This is a story I wrote for a workshop a few years ago. It’s a memory that makes me smile, for many reasons. I raised my children and will still say to the grandchildren, “If you tell the truth, the punishment will be less than if I catch you lying.” Sometimes it works, sometimes I still get a lie…with a smile… My parents got it right many times…
I walked into the house, and Mom said, “Are you up to something?”
I looked at her as innocence brushed over my face; “What do you mean?”
“Charlene called me today and said that Brian had taken some paint out of the store and when she confronted him, he wouldn’t say anything. She thinks you’re going to paint on the water tower, “Is that true?”
My mind moved quickly; do I lie; do I tell the truth; how much trouble will I be in? “Yes,” I said defiantly.
“Dad is down summer fallowing on the Blatherwick quarter; you need to go talk to him.”
“Oh my God,” I thought.
“Ok,” and I turned out walked out through the garage, where my yellow Volvo was parked outside. My car, my freedom, was going to take me to talk to Dad, who would imprison me. It was a hot and dusty drive down the gravel road, the three miles south, where Dad was going around in circles, on his big tractor, tilling the earth, with nothing much to think about.. yet.
I turned left off of the road and onto the approach, driving across the freshly tilled field to a place where I could intercept Dad. He saw me and all of my dust coming towards him; stopped the tractor, came down the ladder and stood waiting for me, with his hands on his hips and an expectant look on his face.
“Hi Dad!” I said, with all of the “I just drove down here to say hi friendliness I could muster.”
“What’s up?” he said.
“Umm, Mom just thought I should come down and talk to you about something.”
He waited…
“ Well, four of us decided to go up and paint the water tower tonight and Mom found out, and thought I should come and tell you.”
Painting the year of your high school graduation was a time-honored tradition in my home town. It had been done for years and Marci, Colin, Brian and I had decided it would be us this year.
I waited; he was thinking and you didn’t want to interrupt him on the wrong side of his thinking. He was going back and forth in his head about what he was going to say, weighing all the possibilities, and how we all would react to his decision. You didn’t want to stop him at the end of the “maybe I should ground her for the rest of the summer” pause in his thoughts (I had learned that one from experience). I was hoping for the “hey, I was a kid once too” place in his thinking.
Finally he said to me, “If I say no, you’re probably just going to do it another night?”
“Yea, probably,” I said honestly.
We were raised to tell the truth. Mom and Dad always told me, if I told the truth the punishment would be less than if I were caught in a lie. It wasn’t the first time, or the last, that I was counting on that being their truth.
He shook his head and thought again, for a while. “What if we do this; you call me before you go up, and you call me when you come down, so I know you’re safe.” “Can you do that?”
“Yep.” “Thanks Dad.”
“Just be careful up there.”
“We will.”
I picked up Marci and we drove to meet the boys. All of us had last names that ended in H, so we thought it was a great idea for the four of us to take this project upon ourselves. We hadn’t asked anyone else’s opinion on that, but it was going to be our night. We were well prepared. We had silver paint to repaint a huge portion of the water tower to make sure the black H and the 77 would be easily read from the ground below.
I recounted my “visit” with Dad to the rest of them, as we drove up to the water tower. (I had already called the folks from Colin’s house.) The water tower was a typical small town water tower; sitting on four long legs, it was painted silver. There was a cage on the bottom of the ladder, with a lock and chain on it. The boys scouted the tower out ahead of time and had brought along the proper tools to “disengage” the chain from the cage and ladder.
Fortified with a couple of beers to steel our nerves, we one by one, propping, pushing, and pulling, climbed up the ladder to reach the top. There was a small widow’s walk and railing around the perimeter of the storage tank that held the water. We started off by tackling the silver paint first. We deftly covered up the 76 from the year before, about the time we noticed a lot of traffic showing up and driving by. The silver swath widened to cover an area as high up as we could reach and wide enough to give us room for the real artistic work.
We were starting into the black paint, when there were a couple of honks, and hollers from the cars below. The class of 76 hadn’t left for college yet and apparently felt we were usurping their class.
“Fuck them.” One of said and all of us felt.
Word was apparently passing quickly, we hurriedly painted on the 77 and then the H appeared a foot or so away. We looked at it, felt a lot of pride that we were pulling this off, and brazenly decided to paint on our first initials, so a L, M, C, or B appeared in each corner of the H. We stood there and it was decided we needed to celebrate before we went down.
We sat on the walk, our butts on the grate, and our feet swinging in the air. A joint was passed around and we shared a couple of quick beers all the time teasing each other about who had spilled the beans to the others driving around below us, who’s idea was it for me to wear a white sweatshirt, and how cool were we to have pulled this off.
We quickly descended the ladder, jumped in the car and planned what we were going to do next.
“Colin,” I said. “We need to run back to your house quick; I have a call to make.”
“Dad, we are done.”
Peace…. 🙂
Loving and Surviving 