When I was a teenager some 50 years ago, I convinced myself that I looked much older than I was, or more mature, or I had plenty of hair on my head and a pair of sideburns down to the sides of my face and left me looking like “the man”. I was seventeen, a former senior in high school that just graduated, and I knew that driving that ‘61 Chevrolet 3/4 ton flatbed pickup was the “man” ticket.
So there are many stories that I could tell, but won’t, as Mom’s is in her 88th year, and as bad as I don’t want her to know what I did, I don’t want to know, that she already knew, and that she has kept it quiet til now. My
Pop would be 96 soon, if he were still living, and I would just as soon keep it from him as well.
It was a Saturday, a bright evening, almost to collapse on spring and the beginning of summer to begin. I had been out hauling hay all the past week, with a two-ton 40’s model truck and a pop up loader. 60 pound straw to 85 pound grass bales. I had come home, cleaned up as best as I could, and headed out.
Lot-A-Burgers for dinner, at least five runs on the “boulevard” across town; turn around on the westside, make your way back across the River bridges, all the way out east and then back over to the west. Over and over. Shifting gears, radio on loud, a good time.
At the last minute, about 10 pm, to head down to the Moon Glow Hut, a dance hall building in Ochelata, Oklahoma, about thirty feet wide by sixty feet long, white with two doors on the front. Downtown Ochelata, with cars and trucks parked every which way around the place. The population of Ochelata was about 420, with the grocery store at one end of main and the Moon Glow Hut at the other, and Rodney Lay and the Drivers performing there on Saturday night, the place was packed full of people as the population of Ochelata tripled on Rodney Lay nights.
The rest will be a bit abbreviated: Music went til 1 or 2 o’clock a.m.. Lots of people, very little memory of it all, managed to get the truck wound up for the last 8 miles, pulled to the front of the house and looked, and Pop’s car was no where to be seen. It was still as a mouse. I managed to get out, got in, pulled off my smoke ridden clothes, jumped in the shower for three minutes, dried, crawled in bed, and laid there with my eyes wide open and my hearing buckled on and I was shaking with the covers pulled up.
I heard the car door shut when he pulled in the driveway. The key in the door; no words, no sounds, I heard my door slip silently open and I closed my eyes and turned my head, covers up. A long time I could hear him breathing. The door shut, my body collapsed, I laid there a few minutes, broke a new sweat and finally drifted off to sleep.
The next morning I wandered in to the kitchen, Pop was there, drinking some cold coffee from his half full blue and white cup, newspaper on the table, and yet he filled that room with his soul and being.
He looked at me, I looked at him, and then he calmly and quietly informed me that there would never be another night like the one we had just lived through, and if I were to be gone past 10 pm I could find a pay phone , drop a dime in it and call and let them know. There was a roll of dimes on the table.
I never ended up being late again.
Ralph Peck
Photo by Chris Hall, Wichita Mtns.
Bartlesville, Oklahoma
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