Being 17

 

When I was 17, and had graduated high school, I had a girlfriend named Yancey.  She lived in an apartment with her mother, a nurse, who worked the day shift, so Yancey was home alone for the summer. I visited every day for most of the month of June, and I behaved. I am not sure Yancey wanted me to, but I did anyway, even though I didn’t want to either because she had big boobs. And when you’re 17 that is a big deal.

My parents were distraught over these visits, and one day a friend of my brother inadvertently dropped a rubber from his pocket on the floor at our home. Naturally I was blamed in spite of my vigorous protestations of innocence. Dick actually set the record straight and I was absolved of the crime. Nevertheless the wheels were in motion, and I was to be packed off at Mother’s expense to live with my uncle in her childhood home of Newport, Vermont for the rest of that summer of 1960. I was driven one morning to Columbia, South Carolina to catch the train north. We said our goodbyes and I climbed aboard. The interior of the rail car was dark, and I could see only eyes, all staring at me standing in mortified confusion. Shortly, the porter, seeing my problem, pointed me to the ‘whites only’ car and the train left the station.

I was given a down pillow to sleep on that night, but there was a hole in it, and feathers got everywhere. Sleep for this teenager, on his own for the first time, was out of the question.  When we finally pulled into Grand Central Station, I gathered my bag and found a sign that said ‘Information’.  I approached the clerk behind a window, busy reading a newspaper, and asked on which track the next train for Stamford, Connecticut would be found. He pointed to a train schedule on the wall behind him and went back to his newspaper.

In Stamford Uncle Wesley picked me up in his 1954 Ford Woody Wagon and delivered me to his home in time for dinner with my aunt and him, after which I promptly fell asleep. In the morning I was taken to yet another train. This one was a Budd car, a connection of three or four diesel self-propelled cars.  We rhythmically clacked and swayed our way north through rural and green New England until we reached the last stop on the line, Newport, where Robert and his wife Betty were waiting.

That was undoubtedly the best summer of my youth.  I was quickly guided to a warehouse job at Robert’s employer, Canadian Pacific Railway, for $2.17 an hour (union wages) unloading freight cars. No sooner was I there than I was taken under the wing of Armand Bergeron.  Armand was not one for civil discourse, often given to coarse expressions like  ‘shit on a goddam’ and colorful ones such as ‘balls on a heifer’. Pretty good for a native French speaker. I quickly forgot about Yancey and fell in love with a Canadian girl who was going into her junior year at McGill University in Montreal. We went swimming in the lake at night with Robert and Betty, and I took her to summer stock theater more than once.

In early August Robert, Betty and their two boys went on vacation camping in parks around the state. I moved over to my grandmother’s house for that week. My grandfather was not well at the time, and one night I woke to hear a thud in his room.  I looked in to find him under an open window.  He had gotten up to use his bed pan, dressed only in a nightshirt, and in his weakened state he had fallen. I called to my grandmother, and together we lifted him into bed. At 5:00 A.M. the doctor came and told us he needed to be in the hospital, a place he had never been in his life. I went to Robert’s home to get his bathrobe, but before I left my grandmother looked in on him, and he called to her: “Alma, I’m okay”.

Robert’s home was less than a mile, but I walked quickly and was back within 20 minutes. She was clearly upset, wringing her hands, and asked me to check on him. Upstairs, with trepidation, I went in and spoke to him; there was no answer. I lifted his arm, it was rigid, and his skin was cold. I had never seen a dead person before, and now I was staring at my own grandfather. He was 78.

In his retirement, during summer, John Wesley Wyman liked to putter in his ‘victory garden’, sit on his screened porch, smoke his Lucky Strikes, and listen to baseball. That day, Thursday, August 4, 1960, his bottom-of-the-standings Boston Red Sox won a double-header, but he missed it.

Yancey quickly recovered from the loss of my attention and eventually married Jack Jackson, from Jackson, .... Yes, really.