Stepping Stones To 80

I will start at the beginning. I was born. Please don't ask me why. The time passed fast and soon I was 50, then 60, 70, and then, just three days before I was 80, the mailman brought me a birthday card. To my surprise it was from President Carter and his wife. Then I noticed how nice people are to the aged. They don't stop to think that we were young once.

We can look back when if you took your girl out riding you used the horse and buggy. Picture shows was 5 cents and they even had a piano player. If they were showing a wild west picture, when the cowboys and Indians came racing down the road you almost needed cotton for your ears. The piano player had different moods for different scenes.

Before you reached your teens, if you had a girl you liked, you could take her to the drug store fountain and for 5 cents you could get a soda with two straws. Banana splits were 10 cents. I didn't have them often as a dime was a heck of a lot of money.

Then along came the auto. The Ford Model T. I think it could travel 12 to 15 miles per hour-down hill.

Then came the Wright Brothers with their airplane. The old plane flying was a sight to see. I saw my first plane in 1913 or 14. Then we got in the war with Germany. The songs "Over There," "Give My Regards to Broadway," and "How Are They Going to Keep Them Down On The Farm After They Seen Pariee," became famous.

Then came the Roaring 20ties, the day of the Flapper when the say was "Oh You Kid" and "23 Skiddo."

In 1929 came the big crash when the bottom dropped out of the Stock Market, factories closed up, and things got tough. I don't think I missed a meal. I postponed a few till the next day, though. During the Second World War, the planes got larger and faster. Then came the rockets and we put men on the moon. Now, the piggy-back rocket.

So at the age of 80 years, you can sit back and dream of the good old days of the past.

I thank the Lord that I am near the end of my road, instead of just beginning. What's in store for the world in the next 80 years or will it still be standing?

*****

Dad can write "I thank the Lord that I am near the end of my road," but after he entered the hospital in November of 1981 with, among other things, fluid in one of his lungs, he obviously knew he was very near the end of his road and was not happy about it.

Once more the old curse of November was getting to him. November, when his back slipped out, when he spent the month in bed with the flu, when his truck broke down and refused to run. November, a month for Dad that could only be described as disastrous.

After he was released from the hospital, I stopped in mom and dad's Pierce Street apartment every day. Within a week of the time he was released, it was obvious that my mother, who was by then 77 herself, was in no physical shape to lift my father out of bed, give him a bath, put him in his chair, etc. But, on the other hand, he could (or would) not do these things for himself.

So, at my insistence, she again called the hospital and once again the ambulance arrived. He didn't go easily but he didn't have much strength left to put up a fight. The only thing he was able to do was to cry, saying he'd never get out of the hospital. I'm not much of one to visit hospitals so I only went to the hospital once to see him. He was right. He never left the hospital. He died exactly one week short of his 82 nd birthday.

Before Dad was 10 years old he learned to make what he called cigarettes out of the dried shucks of corn using anything he could find that would burn for tobacco. He smoked Camels from the first day I can remember until he broke a rib coughing while moving some stuff into our garage. He threw his cigarettes away that day and for the next five years, he smoked a pipe. Then one Sunday he packed the pipe and tobacco into a paper sack and took it with him to the flea market, having for reasons he never talked about, deciding to sell it. While he was making change, someone stole the sack off the table.

During Prohibition (from 1920 to 1933) when liquor was outlawed, Dad drank moonshine that all too often contained turpentine and wood alcohol. I once heard him tell a story about how he and a friend, both in their early twenties, shared a bottle of lethal brew one night. Dad took a swig and spit it out. His friend swallowed and died. But Dad swallowed enough homebrew to eat the lining out of his stomach and suffered from painful ulcers the last half of his life.

Neither he nor I made notes as to the order these stories were written or when he submitted them. However, on the envelope this one was returned in, Dad wrote, "Rejected May 26, 1981."