I grew up in Westfield, Indiana, a quiet little mile-square Quaker-built town of about 800 souls, 20 miles north of the center of Indianapolis. My father was born in Westfield in 1914; his father was born there in 1876. Not long before that, Westfield was a major waypoint on the Underground Railroad; some of the old hidey-holes for escaping slaves still exist. And not long before that, Grandpa’s grandpa’s grandpa had left Sevier County, Tn. in 1805, bound for western Ohio, next door to Indiana.
When I was a boy, my dad would often point out various big trees in farm fields two or three miles outside the town.
“See those old boards way up there? We built a treehouse one time ... .” On one summer afternoon hike he showed me his name carved into the smooth gray bark of a tree deep in a dense old woods. Again and again he would say, See this? See that? The evidence was that Daddy had been a boy who got around. And that notion led to the draft of an essay called The Boys of Westfield which resides somewhere in my abundant notes (not on paper, but deep in my computer files).
Even as a young boy before the Depression, Daddy had a bicycle – a veritable giraffe of a machine with heavy 28-inch tires. For my twelfth birthday at the end of summer in 1955, he gave me my own first bike, Huffy’s $53.95 next-to-the-best 26-inch version that lacked only a radio; you can look it up. With that bike I, too, began to get around the town and the rural township. In fact, as my story-thoughts about the boys of Westfield developed, the theme was Westfield boys getting around.
Actually, the theme was Westfield boys running around. Running boys – strong, healthy, carefree, active, and mostly unsupervised. I doubt Grandpa Cloud ever had a bicycle, so “shank’s mare” – his own two feet – was the way he got around as a boy in the nineteenth century, always walking or running. In my mind’s eye, maybe as a racial memory, I’ve seen generations of Westfield boys running, sun-browned barefoot boys running here and there and everywhere – with yet earlier generations of near-naked Miami and Delaware Indian boys preceding them, back when central Indiana was forest rather than farmland.
And, if personal experience is any indicator, the boys of Westfield weren’t running around unencumbered. Read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn; read Penrod; boys back then evidently never went anywhere or did anything empty-handed or empty-pocketed. Daddy and his pals, for instance, must have carried hammers, nails, and saws, plus a lot of begged, borrowed, or stolen boards in order to build the various treehouses that he pointed out to me.
On this Father’s Day Sunday morning as I woke up and started to get out of bed, I suddenly realized that my own running days are evidently over. I was awake and aware, alive and alert, but I sure didn’t feel like running anywhere. Then I remembered ... one same-age friend has had health problems for a couple of years, capped by a heart attack last month. My best local hiking and caving buddy has been crippled by diabetes, infections, and other related maladies for more than a decade now. Another good and active and useful friend, two years older, has an inoperable brain tumor.
Recently I saw the obituary of a former employer and immediately called another fellow who’d also worked there – then two weeks later I read that man’s obituary, too. Periodically I hear from one or another of my former students at Tennessee Temple College who is afflicted by one or another major health problem. Two of those ‘boys’ lost their wives just last month.
So, this Father’s Day morning as I sat on the edge of the bed and closed my eyes for a moment, waiting for energy and the inclination to stand up and get moving, I didn’t visualize many boys running around; I didn’t see me and my ever-fewer surviving friends running anywhere today. Instead, surprisingly, the vision I had was of a lot of people moving slowly, myriad people shuffling along, all shuffling quietly toward a distant checkout counter. That doesn’t sound too strange; most of us are used to doing that, standing in some line somewhere, waiting for our turn to do this, that, or the other supposedly important thing.
But the folks I saw this morning weren’t lined up single-file, front to back queue-style, waiting for their turn – and there was certainly nobody in a hurry, nobody trying to cut in line ahead of us. No, what I saw was all of us – big and little, men and women, boys and girls – all mixed up together and standing abreast, shoulder to shoulder, side-by-side as far as I could see to left and right. It was like the starting line of some great foot race, but we were each waiting for our turn at the checkout counter.
None of us held a pointy little piece of colored paper with a number on it; none of us had a neat-printed doctor’s card with an appointment date and time scrawled on it; nobody knew who was next in line; there was no way to know when anybody’s name would be called to step forward. We weren’t even standing in line voluntarily; somehow we were individually coerced to be there. I was reminded of the old gambler’s description of life: “You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game.” Just so, once you’re in that checkout line, you can’t voluntarily step aside and give your place to someone else.
I suspect any of us who remember Brylcreem, Sputnik, Elvis, the Kingston Trio, and the original Beach Boys are beginning to get the picture now. That long side-by-side line I saw doesn’t represent the start of some race; we all entered that line the moment we were born, and now we’re facing the other end of the race, the finish line – the checkout counter.
Somehow, standing in that uncertain and interminable checkout line didn’t bother me at all, it simply seemed like the right thing to do. But I really did wonder ... where did all the running go? When did all the running stop? And where, and what, did all that running around get me?
Like most of us, I prefer to think that everything I ever did seemed like the right thing to do at the time ... so, where did all that running get me? Where did all our running ever get any of us – other than just that much closer to our turn at the checkout counter? Last year I told a friend that some days now the best I manage to do is only two or three hours of honest work, and the rest is just piddling around. He replied that two or three hours of just piddling around was the best part of his day.
To Christians the most exquisite statement that applies here has become almost trite. The apostle Paul said it first and maybe said it best; we all earnestly hope it’s true of us: I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.
If that’s true of us when our name or number is called, it will be enough. In the meantime, some days it seems we just keep standing in line, shuffling toward the checkout counter.
Larry Cloud
Lookout Valley