Snapshots At St. Arbuck’s ™

After weeks of not knowing what was going to happen, I have come to an agreement with the estate of Danny Gans.

It was nine months of hard work (completed the day before he died) and I am so looking forward to his remarkable story being in the hands of the fans he loved, and who loved him in return.

I’ll try to keep updates happening here and on Twitter regarding a date for publication.

rg

“You sure you have everything you need?”

It was a question I had asked repeatedly since early that morning when my wife started packing for the long-awaited road trip with two of her high school friends.

And of course her frustrated, yet bemused reply was, “Why don’t you get busy on that list of chores I wrote out for you and quit worrying about me?”

“But someone has to worry about you.” I paused, letting the statement hang before taunting, “Let’s see now, was it three or four return trips we made after starting out on our last vacation?”

Standing up with hands on hips, blowing a wisp of blonde hair from her eyes she pouted, sticking her lower lip out dramatically, “You promised you wouldn’t bring that up again.”

She knew I couldn’t resist that look, so we bantered back and forth for another fifteen minutes until her friends roared up in a 5.0-liter Mustang Convertible, honking the horn and screeching like good-natured banshees out for a good haunting.

“Have a good time,” I hollered as they burned rubber backing out of our driveway and drove off singing, “Girls Just Wanna’ Have Fun” at the top of their lungs.

Back inside the house, being the obedient and helpful husband that I am, I consulted her list and checked off the first two items simply because I didn’t want to do them. One involved crawling around on my knees under a counter with the possibility of getting soaking wet, and the other had to do with broken glass.

But the third item, ah yes, the third item had about it the sense of adventure.

3. Clean the garage.

I hadn’t cleaned the garage since boxing up all of Madison’s clothes and stacking them up in a far, dark corner.

Had it really been two years since her death? It wasn’t something either of us brought up for discussion. The truth is, the way we act you’d never know that we were once the proud parents of a beautiful little six year-old girl with golden tresses that fell in natural ringlets and framed a face full of freckles. And when she smiled, it made her blue eyes dance.

The doctors told us it was the most aggressive case of childhood leukemia they’d ever seen.

It didn’t make us feel better.

Not one bit.

I decided on the spot that I’d clean the garage, but I wouldn’t clean that corner.

Wouldn’t go anywhere near it, actually.

I set about accomplishing my task as quickly as possible, for suddenly, the adventure had flown, caught in the downdraft of my falling heart.

Living in a seventy-five year-old house has some disadvantages, among them a garage that was originally a carriage house. It was big and drafty, more like a barn than anything else.

Organization was the main difficulty, something at which I excelled so I started moving things around and lining them up according to shape and size. I realized early on that there was no way I could accomplish my task without rearranging Madison’s boxes—they were just in the way, it was as simple as that.

I steeled myself against the emotional onslaught I knew I would have to face and started moving them aside as carefully as if they contained something fine and precious, which they did…it was the memory of my baby girl.

Reaching down for the very last box, I spotted a smallish object shoved way back in a dark corner, wedged in behind an old piece of plywood someone had carelessly nailed to the timeworn studs that had now come loose.

I eyeballed it for a few moments, pondering whether it was worth getting down on my hands and knees to retrieve it. I had to do it, otherwise I would always wonder what was in it.

I reached for the object, which turned out to be a shoebox—a very heavy shoebox—and gave it a sharp tug. It came free with an unexpected suddenness sending me head-over-heels in a clumsy backward somersault to lie in an ungainly heap like some sad marionette whose strings had been unceremoniously cut.

Once I came to my senses I noticed that the box was bound up with twine, so I walked over to the workbench and cut the twine with an ancient pair of scissors that hadn’t been sharpened since the invention of toothpaste. So when I say, “cut” what I really mean is I mashed the twine in two.

When I removed the lid, what I saw took my breath away.

Cash.

Lots, and lots of cash—all denominations, some folded, some wadded, a few stacks of hundreds held together by rubber bands. I dumped it out into a big pile on the newly cleaned surface of the workbench and began counting.

Twenty minutes later I totaled up the columns I had hastily scribbled on a brown paper bag and actually felt my mouth drop open when I arrived at the sum.

Forty thousand dollars!

Exactly!

I looked at the end of the box. The faded label read, “Buster Brown official Boy Scout Shoes.” I remembered my dad telling me about a Buster Brown TV show he used to watch back in the fifties, which made me wonder just how long that box had been up there.

I picked up a few of the bills and squinted to see the date of issue and found that not only did they range from the thirties to the late fifties, but that most of the currency was in silver certificates. Dad had tried his hand at collecting rare coins and bills for a while, so I knew that silver certificates were worth more than Federal Reserve Notes, because the government had to match the certificate to the same amount of value in silver.

Most of those bills looked practically new, as if they’d never been used. But where did the money come from? Who did it belong to? Me? I mean the age alone would seem to indicate that whoever had once been its rightful owner, was now long gone and forgotten.

I picked up the lid to see if there was anything I had missed and spotted a nearly illegible scrawl snaking its way along the inside rim.

It read, “This is my life savings. If you’ve found it, most likely it’s cuz I’m dead and buried and my big plans have come to nothing, just like my life. Think of it as an inheritance.”

And the message was signed, “Red.”

I stood there looking from the lid to the money, back and forth, back and forth trying to decide what it all meant when suddenly, I could swear I heard a scratchy voice say, “It means yer one lucky sumbitch, that’s what it means!”

I smiled, I mean I was spooked, but I couldn’t help but smile. I said in reply, “Thank-you, Red. Your life did NOT come to nothing. You’ll be remembered, I promise you that.”

Because of the silver certificates, and the fact that many were rare and uncirculated, that forty thousand wound up being worth a little over one hundred thousand.

That is how Children’s Hospital got a great start on their new children’s oncology wing.

It’s also how that shiny new Porsche Boxter came to be out there in my garage.

Red, of course.

The rain began ten days ago, and hasn’t let up once—not even for a moment. Relentless and unceasing it falls seemingly in an attempt to cover the surface of the earth in a deluge of Biblical proportions.

My umbrella ceased to function the morning of the third day, which means that I’ve gone eight full days now dashing from house to car, to store, to car, to work, to car, and then home to wring out my clothes, and then fall exhausted into bed only to rise and begin the whole blasted routine all over again come first light.

On the fourth day, the overtaxed storm drainage system began vomiting its excess into the gutters, thus creating a sizeable obstacle to anyone desiring entrance to the office building where I watch the minutes of my life tick away. And thank God my office is on the third floor, else I’d be treading water instead of sitting in a mediocre chair in a coffin-sized office still trying to figure out what I want to do with my life.

On the fifth day, the local constabulary closed the business district citing unsafe conditions as the reason for the closure. Not that anyone was out and about by then save for the looters who seemed neither hindered nor intimidated by the violent weather.

I hate the rain! I hate the way it beats spitefully against my window as if to say, “This thin, flimsy glass can’t withstand me forever, so you’d best not be getting too comfortable.” No worries there. I’ve never been comfortable even in the best of times.

The electricity went on the sixth day leaving the city’s residents shivering in the dark and wondering if their houses were built on ground sufficiently high to escape the rushing torrents below.

On the seventh day, ah yes, on the seventh day my old friend despair paid a return visit. There’s nothing quite like sitting alone in a dreary, run-down apartment with no electricity, no heat, precious little food and no compelling reason to continue one’s existence.

I’m not usually this maudlin, so I must beg your forgiveness as well as your indulgence. You see, what I haven’t told you is that the beginning of the rain—the very night it started, actually—brought the end of my life, or, at the very least, life as I had known and loved it for a season.

“I can’t do this anymore, Harold,” was all the hastily written and poorly folded note had said. It had been thrust into my hand, soaking wet from the downpour. A quick, insincere peck on the cheek, a sad little movement of her lips that was more of a twitch than a smile, and then she was gone, splashing through the rain as she ran to hail what would be the final taxi of the night.

I stood there feeling quite ill at ease at so insubstantial a parting; not knowing that everything I had ever loved had just been torn from my grasp.

At first I couldn’t make out the words, standing as I was in the rain—an apt metaphor for the sad little scene. When I was finally able to decipher her stiletto-like message, feel its steely point sink deeply into my heart, I am ashamed to admit that I sat down. I sat down right there on that cold, cold cement sidewalk and wept, my tears inconsequential against the rain.

Not that it had been a long affair, a scant three months in duration, but it had been good. It had been so very, very good. To paraphrase a line from Les Misérables, “She spent a summer by my side, she filled my days with endless wonder.”

And so she had.

I had even allowed myself to believe that she was the one. Only the reality of my grief eclipses the error of my thinking.

Were it possible for any of my friends to contact me, I’m certain there would be the usual patter one hears during times of bereavement from well-meaning friends and casual acquaintances alike, “You’re too good for her.” “You’ll be better off without her, you’ll see.” “Someone will come along and make you forget all about her.”

The thing is…I don’t want to forget about her. I want to remember when our hearts beat as one and nothing else existed in the earth except we two. I want to believe that one day she’ll come to her senses and return to me.

And so, I’ll wait.

Not forever, mind you, but wait I shall for a season and a day if necessary.

The silly dreams of a mad fool? Perhaps. But, then, one must have a dream or surrender one’s reason for existence.

It’s funny…I can’t hear the rain.

St. Arbuck’s is quiet this early Memorial Day’s morning, the usual hordes having apparently chosen to sleep in and enjoy this brief respite from the daily grind.

If you can sleep in, you have my unmitigated respect, and no small amount of envy for I cannot now, nor have I ever been able to log more than five or six hours of uninterrupted sleep in any given night.

But napping?

Ah, now there’s something at which I excel.

Give me a twenty-minute power nap around two in the afternoon and I’m good to go.

Absent the typical frenzy my mind escapes down a well-traveled and timeworn pathway.

Bits and pieces of scattered memories coalesce into one compelling thought.

He came into this world, born of tough Germanic stock.

Andrew was his name.

No middle initial.

Just Andrew.

From the start he was a fair-haired wunderkind, destined for great things, or at least that’s what his momma always said.

Having made it through the Great Depression, but just barely, he enlisted in the US Army at the ripe old age of seventeen—although with his blonde hair, startling blue eyes and boyishly handsome face he had trouble passing for fifteen.

It was a time of horror like the world has never seen before, nor since: new estimates place the total number of US casualties at close to 420,000 and total deaths related to the war worldwide (including Russia and China) at nearly seventy-three million.

Of course at the time, no one had the slightest idea of the severity of losses, they only knew that evil men threatened the security of peace-loving peoples and had to be stopped regardless of the cost.

It was 1944 and Andrew’s unit was assigned to the offensive officially known as the Battle of the Ardennes, but known to the general public simply as the Battle of the Bulge.

500,000 German, 600,000 American and 55,000 British troops met in the Ardennes Forest on the German/Bavarian border during the coldest, snowiest winter “in memory.”

Trapped behind enemy lines within the first three days of battle, he was one of 23, 554 who were captured and consigned to German POW (prisoner of war) camps.

There was no overt torture—the Germans were too smart for that.

Besides, when you had hunger and severe cold at your disposal, that was torture enough.

And with holes in their socks of sufficient size to allow passage of an entire regiment, and boots that were no better, they had to sit on each other’s feet in a desperate attempt to keep warm.

While so occupied, they would pass the time by making up recipes of their first meal once they were rescued…and to a man they KNEW that they would be rescued.

Some of those recipes still exist in the margins of Andrew’s battered old New Testament that he carried throughout the experience.

Christmas of 1944, brutally cold and having seen a good many of their fellow captives die from either cold or starvation, someone called out, “Is there a preacher here?”

Andrew wasn’t a preacher, at least not then, and he read the Christmas story from that little New Testament, and when he finished someone started singing, in a voice that croaked and quivered from the cold, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.”

His mother was right about him, for after the war, he did do great things.

As a pastor he served congregations all over the west coast for more than fifty years; raised four children (one of whom is my wife); and loved his wife fiercely until the day he died in March of 2004.

And having never known my own father, Andy taught me how to be a man.

World War II Veterans are literally a dying breed, passing on at the startling rate of one thousand per day.

But I remember Andy.

I remember him on this Memorial Day.

I will remember him on every other day.

For he was a man well loved.

His was a life well lived.

May the same be said of me.