SLOGGING THROUGH WINTER… Good & bad (Part 169r)
Dick offered
to try and find out what was up with Cliffy… but not right then. Best
friends through high school and then they served together in the Navy,
he was best suited to try and figure out what had him so ‘up-tight’. A
couple of theories were tossed out for quick discussion but they soon
died. My own was that the source of it was the wreck and death of the
driver at Daytona. Being a part of the pit crew on that car, he got much
closer to the situation than most and it had him questioning weather he
wanted to continue to race. Alan had suggested that it was Beth who
might’ve been putting pressure on him to quit since he now had four
kids. Dick rejected that saying he thought Beth loved racing more than
Cliffy. More important than that was getting the money we owed together
by Cliffy’s deadline so I asked Dick about his share. He didn’t offer any
amount saying he had to pay for seeds for planting crops on his farm
before he could do anything about the racer. That triggered Buster to
start complaining. We all knew his wife was a flat out ‘bitch’ and had
tolerated his whining while feeling somewhat sorry for him. Joe added
that he was strapped for cash too. He was an apprentice union welder and
to get work had to travel to get to it and was often gone weeks at a
time. He had to pay for his lodging on top of gas for his car to get to
the sites, often more than 300 miles away. Alan was the only silent one.
It had been an exciting racing season and even though we didn’t finish
the championship race we’d all left the track excited about the upcoming
year. Now it seemed we’d been looking through ‘rose colored classes’ as
the future was far from bright. Like everything else in life, only time
would give us the answers.
After slip-sliding home I spent the
rest of the day and then the evening working on the sign. It was, for
me, a big one… over $120 and was for cash. As I finished up that night I
was thinking back on a sign I’d turned down. It was also a big one but
was very labor intensive and I'd turned it down for that reason. But, if
I did it I’d have more than enough cash for my share of what was owed on the race car. The question was would I be able to find the
time to get it done by the time it was needed. It was more pressure on
me and I surely didn’t need it.
Elle was in bed and asleep
by the time I got upstairs. In the dark I managed to knock a pile of the
disposable diapers off the chair and onto the floor. I made an attempt
to pick them up and was surprised at how they felt. Tiny, because the
baby was an infant, I lay in bed wondering if they were made in larger
sizes and then fell asleep. The weather was even worse on Sunday
morning. I got a call from John, my farmer neighbor, telling me he
wouldn’t be able to do anything as far as the driveway was concerned as
it was nothing but ice. Thinking about church, all I could do was hope
the parishioners had enough sense to stay home. It was after we’d eaten
lunch and Elle had shuffled the girls off to play in the basement that
she finally opened up. As soon as she started I knew where it was going.
Long story short… she asked if I’d give some thought to having another
baby. I didn’t need to as I’d come to grips with not having a son. Plus,
we had three healthy kids. Health was a factor as the daughter of one of
the older women who worked upstairs at the bank had given birth to a Downs Syndrome
baby. The woman was a lot older than Elle and I’d been told that the age of
the mother had a lot to do with that condition but still, to have
another was “a roll of the dice”. However, having all that in mind I
didn’t want to hit Elle with it all at once. I told her that I’d give it
some thought before discussing it with her. That seemed to make her a
little more upbeat and I left it at that.
With the sign finished
Elle suggested that I spend some time playing with the kids. To paint
the sign I’d taken over the ping pong table, such as it was. It had been
left behind by the previous owners and was used more for stacking
things on than for playing ping pong but that's what they wanted. So, down the stairs I went but
before I made it to the last one out went the lights. There were no
windows down there and the second it got dark I had three screaming
girls to corral. I managed to get them together and calmed down a bit
before slowly heading up the stairs to open the door and give us some light. One
by one I guided them up to the first floor. It didn’t take long for me
to be kicking myself in the butt for not thinking of the possibility of a
power outage what with the ice storm. Everything in this house was
powered by electricity… the water pump, the oil burner motor, the oven
and stove… everything. Elle usually did her grocery shopping on
Saturdays and I knew she hadn’t left the house the previous day so when I
asked how much food she had she gave me an answer that
told me my answer about the baby had worked as she gave me the
smart-assed answer that she hoped I liked dry cereal. We went over the
bathroom usage drill that we’d done when we’d had the Nor’easter type
storms… no flushing unless Elle or I gave permission. Elle filled a
couple of pots with water for drinking and we then pretty much just sat
in the den looking out the windows. We didn’t even have a battery
operated radio so we were in the dark in more ways than one. The phone,
not unexpectedly, was dead so I couldn’t call my father to find out what
the weather had in store for us. We were marooned in our own house…
until, seeing my car in the driveway, remembered the car had a radio.
Getting to the car was the easy
part. Getting into it was where it got difficult. As I remember it
there was at least an eighth of an inch inch of ice over anything that had even the
slightest horizontal plane… including the lock. I was able to get into
the garage and got a couple of dirty rags. I had an old fashioned oil can
that had a narrow spout and that you had to push the bottom of it to get the oil out. I squirted some on the rags and set them on fire.
Taking the car key and holding it with a pair of long nosed pliers I
held it into the flame, ran out to the car and then back a couple of times, finally
getting the door unlocked. But, now the battle was to get the door open.
As I admitted, I was (and still am) anal when it came to holding on to
things. In a corner was an old mop handle with most of the cloth ‘tails’
worn off leaving a ball like wad of white on the end. I took it out to
the car and started beating around the edges of the door. By the time I
got enough ice off to get in I was no longer cold.
My father had
put me wise to the best station for regional weather and I had it on my
car radio. Even though the station was located in another state, they
did recognize they had an audience to their South and, after about a
half hour finally got an idea of what to expect in the next 24 hours.
The freezing rain was to stop but it was to get colder… not good. They,
of course didn’t give any information on the power outage we were faced
with. The way I looked at it was some information was better than no
information. Back inside the house Elle and I rounded up the few extra
blankets we had and put them on the beds of the two older girls. We
decided to let Kaye, the youngest sleep with us. It was going to be
tight… but cozy.
To be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment