When you’re hungry, all you want is food. And the hungrier you are, the more you welcome even simple fare.
Yesterday my friend Bill called. He served my hungry spirit two simple pick-me-ups, two little anecdotes about Jack, recalled from our years in Chattanooga.
He said one day they were sweating copper pipe for a project and the talk got around to work pants. “If you want quality,” Jack told Bill, “get the double belt loop in the back. They hold up best.”
Another time, one early morning, Jack picked Bill up to run him to the bank. He was driving our manual VW Rabbit and drinking his morning coffee. Bill got in the car with a travel mug of coffee, too, but it had, as Bill called it, an adult sippy lid on top. Jack told him, “Any good adult can drink coffee and drive stick shift. Mr. Bill, you’ve got to move up.”
Well, I laughed and ate up every word, scribbling his memories as best as I could through my tears. What is exactly right about these slices of life is that they are specific, and they connect me to the man who knew first-hand the benefit of good work clothes and a decent cup of coffee. They remind me of a time and place where we had that VW and we lived on Tennessee Avenue near Bill and Margaret. I can picture it in detail. Bill’s stories reopened for me my mental picture album of our sixteen years in Chattanooga, and my mind has been turning pages in it ever since.
Here we are driving Lookout Mountain in that VW, where Jack taught me to drive stick, and here we are starting our families, and there we are raising them with now-lifelong friends. There we are serving in our church, hiking in Cloudland Canyon, and playing Rook Friday nights with the Gradys. How about eating sweet corn from the Shepards’ garden, or sitting on the Morrises’ front porch while our kids played in a wading pool, or walking St. Elmo with my sister-in-law? And then there was the time I started teaching while Jack started mill-work…
Chattanooga was where we met. We went to college there, got married in Philly and returned to finish school there. We bought our first home there, grieved a miscarriage there, rejoiced at the gift of two sons there, and generally did a lot of living there. The longer I sit still, the more I am nourished at remembering how much we had there, how blessed we were. We did a lot there, and the recollections are sweet.
Now, I had not heard those little bits and pieces before, the ones Bill mentioned, but even if I had, I would have wanted to hear them again. That is because, in the telling, we are together missing an irreplaceable, dear man, and that is a worthwhile way to spend time. Though Bill can’t do everything, he could do that one specific thing. He could take five minutes and fifteen seconds of his day to bring me those specific tidbits.
And they were delicious.
