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Well, if that isn't a fine feast--the moveable one.

Kath wants me to get my writing on Google Doc so she can give this machine away. But for some reason I see what Chapter 17 is. It's JJ's letter. And here we just had the miracle post from his church. They are little dated because now it's Wed. and that was Monday news.

I wonder if he has his little kids go out for proselyting? That's what I picked up from one of the sites, the sending church or the receiving church or mother church or whatever. However they phrase it.

But to the point: I thought I'd look at what Chapter 17 said and it opens with a letter from JJ:

This was when we were in murky waters, not for sure knowing how we'd put our lives together.

Chapter 17

FATHER’S DAY REVISITED
Ron,
I cannot tell you how much better I feel about life in general. This past summer was a very hard time for me. I have spent a lot of actual “bad times” but I know that I hit absolute rock-bottom that particular time. I suppose a man puts himself in a given environment and acts accordingly. I don’t know but I profess to but a culmination of factors seemingly gets in the way of given priorities. I say seemingly because we, or I, use certain factors as excuses. That isn’t right by any means. Excuses are for the weak while reasons are for the strong. I don’t like feeling weak. There are many things I like to feel and weak is near the bottom, I must say…oh I told parents of my relationship with Sunny. I sat down with them one night and told them I was sick of hiding things behind my back and it was time to stand up and take responsibility of my actions no matter what. NOW is the time and we ALL KNOW TIME!!! So, they have to deal with it the best they can and I have, as a result, cut off my "thing” with her. I even told them we’ve slept together. That was a blow and a half but it had to be done. Now, my conscious is clear and the future looks bright. (plus, I needed another chapter for my book!!!! Shhhhh)
Ever,
Jeremy

There is something of a fan club. I trundled along with Dad and youngest son Brendan to the local Hoop It Up. It’s Father’s Day. Brother Danny’s son Jimmy is on a three-man team of four players that is vying for championship honors in the form of a trophy waiting to be bestowed like a glove on the winner of the 3-on-3 half court tournament.
We moved around an old section of concrete outside a closed auditorium. Its glory hallelujah days have passed. Sometimes, a flea market or a craft show will command a section for a day; other times a rock concert, a basketball game or a circus will come to town and take center stage for sometimes a fortnight to brake amphitheater decline, all not having much success. Today, on what is the parking lot/basketball courts, east of the large building, small groups of people commingle around very old concrete slabs section of concrete on which a handful of mobile b’ball hoops are set up for this the last day of the two-day tournament.
The sun, blazing overhead, bounces off a nearby river no one is looking at. Fan focus is on the game and whether or not they’ll get their sandals or tennie boppers stuck on the black tar that grips the concrete’s broken slabs of cement because, in the heat, the black tar is moving and expanding at irregular intervals. It is melting. And, because there’s a lot of cracks in v. old cement there’s irregular fissures of tar-sealed concrete; miniature fault lines predate earthquakes and seismic waves.
There isn’t a real safe place to walk. Fans watched the game and watched where they walked.
A sunglass girl came immediately up to me and began to hug.
“Hi, Ronnie, remember me?”
Came from out of the sunglassed tan face freckles and blue eyes.
“Hi,” I replied. She was very friendly; I was surprised at the sudden rush of kindness beneath the blazing sun that was glinting off a collection of bronze trophies crowded tightly against one another for safekeeping because what if someone out of their right mind would suddenly spirit off with one.
“No,” I said, letting go of the grasp and looking at the slim figure before me, “I don’t.”
“I’m Jackie Hartnett.”
Oh yes, of course I said, a flood of memories rushed like a river to the frontal lobes. She informed me how her son—and she pointed to one of the three blond haired boys that was on the team with nephew Jimmy (with black hair) as being her child. I nodded sagely, looking at the three almost identical looking towheads, not sure which one was her boy. I was too ashamed at this gap—wearing a mask of coolness that seemed to be the attire for the day—to ask any further.
We chatted. Jackie closely examined me. How was her brother Jim doing? I wanted to ask. I could almost count the freckles on her face. How are things with the old crowd? I’d not seen Jim, who’d rolled a 300-game at the local lanes, since the Powerhouse—in the yard shaking out iron with the gang of Roland, Gene, and Jim Reed. It seemed eons ago. It was a quarter century. I hoped I was looking fit enough. I subconsciously tightened my gut. I stood more erect. Did I not want the impression to be complete?
Her husband, a sports buff, from what I could gather, came over and nodded an introduction. Was he a coach or did he have a business?
He spirited Jackie away. They had to get ready for the championship game.
Jackie, with bright smile and parting pleasantries, walked away, smiling, with her husband. I called, “I’m working iron again” almost in defiance of all the Odds and all the Gods.
“You’re crazy,” she said. She smiled and shook her head. I forgot just how really pretty she was when she walked away, concrete being kind to her.
I thought how this mask was proffered when I talked to another disappointed fan.
“Hello Ronnie,” came the greeting. She also was wearing sunglasses and slowly walked towards me.
Did I recognize immediately?
“Oh, hi Barb.”
She mentioned that her son was playing.
“We just lost. We won’t have to stay around any longer.”
Barb’s hair, unlike Jackie’s, though they both were wearing shades, only a couple years apart, town natives, was short and close-cropped. Barb didn’t have the tan Jackie did. I soon find out why. I was info’d she was “Supervisor at Marian for radiology.” Husband Dan was hanging gutters even on this hot Sunday Father’s Day.
“Man,” I said. “He never stops.” extended the cordiality that sometimes can emerge from greetings from people you’ve not seen for some time. Jackie’d gotten the plus positive bar rolling.
I remembered how I found out a few years back that Dan, who’d exchanged hardhats with me moments before I fell day after Father’s Day twenty years previous, had his own gutter biz along with a mail route. Did he start drinking or stop drinking or no? In between the years since I last saw Dan did I not hear from some source that he went to bars but wasn’t drinking?
Also, somewhere along the line, his stepdaughter married my oldest son.
I remember one time talking to Dan at the bar ten years back. He said that, yes, he was always keeping the lines of communication open between Sunshine and her dad. I’d said the same was not true for me.
“McGinty’s an asshole,” Dan had said. “I saw him at a party when they were around. I said ‘Hi Mick’ but he just walked right past me. I don’t know what his problem was.” Dan had turned to me and looked closely. I was drinking and so therefore more brave. I didn’t ask any questions. He talked about his Barb for a minute. “She said ‘Don’t go to the bar.’ I ain’t gonna have anyone tell me where I can or can’t go.” That day, Dan stayed at the bar drinking.
It was the last time I’d seen Dan. The watering hole was the Midway Bar, where the ironworkers, if they didn’t go to the El Char, another bar a few blocks away, drank beer and downed shots at the Midway—after a day of wresting with the iron. I was told that this is where the ironworkers went mid-morning to discuss after I fell that day after Father’s Day.
“Yeah,” Barb informed me, “Sunny came back for—was it Ashley?—her graduation. Jeremy stayed behind.”
Barb continued. “She has a full ride to Briar Cliff in softball.”
“Is she tall?” I imagined a tall-strapping young girl. Dan is a notch over 6 foot.
“No, she’s real short,” Barb said. Then I watched as her tired son came off the concrete—as Dad pointed out a little later in the afternoon—“that is unforgiving.” It wasn’t hard to not wilt quickly on the uneven patched surface. The son, who was almost a spitting if smaller image of Dan, walked straight ahead, hands on his hips.

*********n

Of course, after seeing the son, I then juxtaposed the shot of Sunny with that of her sister with some difficulty: Sunny’s father is black-haired, half Native American, I think, having the thick black straight hair yet facial features almost virtually white.
Such that Sunny was, like Jeremy, raised by someone else—Dad as a fill-in. Mick’s Sunshine was raised by Dan Black. My son Jeremy was raised by McGinty.
You can just never find the right card for Father’s Day.
Of course, that is nothing new. In fact, it’s become something of an acceptable societal norm—split molecules of families forming again. The only asterisk is that it had started so early. Kerry split for California with Jeremy. Then McGinty was either there or had come around. It wasn’t before too long they started living together. The only wrench in the works that was Barb was pg with Mick’s child. Again, while that has become more of a societal norm, it was pretty rare as to the point of nonexistence in those days.
But at any rate, I think a few years later Kerry and Mick made it official. I remember calling California to talk to Jeremy but Kerry answered the phone. We were talking a little more then because, while Jeremy wasn’t there, she told me that Mick has asked her to marry him. At any rate, more accident then chance, more chance that accident, who could say?
That is why Barb’s three children—after Sunshine—were blond bombshells. When finally Jeremy dropped by to visit, Sunny had graced the doorways of our house, straight black hair to her shoulders. She used the facilities and opened the windows of 20 years, a room stuffed with anger and regret and remorse. The window was partially open and it was hard to see through. A signpost—from which new nuclear familial fissures evolved revolved.
So too Jeremy. Although what I guessed to be something of a more a literate personage and thus more talkative such that where Sunny brought Mick’s silence, Jeremy brought my mouth.
And maybe Barb was trying to say that yes, she wasn’t not unsuccessful, that she was going quite well that there was really nothing to worry about. That it was just a slip-up and now she’d recovered and went back to life as before.
(But this is mere speculation. And playing out the daily scenery of this arrangement of the new families would be even more speculative. Although I can venture to guess and conjure up all. A big happy shindig. But let us return to the matter at hand.)
We left off with the fact that Jeremy stayed behind, cooling his feet on the sandy creases of the western shore.
Barb said, “She stays at home with the kids.”
I tried to stay cool beneath the blazing sun. A thousand Q’s, river rushed and leaped to the fore. The dam held.
What could I ask her, anyway?
“Uh-huh,” I said, nodding.

“And is that your son? About the same age as Noel?” She looked down at Brendan, as tow haired as her children through the loins of a Mr. Dan Black.
Like her information to me, we talked a bit too quickly.
“Yep,” I proudly reported, “six weeks older.”
I thought later, since Sunny and Jeremy’s union and their subsequent children, that there was more than a lot left unsaid. For one, I didn’t know the name of the little girl; Jeremy hadn’t talked to me in two years, and I don’t know the California address leaving the ball, so to speak, in his court.
“Grace” I thought she said at one pt. Was this the name of the youngest child?
“Grace,” I repeated, looking for confirmation of my granddaughter’s name but Barb said something else. She was partly turned away, shielding her eyes from a merciless sun and I couldn’t make it out. Brendan, meanwhile, was more or less bumping in and out against my leg, swimming and swirling with the heat.
The significance of the day was not lost on me. It’s how old Jeremy was when I fell. The day after Father’s Day I went in the hole. The ironworkers shoved the ambulance out of the sand and then went home for the day. Some of them went to drink at the Midway bar; a few others went to the El Char. Some probably went on home and hugged their children.
“Yeah,” Barb said and turned and faced me. While still quite young looking and still quite pretty, she looked tired. It was for the early summer’s heat a natural mask. “Sunny came back for Ashley’s graduation and brought the family.
“Jeremy stayed behind.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, harking back to a winter three years ago when Jeremy and Sunshine visited. “I met Sunny.”
This surprised her a little bit. But, because it was all new territory for Barb the Pivot, it was more new information than any surprise contained therein.
“They visited a couple years ago,” I explained. This, of course, when Jeremy was newly arrived back from California. And Sunshine, who was raised by Barb, and then Dan, after Mick knocked her up, then left, saw to it, for some reason, by some design moving in a thing so small, that she would seek out my son first, her dad second. Or maybe it was the other way around.
Again, it was mere speculation but I couldn’t resist trying to fill in the blanks.
Yes, Kerry and Jeremy’d gone west. Mick had gone after them. The western shore, too, pulled me. I didn’t go after them but was one small step away. It was April, it was spring, and in 1974 there were all manner of possibilities. There were 20 Powerhouses yet to build along the eastern banks of the river. There were 30 rock concerts scheduled at the auditorium.
I remember Jeremy—when I finally saw him after 10 or so years, led by Sunny, saying something along the lines of what-might-have-been. As if preparing some kind of defense.
“Yeah, if Mick would’ve married Barb and you and mom would’ve stayed married, then I’m still sure Sunny and I would’ve met and got together anyway.”
(I remember how I looked at him. I didn’t know that they’d wind up being betrothed. I just wanted him to stay with me. I heard him critique the wallpaper in the attic and watched him take a couple books from the shelf. I
told him how I could maybe get him on working iron. I even told Local 21 President Bill Pilant. “Yeah, send him around,” Pilant had said. I think I mentioned this to Jeremy but he was pretty slow on the uptake.
But the missing pieces are: how does Barb handle the fact that my son is married to her daughter who was not raised by the man she quite possibly still loves? All this unrequited love. Did she, too, imagine herself in the house along the river, married to a successful illustrator instead of a mail carrier/gutter hanger?
You wonder how they get along. Does she say “Hello Mick” years later after he knocked her up and then took off for California and started shacking up with Kerry and Jeremy?
Of course, like the James Taylor song says, 100 miles, there is easily, five years after she came back from 13 years in California, that far between us—the ex-wife, that is.
She got her way, all the way. I still remember a pix of her crinkling her nose, a broom in her hands, curlers in her hair, sweeping the floor of the hotel—dubbed the Heartbreak by town crier Jim Erickson, and how it’s still referred to, today. There’s an enameled piece of the dark panel on the bar’s wall in Hubbard, directly across the street from where the hotel used to be.
That little piece of wood, that 2 X 6, says “Heartbreak Hotel.” It was where Kerry and I—and then Jeremy a few months later—first lived when we were married: little room the little town the large hotel, the huge life.
I doubt seriously now if anyone knows what it stands for.
Ironwork changed all that. The accident changed things a little bit further.
“You just can never tell what’s going to happen,” Barb said, referring to the tournament, in part.
“Yeah,” I said, feeling Brendan grab my leg and run between them, “you just never know.” smiled.
But here Barb was looking at my son, my youngest son. Her first child married to my oldest one. All of us, Jeremy, Brendan, and I, were all born in September.
Now what a time is this.
“You take care, Ron,” Barb said, and walked away.
“Thank you; you too.”


Father's Day? What are you talking about?

Certainly an important one.

And that's what the thrust was for ss, "It Was Bigger Than Both of Us." But, like early farm, stepping into modernity with the new John Deere tractor, that's when JJ was not even two. When I went off. It was the day before. And I tried to look at my life, how I had a few hours before I'd have to join Harald, so many years removed, and also became part of the ss, how this was before he got religion.

Or the calling.

Or the full baptism.

The spirit.

And, then after he was two, after they'd left, how I started working busing tables at the Red Raven. I did write a little bit about that. Not that significant save it was my first job after teh accident unless, of course, you count mudding concrete at the farm for the feedlot and the Unit.

But really, I was walking around. Just had a few locks shorn from the head. A little weaker. But therapy would change all that.