My John Wayne Moment (from June, 2006)

I read recently about a former Marine who was attacked by four armed thugs – two of whom had guns – as he walked home from his job at an Atlanta restaurant.

Thomas Autry, who is 36, was jumped as he was walking home from work. He called for help and pulled a knife out of his backpack, and got busy. The upshot: One attacker dead, one in critical condition, and two in custody.

Only a Marine would take a knife to a gunfight and walk away the victor.

Police, sensibly enough, did not charge Autry. Of course, Atlanta is the South, where I grew up, and, for good or ill, the South has always viewed weapons of any kind as educational tools and instruments of attitude adjustment.

I guess every guy dreams about having his own “John Wayne Moment.” I had one once. There is a song that says “life is different than it is in your dreams.”

My John Wayne Moment came late one summer in the late 1960s. My wife and I lived in a little wooden farm house on Turkeyfoot Road in Clarke County, Ga… The house sat back in a clearing in thick pine woods, at the end of a long dirt driveway.

We were hippies, sort of, and the house was small and isolated, but had most of the modern amenities. Well, there was an outhouse that you had to chase the copperheads out of when you needed to go, and the electricity was limited to a single light bulb hanging from the center of each of the rooms. But it did have running water, though no water heater and we had to bathe in a washtub on the front porch.

Still, it was $50 a month and we liked it. Until the strange car started showing up.

It was an old white Ford Falcon station wagon, not in good repair. There were always three or four guys in it. The car would drive to the edge of the clearing, stop, and just sit there, idling.

The men just sat there, watching. I approached them the first time, thinking they might be lost. They backed up and left. They came back several times over the next few weeks. I didn’t like the way they looked at us, especially the way they looked at Mary. They always had beer.

We did not have a telephone.

After about the third visit from the Falcon, I drove to my parent’s house and dug out my old Stevens .22 automatic rifle and a couple boxes of cartridges.

And a good thing, too.

In the small hours of the next day, the Falcon was back. This time, it drove right up into the yard. A man got out of the front passenger side, and strode right up on the porch. He walked right past the bedroom window. In the moonlight, I could see he had a knife.

It was hot, so the door was open, the screen latched. I heard him cut through the screen.

I don’t remember this part, but Mary said I rose up off the mattress, cursing and praying in the same breath, and, scooping up the rifle, ran toward the porch.

I was a good shot, back then. My buddies and I used to hunt rabbits with .22’s. This was a fat man in a white shirt on a moonlit night. I figured he was mine.

The man jumped off the porch and ran toward the far side of the clearing. I ran out into the yard, raised the rifle, and fired all 15 rounds at him.

At that point, I remembered the Falcon wagon and the fat man’s three friends. The car was about 10 feet to my left.

This was my John Wayne Moment. One bad guy, I thought, perforated in the piney woods. Three drunk bad guys and a ton or so of steel to my left.

And me, long hair sticking straight out every which way, wearing nothing but a St. Christopher medal, a Timex watch, and an empty rifle. Not even a cowboy hat.

It was a moment, all right. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more naked.

I don’t know how long we all stood or sat there, respectively. Seemed like a long time to me, but I didn’t check the Timex. The driver of the Falcon threw the battered old heap into reverse and tore down the driveway without bothering to turn around. I guess he didn’t realize my gun was empty.

Suddenly, there I was, all alone, under the moon in the piney woods, standing barefoot in the red clay dust, wondering if I had made the whole thing up. I mean, it was the 60s, after all.

I think Mary came and got me back into the house. I don’t remember, but I’m pretty sure I did not sleep.

Nothing ever came of it, except the white car stopped coming around. I never called the Sheriff to report the event. The guy was, after all, running away from my house, so if I had hit him, I would have been the one going to jail.

I got a bunch of friends to come over and walk around looking for a fat guy with a lot of holes in him, but we never found him. I finally had to admit that I was so angry and afraid that all of my shots had gone wild. I have to say, though, that I never saw a fat man move so fast.

© 2006 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

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May 26, 2002: Remarks for Dan Bartlett’s funeral, Beaver Meadow, NY.

Daniel Bartlett, August 1, 1960-Mary 21, 2002.

“I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”

(from the funeral card.)

JoAnn told me Dan’s service would be held in a small chapel, so I promised not to use any big words.

On the way up here from Gettysburg, it struck me that perhaps our most persistent sin as humans is our sloppiness toward time.

We spend it like the government spends money, as though we had an unlimited supply. Time is our greatest thief, and now it has taken Danny away from us.

In the few short years I knew him; it never passed my mind that I would attend his funeral. Certainly not this soon.

We had a lot of fun when we’d get together, usually with our significant others. We didn’t see each other all that often, actually. We had work. We were busy. There was so much to do. There would always be time…later.

Well, later is here, now, and look where we are.

There is a lesson here, somewhere. I just know it.

Those who really knew Dan Bartlett will not be surprised to learn that most of our get-togethers involved food and laughter.

One of the many reasons I enjoyed hanging out with him was that he was one of the few people I know who could eat more than I. How he arranged to do that and have ME gain all the weight, I’ll never know.

His enthusiasms were as quick as they were energetic. I remember one time Dan and JoAnn were over for Sunday breakfast at our house. I’d made up a mess of biscuits. One of the condiments we had on the table was a jar of soybean butter. Dan gave it the old hairy eye-ball and announced that it must be simply God-awful, and he’d have none of it.

Well, I talked and cajoled and pleaded with him to give it a try.

Reluctantly, he agreed, and smeared a modest gob of the stuff on half a biscuit.

About 20 minutes later, 3/4 of the contents gone, I had to threaten to whack him on the head to get what was left of my jar of soybean butter back.

Dan’s sense of humor stayed with him until almost the end. A week before he died, JoAnn took him to see his neurologist, as he’d had two very bad seizures the night before.

“Well, Mr. Bartlett,” the stern and humorless physician said.”What brought you here today?”

Without batting an eye, Dan replied:”An Oldsmobile.”

All kidding aside, the thing that stands out most in my memory about Dan Bartlett is his persistent and spontaneous humor. Even as he approached what we all assumed would be his middle age, I think he still looked on the world in a very joyous, childlike way, and was very quick to see the humor in almost any situation.

And yet, here we are. We have all lost a good friend, and I know the world seems today a little darker, and a little less interesting.

© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

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A slip in Time: Pictures on the ‘Fridge (1/7/1989)

In my job, I am occasionally called upon to use a camera.

It’s not one of those complicated rigs used by the pros. Mine is a little box with a minimum of buttons and no folderol. One points, sights through the little window, and pushes the button.

Over the years, I’ve stopped a lot of moments with that little camera; happy times, silly sights, mundane civic ceremonies, fender-benders, and tragedies.

Often, people ask me not to take their pictures. Sometimes I go along with them. I know how they feel; I get a funny, naked sort of feeling inside when somebody points a camera at me.

Members of primitive societies are often fearful of cameras and photographs. They believe that the camera contains a demon that steals their soul, imprisoning it on the photographer’s paper. Some aspiring actors, actresses and politicians might agree, when photographs of themselves appear, taken years earlier in inconvenient situations or positions. The devils, in these cases, are usually those in possession of the photographs.

What the photographer really does, of course, is steal time.

Perhaps “steal” is inaccurate. The photograph is more like a tracing of an event, inexact, often blurry, certainly only two-dimensional and lacking the sounds and smells and motion of the event depicted. It is a whisper, a hint, as fossil dinosaur footprints imbedded in shale only hint at what may have been the drama of the creature’s final moments.

As a traditional repository of family snapshots, the refrigerator is a sort of fossil bed, an enameled steel La Brea Tar Pit of our abbreviated histories. Under cute magnets disguised as everything from doughnuts to farm animals are pinned grocery lists, notes to remind us to pick up Aunt Harriet at the bus terminal, invoices from the kid who delivers the Sunday paper, and photographs, of friends, children, kith and kin.

Part of this past holiday season I spent at the home of my cousin Tom in western Pennsylvania. Like other families in what the social scientists are now calling the Post-Industrial Age, ours is as scattered as papers on a windy street, to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, California. The holidays are the one time of the year when as many of us as can manage come together.

I can remember Tom driving me around in my uncle’s yard in his first car. He piloted the vehicle self-consciously over the brown summer grass. I don’t remember what kind of car it was, only that it was huge, black, and round as a beetle, and it smelled like all old cars smell. Tom was 16, then, and I was 8.

Now he is 48, graying, an engineer. In his garage, aloof from the two everyday cars in the drive and hidden under a tarp in the semi-darkness is a Corvette. It lurks there, muscular and sexy under the canvas, like a secret passion, an incarnation of what that first car probably was in his teenage dreams. It seems to be waiting for a secret release. I don’t know. I have never ridden in it, never heard its engine.

The visit to my cousin’s house carried with it all the emotional depth that such things bring with them. Mostly, that is a good thing. Caught up in my job and with the everyday details of my immediate family and acquaintances, it was good to go back to the center, to tap into the root of blood, time and experience and rediscover, if not who I am, then at least the common cloth from which I was cut.

Notable by their absence, even after some years have passed, were those who had died. Their likenesses peered down from the walls and from desktops, smiling outside a Florida condo or staring stiffly from a brown studio portrait taken sometime in the early decades of this century.

There are faces I have never seen in person, yet behold echoed in the mirror every morning, and glimpsed, transformed and altered by heredity, standing and sitting in the living room of Tom’s house.

On the refrigerator in the kitchen, along with the memos and grocery store coupons and notes are photographs of Tom’s sister, Lynn, and her two children. The photo of the youngest, Nicole, looked so much as her mother had as a toddler that I had a giddy moment when I slipped 30 years back, when smiling people carried a sleeping girl into our home in Georgia after a long drive through Appalachia on two-lane highways.

Of course, it was only an illusion, a trick of the brain. Memory and perception had tangled with predictable results. I was only looking back a little way, seeing a few links in a long chain of time and converging ancestry.

Looking at the picture of Nicole, whom I had mistaken for her mother, I had a moment of sudden fear, as though I had found myself standing at the very edge of a dark abyss.

I realize then that on the night I remembered, when the weary travelers had come through the door in the small hours of the night, that I am now the same age as were the adults who stood in that room.

With only two exceptions, all have now gone, their atoms returning to the still earth, leaving behind a few material items, some photographs, and some moments in the minds of a few who still live.

I carefully put the photo of little Nicole back under its magnet. In the reflection of the oven window I could see the ghost of my father walking in the bones of my face. I saw others in there as well, looking out from time, from a particular mix of genes.

From the next room came a loud burst of laughter; there was conversation and merriment going on out there, and I was standing in the kitchen, communing with ghosts. I picked up my coffee cup, grabbed an extra Christmas cookie from the tray while no one was looking. I looked back at the reflection, gave us all a wink and went back to the party.

I don’t think anyone took any photographs that night. I hope they did. And, who knows, maybe someday, 30 years from now, a young woman named Nicole, visiting her Uncle Thomas’s home in Pennsylvania will look at a dimming old photograph in the family album and wonder who all those laughing people were.

 

 

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© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/