Sitting here today facing another imminent death in the family. That is always rough, though at this point it's a given, seeing as how we are all getting older. That knowledge sure as hell doesn't make it any easier, however.
This time around it's my brother in-law, Kenneth, who is at death's door. Ken is two years older than I am and we have been friends since the mid-fifties, when I returned to McKenzie after years in Middle Tennessee and on the pipeline earth in various places. Though his mother was a school teacher, he didn't fare as well in his studies as he could have and we ended up in some of the same classes and soon became fast friends. In fact, he met my sister because he was hanging out with me and a few years later they married.
He had a '56 Ford and many times we raced other cars on the long, straight stretch of Highway 79 South out through Jarrell Bottom. Not only did we race at speeds up to 110 mph, very frequently one of the other crackpots (sometimes Billy Scates) and I would be sitting on the front fenders at that speed.
Riding out exposed in such a wind blast is very difficult; the only way to do it is to lean as far forward as possible and put the top of your head straight into the wind, relying on the back pressure--and that tiny handhold on the hood ornament--to keep you aboard. You can imagine what might have happened had the brakes been applied with any degree of pressure. There would have been fresh road-kill all over that blacktop.
Ken went into the Air Force about 1957. He gave me his old Famous James motorcycle shortly before he left for basic at Lackland AFB, Texas. It was the first of many motorcycles I would own during my life. I had a ball with that little 150 cc English monstrosity. It had both a hand clutch (left side) and a hand shifter on the tank (right side), which was really unhandy. I later had an old Indian Chief, a honking big sucker with a 74 inch engine, with the hand shift in the same place and a foot clutch on the left side. They called those clutches "suicide clutches" for damned good reason, as anyone who has ever driven one knows. It's engaged or disengaged, little slack to play with. And keeping the left foot off the ground at stops is a pain in the ass, because if you get a bit off-balance the bike will fall over. They are extremely hard to pick up when they do.
I wrecked the little bike numerous times, in one accident ripping the hand shift lever and linkage rod off the bike. I discovered, however, that I could use the heel of my right shoe to change the small nub sticking out of the transmission case. The thing ran real well until I tore down the transmission to overhaul it. When I put it all back together, I discovered I had nothing left but high gear. That made it necessary to get the bike running and then push it as fast as I could run before leaping on and building up steam slowly. It was a bitch to ride around town, more work than I'd be up for today.
Ken came home from the Air Force, already married to my sister a couple years before. I won't go into details (too long) but in 1960 Billy Scates and I went to Miami on one of our wild road trips and wound up visiting Kenneth at Homestead AFB south of Miami, a SAC base where he was stationed at the time. We all went out and had quite a few adult beverages and Ken drove us on the base hidden in the trunk of his car. We spent the night there and he slipped us out the same way next day.
Anyway, we were working at a local furniture factory in '62 and one morning decided to quit and go to California. We informed the foreman that we'd be leaving at noon and not coming back. "You cant do that!" he exclaimed. "Watch us," I said.
Thing was, I wasn't going west for several months, though I did quit the job. Ken and my sister went and he got a job in a machine shop. And then I followed later, lived with them and went to work at Wayne Sweeper in Pomona, making about four times more money than I'd made at the furniture joint. I though I'd died and gone to heaven.
I lived there with them, even after I met a girl and got married. When I was able, I moved out but we still all spent a lot of time together, playing poker and just hanging out. Kenneth, who had been a jet engine mechanic in the AF, went on and got a job with General Electric at Edwards Air Force base. He moved to Lancaster, up on the high desert northwest of LA and lived there until the mid-eighties, when the company transferred him to their Evendale, Ohio facility. There, before his retirement, he worked his way up to a suit-wearing, briefcase-toting executive with the company.
He suffered a lot of bad misfortune over the years. His first son developed a disorder in childhood that was later diagnosed as Frederick's ataxia. Terry died in April, 2006 in his early 40s, having been bed-ridden for many years. His only other son, Mike, who was an engineer with GE aircraft, was killed in an auto accident two days after Christmas in 1999.
About that same time, Ken contracted neck cancer and had the radical and mutilating surgery necessary for that particular disease. He and my sister bore up through it all because of their strong religious faith. You can knock organized religion, but it gives people something to fall back on during such times of grief and pain.
It's hell to write, and think, of somebody in the past tense even though they are still technically "here." Kenneth really started leaving here several years ago when he was struck with the cruelest blow of all, Pick's disease. It's something like Alzheimer's but generally runs a more rapid course. Always the nicest kind of guy you would ever want to meet, he began doing things just totally out of character. I won't listed them here, but his actions were not what the level-headed and kind Kenneth I had always known would ever do.
Now, it's just a waiting game. My phone has rung twice this morning. Both times I expected it was my sister calling with the coming bad news. It was not, though both calls related to his situation in another way.
My brother, Jerry, and I plan to make a flying trip up there just for the funeral when that becomes necessary. No overnight stay, none of that, just get there in time for the ceremony and leave shortly after. It's about a six hour drive each way but we should be able to do that without too much problem. I didn't get to go when Terry died because I was tending my very ill mother who herself died a little more than two months later.
If one lives long enough, there's a lot of this shit in life. Add to that the knowledge that someday, loved ones are most likely going to be sitting around half glum waiting to receive such a phone call about you.
One of those things about life that goes in the negative column.
I pulled that last entry off. Too damn petty and negative. So what if the woman eats crackers in bed? I probably do a lot of shit she doesn't particularly care for either, but she doesn't whine about it.
