Defiance High School class of 1974 forty year reunion, 

 June 28, 2014.

Great time, great food and lots of photos for you to see. The pictures start with shots from the pre-reunion party on Friday night at Bill and Elaine Warren's home, then a few of the Saturday morning set up at the UAW hall before you get to the reunion photos. Hope you enjoy!

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  Real Estate is Dying

I knew when I turned right off Mulberry onto Maple Ave. and saw the police cruisers, about a block ahead, that the house I was going to would somehow be involved. The real estate business, for me, has been a topsy-turvy mishmash of action. I pulled my truck over to the left, in front of the property, parked on the street, facing the traffic, grabbed my camera and got out. The officer nearest to me nodded and waved. I returned the greetings. There was a guy leaning against the trunk of a car parked on the concrete pad in front of the duplex. I noticed the door of unit A was open and I assumed the guy was the tenant I was to meet. “You Dave?” He stopped texting and looked up, “No, I am Josh. You must be Steve.”  He was the listing agent, who was not supposed to be there. I was to take photos of the back unit, which was vacant and vandalized. The door was to be unlocked, then I was to go to Dave’s unit and see if he was home and take photos of the inside of his place. The property is a short sale, meaning the seller is attempting to sell it for less than what the bank is owed. My job is to give the bank an opinion of the value. Josh looked unnerved and shaky, “I have some bad news, Steve.” I figured he was going to say that I couldn’t get into the units, which would piss me off after driving twenty miles and wasting my time. “What’s up?” His voice cracked with dryness when he answered, “We got a body inside.”

Things, although bad for someone, didn’t seem so upsetting to me. “NO SHIT! Is it the tenant or a squatter?” He told me it was Dave, the tenant, and that he had come over about a half an hour earlier to make sure Dave would be there when I arrived at one o’clock. He knocked, found the front door unlocked and opened it. After calling for Dave, he went in and found the body. “So, was he in the bedroom?” I am a curious person, although my wife says I go beyond curiosity and run full speed into nosiness. “No, he is in a chair at his desk, slumped over, buck naked.”  “NO SHIT!” I say again. “How long you figure he’s been there?”  Josh thought a couple days, maybe.

So, we go to the back and take photos of unit B. The place stinks, like mildew and mold and maybe dead guy. I am not sure, but the air is nasty. It has been chilly in Tampa the last couple days, so maybe bodies don’t go bad quickly like they do in summer. I am not sure of the physics of that either.  Josh says, out of nowhere, “I would rather be at my daughter’s birthday party.”

I pursed my lips and gave him the sympathetic dad nod. “So, this your first one? Your first body?” He shocks me by saying it is his third. “NO SHIT!! He works the area regular. It is ramshackle, gangster land. Lots of extreme poverty. Lots of homeless. Lots of violence. Lots of bodies. “They all been natural?” He says yes, that he hasn’t found a murdered person.  I say, “Yet.” He looks squeamish. The officer who nodded to me comes around the corner, stringing yellow tape. “Who you with?” I tell him I am a realtor, taking photos for the bank. “Not in that unit, you ain’t.” He points to unit A. “You need to move your vehicle. Park it on the right side of the street.” I say, “Looks like you guys have this handled. I am done here.” The officer glares. I walk briskly to the truck and leave the scene as I entered, in a whirlwind of official real estate business. No shit.

Pandora’s Box

I have been asked to open Pandora’s Box, but I will harm no one, including myself, in doing so. The contents are fluid, figuratively, coming and going, sometimes building pressure, forcing the lid open and spilling out. When that happens I slap the lid closed, slide a stronger lock through its hasp and wait, because it will happen again and again. I will search inside my box, on this day, to find some event that I would change. That is what causes me stress. The box is full of things I would change; that is the easiest way for an event to get into the box in the first place. And many of those thing or events I would change are similar, if not the same, as the things and events locked in the boxes of other people. Everyone has a box.

I lift the lid and find the contents are in no particular order. I would not have become addicted to the Three Stooges, as a third grader, and asked Charlotte to “pick two fingers” which resulted in me poking her in the eyes, and left me scribbling “I will not poke others in the eyes” on the chalkboard during every recess for a week. I would change that action, but will set it aside for now.

I would certainly not have squatted in the bushes under my friend Teddy’s kitchen window and snickered until I could hardly breathe as his brother was viciously beaten, by their drunken dad, for leaving bread crumbs on the butter stick. I have always felt bad about that, as an adult. I may come back to that.

A definite do-over would be the incessant brawling in junior high and first two years of high school. It would be great to have been known as the kind and gentle Steve, rather than the guy who might pound you into sloppy joe meat because of your shirt color. Lots of guilt with this one, but those were the pecking order years, so, I will look at that one later.

The summer I was fourteen I went into Webb’s woods and shot twenty-one woodpeckers, just because I wanted to, and because their calls annoyed me. I knew it was wrong, particularly as I placed them in a straight row and then stared at the bodies. Nature is a priority with me now, so, I did learn something valuable, but the event deserves consideration.

In 1962, when in the second grade, I told Mrs. Alexander I hated her, because she made me take a note, written in cursive, to my mom, describing how I was a boy of bad behavior in class. I got a whipping. Mrs. Alexander, who looked every bit of a wrinkly, pasty, eighty years old, was only our teacher for a few days after I said that to her. She died before I could say “sorry.” However, I am not sure this event is high on the priority list for the task currently at hand. It goes back in the box.

In August, 1973, after working construction jobs for my father, a drinker and womanizer, I went to see him to collect the money he was saving for me. I was only paid for two weeks of work after having worked about ten weeks. He walked up the driveway, with flask in hand, and asked what I wanted. I told him. He became irate, said I was trying to pull something over on him, that he had paid me what was owed. I said nothing in return, borrowed gas money from my uncle and drove back to Ohio to start my sophomore year of college. I had grown out of the brawling and wickedness that gripped me as a kid. I should have talked to my father, man to man, about the money and other things muddying up our lives. But, I didn’t. I will put this on the top of the stack.

Finally, after considerable time and exhausting review I have come to a decision about the decision I would change, first. The initial decision happened in July, 1969. It involved me, obviously, a gun, a dog named Tip and my cousin. I need to first offer a brief back-story. My parents were divorced in 1965, after my father went to Vietnam, leaving my mother with five children under eleven years of age, no support financially or emotionally. Being the oldest and the most likely to make a go of it, I was handed over to one relative after another to live with. In 1968 I went to live with my aunt and uncle in Ohio. Cousin Jimmy was my age and we bonded like a weld bead to a piece of steel, doing everything together. We hunted, trapped, brawled, explored nature and discovered the delights in dating. Near the top of what we shared and cared about was Tip. She was a mix of German shorthaired pointer and blue tick. She was a smart dog. I know everyone’s dog is the smartest dog ever born, but I will say with surety that it is the truth about Tip. In May, she had a litter of pups and for several weeks did not join us on our daily adventures. One morning Jimmy and Bob, our friend from across the road, went to the power dam to club carp, which would spawn against the rapid flow at the dam’s bottom. Carping, as we called it, was fun and there were always hippies at the dam who would take the bludgeoned fish for food. However, I wanted to go to Five Mile and hunt snakes, so I did not go with them. 

Around noon I got my .22 rifle and started out. To my surprise Tip joined me. She loved to retrieve whatever we hunted, it came natural to her. I found water snakes immediately, sunning on the rocky banks. The snakes would slide into the water and surface several yards away, in the waters of the back bay. That is when I took  my shot, almost always deadly with the first trigger pull. Tip eagerly dove in and brought the dead, or not dead, snake to shore. I always patted and hugged her and we would search for another victim. It didn’t take but a couple minutes. The snake slid, I fired and Tip jumped. I made the decision at that point, as she was swimming out to the snake, to cross State Rt. 111, a busy county road, to look along the riverbank. I hesitated, wondering if I should wait for Tip, but I didn’t. On the river side of the road I saw a couple large snakes right away, both slid into the water and surfaced after about half a minute. I took two shots. As I was looking to see if I hit either, I heard a loud thump and turned in time to see Tip sliding along the road, and a pickup truck coming to a stop. I screamed her name and ran to her. She was already dead. The driver touched my shoulder and said, “She just bolted right out in front of me, son. I am sorry. Can I help you take her to your place?” I was already crying and told him no. We moved her to the side of the road and I ran home, got on my bike and peddled the two miles to the power dam to find my cousin.

He was on a path, leaving the dam area, when I told him. He didn’t believe me, but ran to his bike and rode to Five Mile, where he found her. She was a medium large dog, but he picked her up and carried the body home, maybe half a mile, where he placed her on the garage floor, next to the nearly weaned pups. After a couple hours we buried her in the woods behind the house.

Although as cousins we remained close our unbreakable, unbendable friendship was destroyed. We argued and had fist fights with one another and within three months I moved, to live with my grandparents, in the same town.

We remained under the strained relationship for years. It repaired itself and we talked about it nearly every meeting. We talked about all the good things as well. I told him once, about five years ago, that if I could I would change that morning, decide to wait for Tip to swim back to me before crossing the road. He hugged me and we both got teary, two men in their fifties, bonded again like weld bead on steel. Jimmy passed away in 2011. It is perhaps time to remove this event from my Pandora’s Box, because the decision cannot be changed and it needs to be no more than a sad memory in the middle of a beautiful story.

The Road to Mulberry

East of Beulah’s fruit and vegetable stand, just before the big bend in the road that leads to Mulberry, Obie has parked his rust-scabbed flatbed truck a few feet off the shoulder, under the canopy of a clump of massive live oaks. I saw him there, leaning against the tail of the bed, talking with another man. Teetering on the bed’s edge were what appeared to be onions, the large sweet onions that grow at the perimeter of the strawberry fields. We call them Strawberry Onions. They are the best in the world, in my opinion. Better than Vidalia or Walla Walla or Texas 1015 or any of the others, and I have tried most. My mouth reacted and filled with saliva. I was no better than Pavlov’s dog.

I pulled over and discovered that Obie was selling turnips, not onions. “No good onions till spring,” he informed me. The other man, like Obie, in his mid-seventies, at least, looks me over good and says, “Where you from?” Obie says, “You leave this man alone! He is young enough to kick yo ass, Leroy.” They do some verbal jousting and Leroy turns his attention back to me and I tell him I am from the Lithia area. “So, you a money bags, right?” Obie tells Leroy it ain’t none of his damn business whether I am a money bags or not. They argue again, Leroy explaining that he is just being friendly. “So, you know the last road yonder,” he points westward to where I came from. “You take that to the dead end and turn left. I don’t remember the road name, but when you turn left you go to Jap Tucker Road and turn right. You know where I’m talking?”  I shook my head yes. He continued, “After you turn onto Jap Tucker you look left and there is a man, Able, he has a stand there. He has onions. Good onions. All the time. See, Obie, you old mule, I was just telling this man where to get onions.” 

Obie was taking swigs from a bottle, wrapped tightly inside a brown paperbag. Even from a few feet away I could smell the rum. At 9:30 in the morning. Leroy reached in the the drivers window of the car, lifts out a styrofoam cup, looks in it, blows out the dust and holds it in front of Obie. “Kiss my ass, Leroy!” Leroy says he just might, if he gets enough of that rum. Obie pours some into the cup. Leroy looks into the cup, “Cheap-ass! Give me a little more.” Obie does. A car goes by and honks. Obie slowly lifts his arm, with the bag in his hand, makes a wagging motion. Leroy nods, imperceptibly, like the driver could see a motion that small. “Who that?” Obie glares at him, “Dumb ass. No more for you. That was Beulah’s boy. How many times you seen and talked with that boy? You going blind. Old drunk.”   

The two of them stare at the treeline on the other side of the road, silent for the first time since I stopped. Leroy backs up, leans his rear against the side of his car, gulps down the last drink of rum. Obie reaches over and pours more into the cup. I grab a bunch of turnips, hand Obie four dollars. Leroy says, “Tell Able I’ll be by, directly.” Obie glances at him, “He ain’t got rum.” Leroy replies, “No, he be a gin man, but he got good onions. For sure.”

So often I am asked about my ranch or farm or acreage. I do not own any of those, but the readers accept my words as reality. The following poem was born when we found this shovel near the sidewalk, while walking.

Today at the Ranch

What is it inside the imagination

that keeps surprising us

                         --Charles Wright

9:00 am

I have found a shovel.

The handle is broken,

there is a small crack

in its throat. But it is

still good in structure

and could be repaired

for use in your garden

or your yard. Perhaps

it could scoop fallen

leaves of magnificent

color, or snow bland

beyond all description.

Who wants this shovel

someone pitched from

a car or truck, into my

pasture, where the cows

eye it with fear and wild

animals smell the danger

of man. Who would like

to take this shovel, make

it whole and usable again?

Noon

Who will buy this goat

with a face like a sage

and a mellow voice

that beckons the early

evening? Will someone

take this fine animal

and let her see what lies

beyond the wire fence

that butts tightly against

the wood water trough?

She is only familiar

with the ground in a pen

found at the southeastern

corner of the northern

half of  a section of land.

She is most ignorant

of wars and the actions

of politicians eager

to make her life better.

She merely seeks to be

a goat free of bondage.

3:00 pm

A rusty scythe crusted

with more than forty

years of chaff and dust

is this day recovered

from beneath the rubble

of a collapsing tin shed.

Its corroded blade once

sliced through ripe grain

used to make the bread

which fed the family.

Then out of the ground

or down from the sky

its sharp inner curve

came cloaked in silence

to reap the gift of God.

It became the symbol

of all things non grata.

Accept this implement,

for past indiscretions

often are by the hands

of others, not ourselves.