Welcome to the Manuscript Mentor Blog. This week we have a story of longing by Michael Crockett titled, Johnny Vance. For those of us who have lost a beloved elder, the desire to want to know the answers to all the questions we never asked might haunt us. It might also lead us to write our memories, in the hopes we can uncover buried stories or savor what we did know about this person who was important to us. Michael is inspired and comforted by something he had in common with his father. What roads might you take into your writing about grief and love? Finding the creative juice and the spark of inspiration to write comes to each of us in different ways. What inspires you to show up to the page and write?
The house I grew up in had three stories. Well…..it had way more than three stories. It had hundreds, thousands of stories. I should have said it was three stories high. And actually it was closer to four because of the sloping yard with a walkout basement. Of all the trees on our property there was one particular tree that was special. I loved to climb trees when I was a kid and this was a very climbable tree, a maple maybe. It was taller than the house, so that would have made it over forty feet back then.
I think I was seven years old when I climbed it for the first time and when I got to the top I could see my mom in one of the windows of the house and I hollered to her and waved. She didn’t see me at first, but as she raised her gaze skyward….. there I was. I was a little confused by the expression on her face and the wild gesticulation of her hands but I figured out she was trying to tell me to come down from the tree. She had no need to worry. I was fine up there. I knew what I was doing. I learned from the best, from my father. He was a climber. He loved heights.
When he couldn’t get into the service before World War II because of his hearing disability, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps., one of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. They worked in national parks, making trails, planting trees and such. There are plenty of pictures of my father casually standing on the branch of a tree higher up than I could ever imagine climbing.
In 1959 we lived in Portland, Maine and my father was a milkman for Old Tavern Farm. His route encompassed the surrounding communities including the town of Raymond. In 1959 a local TV station built a new broadcast tower in Raymond. And in 1959, that tower was the tallest man-made structure in the world. Over 1600 feet. That’s taller than the Empire State Building.
You can look it up.
Sometimes my older brother would ride with my father on his route and he remembers the day when they were driving by that tower and a man flagged them down. He asked my father if he could get three quarts of chocolate milk. That seemed like a lot to my father and the man told him that one was for him and the other two were for the guys up on the tower. So…Dad gave the man his chocolate milk, grabbed the other two quarts and started climbing. The man on the ground shouted at him to stop but he kept going. He was going to deliver that milk in person.
My brother was sure Dad was going to die. He thinks he was at least halfway up the tower, maybe higher, when he reached the two workers. He stayed up there for quite a while and when he came back down he was like, no big deal. Must have been quite a view though. As an aside, my brother cannot stand heights, can’t even get on a stepladder.
There were also times at home when my father would get the urge to … ah … move to a higher
elevation.
One day my mom got a phone call from Russ, our neighbor across the street.
“Mary?“(My mom’s name wasn’t Mary, but Russ said she looked like a Mary so he always called
her that.)
“Mary?, John’s walking around on your roof. What’s he doing up there?”
She told Russ to come on over and “Ask John yourself.”
So, he did. And he ended up going out there on the roof too. He and my father sat up there
together for a long time. Drinking coffee. Taking in the neighborhood.
I don’t know what they talked about. If they talked about anything.
I don’t know what it was that made my father need to climb. Need to ….what? Slip “the surly
bonds of Earth?” I mean, I could have asked him. I was a grown man by the time he passed
away. Grown in years but …..not in emotional maturity. I was self-absorbed for a very long time.
So many things now that I wish I had asked him.
- What was it like growing up poor in the inner city with nine siblings?
- Did you ever get over your brother dying in a fire when he was just a little boy?
- Is it true when you first met mom, you told her she was the prettiest girl you ever saw?
- What did it feel like to sing on stage with Ella Fitzgerald? Twice!!
- Were you really going to call yourself “Johnny Vance” if you made it big as a singer?
- What was it like to lose part of your memory after you had that accident?
- Did you really remember who I was?
- Would you even be able to answer these questions?
- Why did you need to climb?
When the time comes and I meet up with my father again, my plan is to pack a lunch and if that
tower is still there, climb it all the way to the top with him. We can sit there for a while drinking
chocolate milk. Maybe we’ll talk, maybe not. Either way, it should be quite a view.