School Days

You may not believe it, but I used to have that manual dexterity and coordination stuff the young ‘uns talk about. Today I watched the school kids walk down the street to attend the first day of the new school year and I rejoiced for them. The students appeared unlikely to participate in their own rejoicing, so I did it for them. With me being some 50 or so years past my graduation, I find I kind of like the thought of school. Not for myself of course, but for everyone under the age of about 25 or 30. Keeps ‘em out of trouble that 10 or 12 hours of school each day, it surely does.

I remember back in the day - you might think way back in the day - we didn’t have much of what they call homework. We didn’t have a lot of things kids have nowadays like cell phones, IPods, computers, motorized scooters, and britches that ride to school way down on yer bum. I have no idea how these kids can afford so much, but I also know that I never carried so much to school either. Perhaps the powers that be in our government have decided to raise a generation of pack mules. I hope they will be well-paid pack mules, these kids need a lot of stuff it seems.

My first memorable purchase happened when I saved up for months the earnings from my paper route to buy a watch. Not a fancy watch with the dials and digital windows and such like you can see in the catalogs today, but a basic Timex jewelry store watch. One of my better purchases too; the thing lasted for years. Over the course of my life, it seems that almost all of my best buys came when I saved up for the purchase. The credit card nuttiness that came along later caught me up in it too, but none of those purchases went quite so well.

The ease of plopping down the plastic may be why I did so poorly on choosing the right stuff later in my life, or maybe every manufactured thing went down in reliability and durability across the board; I don’t know. However, I’ll stick with taking the responsibility; credit card buying came too easily and too fast, maybe I didn’t put the thought and effort into the buy like I did when I had to wait for months or years to save up the money. Me ‘n the wife paid cash like that for our first house too.

That old house lasted for decades and we made not a single payment with interest to any bank. That sounds good to you now, but I must confess that we paid in many other ways just the same. The house required refinishing pretty much inside and out. The foundation cracked and leaked, the garage had too many hiding places for mice, and the dry wood of both sucked up enough paint to cover a stadium. We may not have lived under bank payments, but we surely did put in a lot of labor. I suppose if you added up the labor even at minimum wage we might have been ahead to just pay the bank on a newer house and enjoy more time at leisure. Ah well, once you have made the decision you are pretty much in it for life Not many young couples can afford to buy an old house with cash and a new house with a mortgage to compare the two lifestyles and costs over 50 years or so.

Well, I reckon I had better get on with it before you fall over from listening to this old feller go on about his life and wisdom. Least I think I acquired a little wisdom over the years; I guess you will have to be the judge of that.

I guess you could say this story begins in my 7th grade year during a PhysEd class. Kids like to shorten up words for faster communication, kind of a predecessor of that Tweety thing they do now I suppose, so we pronounced Physical Education by the diminutive fizz-ed. Up to one particular day, I jumped into the field hockey scrums, called that because we lacked any real hockey players so all the pretend players ended up in the middle of the field swinging sticks this way and that after the ball. This time, however, a boy who would be a good friend later in life whacked me one above the eye with his hockey stick. Not on purpose mind you, just one of those things that can happen when a group of boys gets together with potential weapons in hand.

The game stopped right there and I had to be taken down to the doctor’s office for stiches. Ol’ Doc Winston, not his real name of course but a nickname that came from the brand he smoked, checked to see if the Novocain had taken by bouncing a needle up and down on my forehead while asking if I felt ‘that’. It was at this point I seem to recall my mother fleeing the exam room. She told me later what the Doc had been doing. These days the Doc’s method would probably bring a lawsuit, back then it was just a good test to make sure the patient was ready for a few stiches.

After my wounded head had recovered, like about the next year I think, I jumped back into field hockey when the season rolled around again. But this time, I thought the player who got to wear the mask and padding might have a pretty good thing going. You might say that was the first time I got pushed into a different occupation. Several of those kinds of pushing would occur throughout my life, but for some reason at the ripe age of 96, I decided to stop getting pushed.

Why would an old man suddenly decide such a thing? You might ask. Well, I can tell you: it’s ‘cus old folks is crazy. I don’t mean mentally unbalanced, though there are a few of those down at the senior center, but because I had nothing left to lose. My wife had passed a few years ago and I was too old for the kids and grandkids to worry with anymore. The church still sent the bus around for me each Sunday, but I got the impression they wouldn’t be too put out if I didn’t get on it. I reckon my ‘giving’ isn’t quite up to what it once was, even if I am giving more of what I have now than I ever did. ‘Course it didn’t help when the wife and I got mad over one of the new guys deciding to publish the annual giving in the church bulletin to increase the take. We kind of figured that what a family gives should be between the man of the house and the Man Above, not the congregation in general.

Since old Pastor Hopkins had retired some years ago, the fire and brimstone had gone out of the church. The new guys who punched their tickets toward a position at one of the mega-churches down in the cities came and went every year, and not a one of them could keep me awake through a half-hour sermon, much less the two hours that Pastor Jack could belt out every now and again. I figure that Jesus is about done with me in this life and since I since I am more than ready to be with Him, I got nothing left to worry about. Come to think of it, the only bus I’ve seen in a few months has been that school bus. Guess the church got done with me after all.

The kids boarded the bus with their packs. Back in the day only soldiers carried the big back breakers, now even little kids get to. Look how far we’ve come. I waved in the general direction of the bus, but no one pays much attention to the old man of our little town. As the last of the mothers left for work in their Superbans and Toho’s and Yayhoo’s and such, I noticed a man going from door to door. This wouldn’t have been at all unusual back when the wife and me had first bought our house. Door-to-door salesmen were the Internet portal of the day. A family bought most stuff they needed from the local brick-n-mortar retailers, a bit from the mail order outfits, and the rest from the nice young men with the well-worn soles. Even the tract pushers have pretty much knocked off the door knockin’ by now though, almost no one stays at home during the day. Well, ‘cept for the occasional old fart like me, and I don’t always make it to the door in time to answer.

This fellow did something odd though. I got out the binoculars, because that is what I generally do after everyone is gone to work and school, and sure enough, the man was trying door knobs and peering in front windows. I dialed the 911 right away.

The dispatcher told me that some rep for a roofing contractor had a door-to-door permit for our little town today, but a deputy would check on him when they got around to it. Yes, even at my age I can tell a brush-off from a believer. I watched the man for a while longer, but he never once looked at a roof and I could see most of our little town from our front bay window. Call me old and slow if you like, but when the man found a house unlocked and went on in, I thought that there just might be a better than average chance that he was up to no good.

Grabbing a hogleg from the gun cabinet, I strapped a gun belt on and shoved cold iron into a holster… then I went back and took them off. I really couldn’t hold a revolver very steady anymore, hadn’t been able to for about ten years or so as a matter of fact, and a belt full of big cartridges gets mighty heavy on an old feller like me. Instead I picked up a lighter shotgun with a short barrel and loaded a few rounds of buckshot. I didn’t even have to carry it as my little scooter had a scabbard on the side. My shooting club had made a few minor adjustments to our gear as we all grew past even the silver and golden stages and got on to the seriously old stage of life.

The scooter had a full charge. Not too surprising since I only used it to go down the driveway for the mail each day, gots to get me magazines you know, and that was about it. The man had vanished around the corner at the bottom of the second street of our four, but I had a good idea which house he would be trying right about now. I slammed the scooter into gear feeling somehow that it would have been a bigger thrill with more than one forward gear to choose from, and roared off down the driveway. The scooter made the little whining noise it always did; the roaring came from me. I had inadvertently left my foot off the side and smacked it on the left side garage door track as I exited at quite a bit less than Mach 1.

I tried my best to rub my knee and ankle and foot and pretty much everything else that hurt, but we didn’t have all day. The man was surely coming up the near side of Oak Street by now and I had an idea about what he might be up to.

Unlike me, most of the folks in town got bills and credit card statements each month and put them in a desk organizer of some sort to keep straight. I had learned my lesson about the plastic years ago and even the big power company had decided that they would carry me in my few remaining months or years. This man with the roofing contractor permit was going in each house and grabbing some means to steal their identities; the crime of choice for most any gang or mafia these days.

Passing the green lawns and lovely landscaping of our little bedroom community, I kept an eye out for my quarry. Plenty of time for that as my scooter didn’t exactly break the speeding laws; I had time to take notes on what landscaping device or method worked aesthetically and what didn’t, at least in my old opinion. My landscaping consisted mainly of grass bordered by grass. My lawn is one of the greener lawns though. The klawn comes every week or so to spray various chemicals on the grass to make it green and keep the weeds out. I call him a ‘klawn’ because that’s what it says on the side of his little tanker trailer. He laughs even though the joke has grown stale, his real name is Kevin, and shares a Bible verse or two with me over coffee while his summer help runs the mower and trimmer over my lawn.

Kevin is one of the few folks I see on a regular basis. I would call him, but I know that his lawn business takes him to Jemville, about 50 miles away, today.

Whew, with the wind practically screaming in my ears, I round the corner at the end of Elm Street, the one I live at the top of, and reach up to turn down my hearing aid - must be the fresh batteries. There, the wind noise subsides to the light breeze that it should be as the scooter finally completes turn one. I turn up Oak; you can’t claim any wild imagination went into our street names – Birch, Elm, Oak, and Maple – those are the wild and crazy north-south streets of our little suburbian nightmare. The cross streets are even crazier: One, Two, Three, and the highway. At least we don’t have a bunch of inappropriate and overblown names like some housing developments do off the bigger town where most everyone works.

I have noticed that towns far from any ocean or mountain range like to throw in names like: Pacific Palisades, Atlantic Avenue, Sierra Boulevard, and other pretentious names to make the owners look good when filling out those forms on the Internet. “Yes, Grandma, we moved into a 2,000 square foot ranch deluxe on Woodland Lake Drive in Avalon Hills!” Translation: they moved into a 1970’s vintage one-level home with an attached garage in a town on the prairie with a name bigger than the town itself.

See it all the time. Oh! The man is up the street only four houses, he must have found a couple more unlocked, as I round the next corner. Hiyo, Silver! We charge into the fray…

Probably be a few minutes before I get up to the fifth or sixth house where he will surely be by the time ‘Silver’ gets up there. We are going uphill now and the speed has dropped off to a fraction of Mach that I am too old to calculate. What else did you want me to talk about as my meeting with destiny approaches? I think a butterfly just passed me; I really should get the old scooter checked out one of these days. I would stop to check to make sure I loaded the shotgun, but the thief might die of old age before I can get there if I do that.

I pull up to the sixth house and see that the door is open in the front. Hoisting my shotgun to port arms, or as close as I can get what with my arthritic shoulder and all, I move to take him in the back kitchen. I know it’s the back kitchen because they built all of these houses below mine on the same floor plan.

The wife and I sold ‘em the land back in ’88 or thereabouts and the developer who named the streets also decided to offer a choice of floor plans: on one side of the street we’ll do it this way, on the other side we’ll turn it around the other way. The developer finished the project on budget, but sheesh you never seen so much dull in your life. The town didn’t start to look decent until people moved in and exercised a little imagination in their painting and landscaping. Underneath you can still see that the houses all look the same. In fact the first victims, I mean visitors, to the town had to keep checking the house numbers and street names against the addresses to avoid losing their relatives in the fog of sameness.

The thief is rooting around in the bedroom while I gaze in wonder at the television screen. Wouldn’t it be fun to watch the Huskers on that screen! I might have to get me one of those if Jesus doesn’t call for me before I get back to the house. Kevin would help me order one from one of them amazons with the web site.

I rack a shell into the chamber of my shotgun and even with my hearing aid turned down I can hear the panic back in the bedroom. I think the thief did not expect anyone here at this time of the day. One of the occupational hazards of being a suburban daytime thief, I guess.

In the bedroom, I find the thief passed out in front of the desk, and much to my relief he is both unarmed and caught in the act if you will. The homeowner’s papers are scattered about the bed and he has set aside a pile of invoices and statements for his nefarious plan. I see in his satchel a pile of similar papers all neatly separated into bundles with addresses and names on the outside. He must be one of those thieves who are paid to break in and collect the goods, but does not do the actual identity theft. I can see how well it must work too.

He chooses only houses that are left unsecured. Takes only a few of the papers while disturbing nothing else, and gets away with the goods. The people come home, think that they have lost or misplaced their invoices, order replacements or make payments online, and then have a good old fashioned row over who messed up the record keeping that month. Meanwhile the organization behind this stalwart fellow begin taking small withdrawals from checking accounts and making small charges to the credit cards; nothing that would raise a big red flag right away, and they can do it for months or years in some cases before the accounts are closed.

Shaking my head at the ingenuity of it all, I go back out to the scooter and bring my winch cable in; like I said: a few modifications. I notice that someone has left the trailer hooked up to my scooter; I might have got here a lot faster if I had noticed that back at home. Oh well, the trailer will work to haul my swashbuckling little thief back home.

In the bedroom, I run the cable around my hero’s tootsies and key the remote. The thief gets a couple well-deserved thumps on the cranium as the winch drags him across the porch and down the stairs. Darn those winches anyway, rough customers them! It takes me a few tries to get the thief rolled up onto the trailer even with the backend tilted down, but we are on our way back home in short order. Make that short order plus as I back up a ways to go back and shut up the house we just left. In the bedroom, I put their papers back in the pile and leave a polite note on their computer screen saver about how naughty that porn stuff is. Bet the house gets locked up tomorrow!

The thief has not gone anywhere; do you think that winch was too rough on him? Nah, he’ll survive! Onward, Silver, off to the home on the range, to bring the bad guy to justice, to right the wrongs, to believe once more in the American way… to make a beeline for the potty when I get back; should’ve stopped to go before I took off so fast like that.

Hope that truck driver is all right. I’ll admit that it isn’t every day you see some geezer cross the highway on a scooter with a trailer. I think the young lady might have broken her neck whipping it around like that; she must think I’m cute or somethin’.

Cute and harmless anyway, I realize that I am well into the harmless years, and that young women will sometimes take notice of old grandfather fellows like my dashing self. I back the scooter and trailer into the garage and plug in the scooter to the charger. I make my way with some urgency to the bathroom and do my business there. Thank the Lord that I ain’t like ol’ Wilkerson. He flew planes for years and years and got used to holding his water so much that finally it wouldn’t come at all. The poor old guy has to put a catheter up his you-know-what four times a day to empty the pot.

One of those big televisions would look pretty good here; I write a note to myself and leave it on the refrigerator for Kevin’s next visit. I sit down in my favorite chair and fire up my DVR to watch the Husker game from last weekend. Something nags at the back of my mind though and I almost forget the game when a groan from the garage ‘bout makes my poor old heart stop.

Having watched my last mutt die some years prior, I almost wet my drawers when I see that someone has left a man in my scooter trailer. I hope I didn’t hit him so hard that he flew over the scooter and landed in the trailer! That hardly seems possible when I think of how fast that scooter can go. I untie the winch cable from his legs and he begins to come around. Some papers spill out of his satchel and suddenly I remember what the man had been up to. Good thing I ain’t old yet else I might have forgotten entirely!

I invite the young fellow into my kitchen and we sit down for some coffee and sweet rolls, along with the lesson from 1 Peter. I almost forget that note I had left about the big television when I notice the young man is ready to spill his guts; no doubt something in my keen questioning has left him defenseless and open to repentance. He signs the confession.

Young Carston, the deputy stands him up and snaps the cuffs on ‘im. Now where did he come from?

“Good job, Mort!” the deputy says to me. “Good coffee and rolls too; he won’t be eating quite so well where he is going.”

“Thanks, Deputy,” I try desperately to catch up with events. “Glad to be of service.”

“Oh, here’s your shotgun,” the deputy hands me ol’ Bess, my big 12 gauge Remington loaded for bear with buckshot and slugs. “It’s a good thing you had your name inscribed on the receiver. The Johnson’s down there on Oak were a little surprised to find a shotgun on the bedroom floor!”

“Yeah, must have left it there when I hooked up this young fellow,” I stand up proudly to receive his congratulations.

“I know, you’ve said that four times already,” the deputy deflates my old chest back down to its former size. “Now Mort, you give those guns to your kids like I told you last time, or next time I’ll have to take them all and send you to the home! As County Sheriff I have to make sure the community is safe from forgetful old geezers with guns. What if the Johnson children had got home first and started fooling around with that shotgun? One of them might have been hurt by that birdshot you had in your little .410 there!”

Birdshot? When did young Carston become Sheriff? When did ol’ Bess get downsized like that? Maybe I had better call my boys and have them come over and get those guns after all. I write a note and put it on the fridge over the television one. Thank God for my big Amana memory aid!