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Riding my bike home in the cool of the summer evening I could smell lilac, carried on the night's first breeze, as I coasted down the last hill to our house. Many summer evenings began that way. Days projected life as a series of stills. Girls and boys - mostly boys - building forts in the woods, fishing in the creek and scouting for deer in the fields surrounding our road were captured in vibrant tableaus. Inside the incandescent wash of our house they would blend cinematically in my head as the tingling in my body and the outside light faded in tandem. After dinner and a bath, and with bed covers up to my chin, I would excitedly lay plans for the next morning while sleep caught up with the tiredness in my legs. My boyhood was well lived.
The gravel road on which I grew up was a coarse brown ribbon camel backed between two-lane black asphalt country roads which seethed heat and tar on hot summer days. Corn fields, cow pastures and woods blanketed the area in orderly patterns and tucked into mud-clumped ditches along rural routes and highways. My dad, like many other men, drove those roads to manufacturing jobs in town. Then, as now, the same fields and roads weather time as men, and now women, fill the shifts which eat away the days and nights. Working families in southern Michigan feel more acutely those periods of feast and famine visited by the national economy.
Gravel, for its part in my young life, was a rude and inconsiderate intrusion under bare feet more used to running in the grass or wading in the cold water of the pond looking for crawdads. The road would exhale large clouds of dirt and sharp rocks behind impetuous cars and dust my mother's laundry hanging on clothes line behind our house. Carmel colored ice, marbled and hard, covered the road with bumpy irregularity in the winter and would soften into sheets of dark fudge that caked on my boots as I walked to the bus stop in the spring. Mom saved bread sacks and slipped them on over my socks as extra protection against the wet. That gravel road is where I learned, wobbling and resolute, how to ride my bike. Dad taught me how to drive a stick shift on that same road and it is where, as a teenager, I fell in love with a red-headed girl in the back seat of a Chevrolet.
This is, for all its wholesome references, my life.
There were other moments I cherish equally for their starkness as I do those recollections for their warmth. I had chores. Even the youngest of six kids needed responsibility. I can still remember the feel of feathers combing through my fingers as I reached under chickens, fretting about my presence, to collect eggs spackled with manure. Corn fields surrounded our house and in the fall, after being reduced to broken and desolate stubble by combines, small swaths of stalks - the leavings - were left standing in the corners. We would dutifully gather ears of corn intended for cattle and bring them home for dinner. It tasted just fine. Winter afternoons, carrying a hammer and milk jugs filled with fresh water to our barn, I would break the ice in several dozen water crocks for the rabbits dad would later butcher. We weren't poor; we in fact had everything that we actually needed.
The single most defining memory of my life on that gravel road, however, was our troubles with the most basic of needs. We had well water and the pump would frequently need priming, year round. Since I was the youngest it often fell to me to remove the heavy wooden cover and jump down into the musty blackness of the well pit, wrench in hand, and unscrew the large yellow bolt on top of the pump to release air pressure. Many, many times my brother would holler at me from the bathtub to hurry up so he could draw more water, or mom would curse the well and the pump after water would sputter out of the tap while I trudged outside to do the priming.
Supplementing the chickens, and ducks and rabbits were white tailed deer, snapping turtle and squirrel my dad, older brothers and later I would hunt. Feeding six children and two adults was an ongoing task. Trapping also brought in money, and rows of muskrat pelts hung from nails on our basement ceiling after being pulled over wire stretchers to dry. Mom canned tomatoes from our garden and the best jam I have ever tasted came from black berries we picked alongside our road - another chore - but one which I didn't mind.
Our kitchen table was where all activity in the household centered. Busying herself between the stove, sink and table mom worked between soft curls of steam as she transformed the kitchen into a canning factory late every summer. Jars packed on the kitchen table were draped with linen towels and I would wait, with my sister, until the lids gave a reassuring pop to let us know they had sealed before we could cart them down to our basement. Grasping the heavy jars of tomatoes, green beans or squash as my mother called for them in the winter always seemed pleasing and reassuring in my small hands. Many evenings dad would have paper strewn over the table surface and silently concern himself with the checkbook and bills under a lone light bulb that hung from the kitchen ceiling. Kitchen Table Politics governed adult conversations when my parent's friends would visit. As a young boy standing at my dad's elbow I tried to appreciate the full weight and importance those conversations seemed to hold. As a young man, struggling with my own convictions, I decided that the Democratic Party could not provide the sensibility for me as it had for my father. Dad was an auto worker, a union member and a Democrat, in that order. He once told me that "unions are like a democracy - they're the best thing going until something better comes along." Dad would also later say that he only had two kids that turned out bad - they became Republicans. Now, I wonder what sentiment he would hold for his youngest son who sees failure in Washington, in both parties, to make America work for the working men and women of this country.
I grew up, got a job and went to college. My young life was punctuated with all the necessary accompaniments of a Midwestern experience: Easter egg hunts, a Big Wheel on my birthday, my first BB gun for Christmas. I played high school football and grew out my hair. I hung out on the railroad tracks drinking cheap beer with my friends on days we skipped school. Braces I wore in my senior picture were because of a handshake deal between the orthodontist and my dad. Dad agreed to pay fifty dollars a month until they were paid for in full and the orthodontist agreed to see me once a month until my teeth were straight.
Dad only finished the eighth grade. He stressed the importance of education his whole life and lectured that we shouldn't be limited in choices as he had. It took five institutions and nearly a decade, but I completed my undergraduate studies. Those were my choices. I chose to drop my classes at community college and enlist in the Army after watching fighter jets on television take off from deck plates in the Persian Gulf. I chose to enlist in the Naval Reserves after the Army. I chose to pursue job opportunities as a Sign Language interpreter in classrooms, boardrooms and courtrooms from Alaska to Alabama. Moreover, it was my choice to volunteer for political campaigns, answering phones, licking envelopes and knocking on doors. I became a precinct captain in my small town, interned for a senator in Michigan's capital city and for a congressman in Washington, D.C. I have, in my working life, stocked shelves, dug trenches, poured tar, filed papers in attorney's offices and cleaned offices at midnight. I have collected garbage and moved furniture. I have worked with abused and neglected children in Alabama, developmentally disabled and deaf-blind adults in New Jersey and schizophrenic men and women in Georgia. Dad taught me how to fingerspell when I was just a kid. His sister and brother-in-law were Deaf. Love for my aunt and uncle, and for Deaf culture and Sign Language, inspired me to work as an interpreter for many years. Finally, after arriving at New York University for graduate school, it seemed I had completed a long, circuitous path backwards to hopes I barely dared dream as a boy on that gravel road. Now, I am a journalist and a writer.
I have traveled far from that gravel road in both years and distance and have arrived at some basic truths. First, dad had the greatest practical wisdom of anyone I have ever met. Second, mom made our house a home.
Lessons from that gravel road run through my life and provide its foundation and direction. I learned what an honest day's work really means and that all work, if done in earnest, is honest work. I learned the value of a dollar and how hard a dollar really is to come by. I know that family is first. I try to live by these principals, and others, which provide my grounding. Often, I fail. That also is a lesson, never give up.
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