When I was ten years old, Mother packed a small suitcase with a week’s worth of clothes and Dad took me to the Bus Station on White Street. Dad purchased one ticket to Union, S. C. and walked me out to the waiting bus.
I remember the smell of what I now know is diesel fuel as I stood beside the driver who placed my suitcase among the others in a compartment on the side of the bus. Dad then told the driver where I was going and asked him to look after me. I think Dad may have given him a couple of dollars to encourage his diligence in keeping me on the bus until we reached my destination.
If you are younger than forty, I can hear you saying, “How could a father put his ten-year-old son on a bus to travel alone even for a couple of hours” But it really was a different time…a time which seems impossibly naïve even to me.
I was going on a great adventure. Like any explorer there was excitement and fear and pride wrapped up together like the ham and cheese sandwiches my Mom folded in waxed paper and placed in a paper bag with a Baby Ruth candy bar. After all, how could a ten-year-old boy go two hours without a supply of food?
Dad put an arm around my shoulder before I boarded the bus. He was in his mid 30s and I remember his hands were big and strong and gentle. I believed he was not afraid of anything and I wanted to be just like him.
I took just behind the driver and wore a face that I thought looked brave and intrepid. Along with my paper bag, I carried one of my favorite books, my Boy Scout Manual. From it I learned, too late, how to identify poison oak and ivy. I knew how to start a campfire by building a teepee out of twigs and slowly adding bigger pieces until the fire blazed to life. I was a good swimmer and was reading the section on life saving in case anyone ever got in trouble at the pool.
I believed that one day I would be a hero and that this the solo journey was only the beginning. I watched the people get on and off in Rock Hill and York and Lockhart and wondered what their lives were like. There was a soldier whose uniform had only one stripe. I knew from Dad that he was a private and sort of a beginner at army stuff. There was a man in overalls and a lady who looked a lot like my grandmother Case, thin and serious and proud.
I had already, while we waited for passengers to get on and off in York, eaten my sandwich and still had the Baby Ruth in my bag.
I might have slipped off for a nap when the driver turned his head toward me and said, “We’re almost in Union now. That is where you are going.”
I decided to go ahead and eat the Baby Ruth so It wouldn’t be wasted. I wanted to savor every moment of the trip.
The bus pulled up to the station and the door whooshed open. I had already spotted my Grandfather Hill pacing along on the sidewalk. I don’t know how long he had been waiting but I suspected that, like my father, he had been there for some time, just in case the bus was early.
He was not a big man, like Dad. He stood at about five feet eight inches, a height I was already approaching. He wore a brown suit with a white shirt and tie and his brown shoes were buffed to a perfect shine. He hadn’t dressed up for the occasion. Despite having only a few weeks of formal education, he was plenty smart and had risen through the ranks working in mills in Lockhart, Fort Mill and Union and was a supervisor. He dressed the way a supervisor was expected to dress in public in 1957.
He hugged me as I came off the bus and even though I had seen him a couple of months before, commented on how much I had grown. Maybe I had, I was in a furious growth spurt.
My grandfather didn’t drive. He had once owned a car in the 1920’s but had parked it during the Depression and later gave it to Dad’s oldest brother Elmo.
The bus driver handed my grandfather my bag and, on this late June morning, we walked the two and a half miles to his house. As we walked and talked, he pointed out a small restaurant that Dad would always stop when he visited his parents and buy a jar of Union County Hash. It was a brown hash of shredded beef and one of his lifetime favorites.
We walked past a cemetery, but none of my ancestors were buried there. They were mostly buried in the Armenia section of Chester County. Paw Paw’s family had moved to Lockhart and later Union for work at the mills when small farms could no longer support families.
Paw Paw always walked at a brisk pace like he had to be somewhere. I was ten and had boundless energy and had no trouble keeping up. We turned at the church where he taught Sunday School and passed the little mill where my Grandmother worked and the store beside it that sold what people called “notions”, not unlike an old version of a convenience store. Just a couple of houses past the store we would turn and climb the fifteen or so flat steps up the sloping hillside and walk through the yard to the house which sat back from the street.
It was a wooden clapboard house and my Grandmother sat leaning forward in one of the six or so rockers lined up across the porch. As we topped the hill, she rose and came down the three wooden steps into the yard to meet us half-way up the walk. She was Hollywood’s vision of a grandmother. Maw Maw was taller than my grandfather and never fat but big enough to be cushy and soft. Her hair was a perfect shade of gray with just a few stubborn black streaks left. She took my hand and we went in, Paw Paw depositing my suitcase on the bed in the first bedroom on the right. It was at the front of the house and a window looked out at the big sweetgum tree I loved to climb. The window was open any time the weather was warm and a breeze seemed always to be stirring the sheer curtains around.
I don’t remember lunch. I was a picky eater so I am sure I filled up on biscuits. There were always biscuits, buttered from a disk of real local butter about the size and shape of two stacked hockey pucks. As the butter melted on the biscuit, I would spoon on a dollop of black molasses from a mason jar. Dad had no love of molasses because during the depression molasses biscuits were the only choice for breakfast on many days. I had no such memories and thought they were a treat.
It was my first day back in a while and I was in a hurry. My grandparents had a large back yard with a ramshackle tool shed where Paw Paw kept every odd and end he came across. I believe I inherited my packrat nature from him. There were rusty garden tools along the walls and mysteries in the corners.
Just inside the door was a pine toolbox, black with age and accumulated dirt. Opening it revealed a treasure trove for a young boy. There were a couple of dime store pocket watches, long ago discarded and missing hands and crystals. Old pairs of glasses with the earpieces that curled all the way behind my ears and even a pair of round clip-on sunglasses took their place next to screwdrivers and rusty wrenches.
The box had been made for my grandfather by a friend at the mill and had been his workbox. There were old broken pocketknives too. Every man my of my grandfather’s generation carried a pocketknife. One was a bone-handled small pocketknife of unknown brand. The larger blade was broken off and more than half of the smaller blade had been sharpened away. My grandfather kept his pocketknives razor sharp and taught me how to put a little oil on the whetstone and stroke the knife across it at just the right angle.
The week was one of gathering eggs for their next-door neighbor who kept half a dozen hens and a grouchy old rooster, and of playing in a small bamboo cane break with some of the canes so big I could barely reach around them with two hands. When I visited in the fall, I would pick figs from the tree beside the kitchen door. My grandmother’s fig preserves were a delicacy I could not yet appreciate.
I remember one day, after lunch, sitting at the table in the kitchen and listening to the pendulum clock on a shelf behind me. Maw Maw was dressed as I always remember her in a print everyday dress with an apron over it. There was always a hint of flour dust in the kitchen air. She sat across from me and told me stories about my Dad as a boy. Paw Paw had disappeared into another room and came back carrying a leather coin purse smaller than a wallet.
In a time when clothes were worn over and again, these coin purses saved many pockets. He put the purse in front of me and I opened it. Inside were three Indian Head pennies and a Liberty nickel. There was also a half dollar with a portrait of Columbus on the front and a ship on the back. It was the first commemorative coin I had ever seen. After marveling over the old coins, I closed the purse and handed it back to him. He told me to keep the purse and the coins but not to lose them. I didn’t. I still have them today.
Paw Paw was retired but my grandmother still worked in the little mill down the street. She finished her shift at around four o’clock and when I was visiting I would walk down to the mill and wait for her to come out. She would show me off to the other workers who would ooh and aah and she would beam with pride. It was worth my embarassment. We would always stop at the store beside the mill for a six-ounce Coke or an RC Cola. I liked RC Colas because they were 12 ounces.
No matter what my age, my grandmother would take my hand and we would walk back to the house together.
At the end of the week Mom and Dad would pick me up and we would make the trip back to Fort Mill.
I saw a quote yesterday in a Costco magazine of all places. People had sent in their favorite inspirational quotes and someone had sent one from Baba Ram Dass, an American guru and philosopher. It was simple and brief and after a week of bad news about several friends, pertinent and poignant.
“We are all just waking each other home.”
And so we are. Whether walking each other home from a great adventure or from a devastating loss, whether walking through bright sunny days or beneath threatening stormy skies, whether we walk together for a few minutes or for a lifetime, we are all headed in the direction of home and thankful for the company we have along the way.
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