking. The turning point came
when I was hiding in the bushes of my ex-partner’s house with a pistol in my
hand. I was going to shoot him. Then I heard his kids inside his house. I thought, ‘What am I doing?’ I walked away. The next day I started hitchhiking.”
Bob had
been to a lot of towns and worked a lot of jobs. His free and easy drifter’s life had gotten
him in trouble with more than one small town police chief or county
sheriff. “I have a great collection of
books at a widow’s house in a town on the state line. Maybe on one of your days off you could run
me over there and we could load them in your trunk.”
I
smiled at the prospect of a road trip.
“But
then the town police chief said if he ever caught me there again he’d find some
way to lock me up for a while. He said
the inmates could teach me a lesson or two about ‘real life.’”
My road
trip dreams quickly vanished. I figured
the guy who brought Bob back to town would be in just as much hot water as Bob.
Bob
became resident psychologist, poet, singer, storyteller and all around good guy
for us that mountaintop summer. Some
folks wondered if Bob’s stories were true.
That seemed to be answered on day when his daughters and wife showed up
to visit him on a day off. A few days
later I found him on the front porch of the bunkhouse, one of the rare times he
looked down and out. In his hand was a
sheaf of papers.
“I’m
supposed to pay alimony and child support,” he said, staring off into the
distance. “Every month, four times what
I make here in a month.”
“What’re
you gonna do, Bob?” I asked.
“Well,
I heard there’s good work in Louisiana in the Gulf on the oil rigs. What they want here,” he shook the papers, “is
about half of what I’d make there. I
could get by.”
I saw
he didn’t feel much like talking and as a guy who hadn’t even reached his 20th
birthday, who had no concept of lawyers and such, I didn’t know what to
say. I turned in for the night.
The
next morning I opened the door to my room and a paper that had been stuck in
the latch fell on the ground. I opened
it up.
“For my
idealistic friend,” it read. “Here’s a
poem for you.” It was a short work, the
opening said it was written by a schoolboy in the 14th century and
was titled “A Wistful Boy’s Dream.” I
held on to that piece of paper for years, even kept it locked up with my
important papers. Then wouldn’t you know
it, some burglar swiped the box in a break-in in Roswell years ago. All I remember is some reference to “gilly
flower” and the phrase “…and every lad shall have his lass.”
Bob was
gone. I never heard from him again. But from him I got brief lessons on
surviving, doing what you have to do to get by and ultimately doing what’s
right.
And so
I stood in the early morning with my hands in my pockets and remembered. I wanted to remember Bob, remember him by
writing about him. And so I have.
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