Our Heart (6 page)

Living in a small town, there aren’t a lot of places to work growing up, which aren’t just for summer work. Bill’s was one of those places, and he hired more than his share of kids around town. You wouldn’t find Bill’s on a map designated to show the greatest places to eat, but to the patrons, many who didn’t even live in town, it was a place to get good, home-cooked food. For many, it was the best place to spend a few hours shooting the breeze and drinking coffee. If you wanted a cocktail with dinner, you’d have to wait until after your meal at Bill’s and walk a block down to “The Last Spot,” the local tavern.

For some reason, on that particular morning, Grandma Sarah stopped next door at the Dittmers. She had already introduced herself the previous day with one of her famous strawberry-rhubarb pies. Stacy Dittmer was ecstatic at being asked to join her in the walk and talk club. She may have been a generation younger, but from the first day she and Grandma met, they’d hit it off like “birds of a feather.” This particular talk and walk day put into motion a string of events, which no one could have possibly perceived, when they first woke up in the morning and pondered what the day held in store for them.

The yearly town festival is more like a large family get-together than a celebration of some great historical significance. It begins around nine o’clock in the morning and runs well after midnight when the street dance finally concludes. This year, a band called “Thoroughbred” was going to be the headliners at the street dance. For the most part, the dance was the real highlight of the festival. The festival committee made every possible effort to get a quality group to come and play. The most important criteria the committee used, when picking a band to play, was whether or not they had a large assortment of musical styles. They wanted to make sure they could play to all the diverse music tastes in town.

Thoroughbred fit that to a “T.” They played top forty, country, classic rock, and even knew a polka song or two. If you wanted to see the whole town stand up and dance, you only needed to play “In Heaven There ain’t no Beer,” at least once during the night. This year, the band had more of a meaning to me than in previous years. My older cousin, Justin, from my mom’s side was one of the band members. He was in his mid twenties and had been with the band for the last four years; he was their youngest member. Like many small bands, Thoroughbred was made up of musicians who held regular day jobs and played music gigs, mostly on weekends and during the summer months. If they could, they would travel locally throughout the summer playing fairs and celebrations. There was a sense of community to many of the bands like Thoroughbred. Members were well known and they generally had no desires to make it big or travel great distances. Their joy came from playing music to the delight of themselves and the people who came to listen. Thoroughbred was made up of five men and one woman. The oldest was in his late fifties and many were in their early forties. They had been playing together for nearly twenty years, while members had come and gone. Justin took an open spot when one of the guitar players got transferred to another state because of work.

It was Justin, when I was younger, who inspired me to learn to play the guitar. On my twelfth birthday, he gave me one of his old Gibson guitars. I thought I was going to be the next Eric Clapton. I always looked forward to the times he came to visit. He always took the time to work with me and help me hone my abilities. Aunt Marcie, his mom, and my mom were sisters. Aunt Marcie was eight years older than Mom and she was equally renowned for her singing abilities, just like my mom was. Neither one of them had ever joined a band; they made their music in the churches and choirs. They had more requests to sing than they could handle and both were booked all year long for weddings and funerals. They found their calling by singing at church and at home. I never really understood why neither one had never tried to pursue their singing as a career. Whenever I would ask Mom, she would always smile and say that she was where she was supposed to be.

Right after high school, Aunt Marcie went to college, and within two years, had met and married my uncle, Tim Madsen. They called Marshalltown home. When my mom graduated from high school, her parents were in the process of moving to Arizona. Mom told me it was so that my grandfather, Samuel Carter, could live where his asthma wouldn’t be so bad. Mom went with them, but she hated it down there. She came back to stay with Aunt Marcie and attend the community college there in town. She met Dad and eventually they got married. There has to have been more to the story than Mom would share, but after many diversions and unanswered questions, I gave up asking. I wish now I had been more persistent. We only took one family trip to Arizona. We didn’t stay with my grandparents, and the mood was always strained between Mom and her parents. The only time they came back to Iowa was for Mom’s funeral. My father didn’t give them much of his time and they left right after the burial. With the mood my Da
d
was in, I didn’t even try to ask about it.

I crawled out of bed that morning, later than I usually did. It was already eight o’clock and, by then, Grandma was already sitting in the booth at Bill’s drinking her second cup of coffee. Matt and I had made plans to meet up with Nick around eleven or so. We’d walk the booths downtown and grab some food, then make our way over to Hidemann Park, where all of the games and competitions were going to be held. By far the best was the dunk tank. Every year, the local celebrities would take their turn sitting on the suspended seat. The lines grew longer as the eager people waited their turn to try and hit the round target with a softball and dunk whoever sat hovered above the tank. This year, the football coach and our principal were going to be amongst the celebrities taking the hot seat—or in this case the
wet
seat. Principal Jenkins was a great guy and very well liked by the students and parents. He was in his late fifties and growing more overweight by the year. The rumor was that next year was going to be his last. He was planning on moving south, so he could be closer to his son and his family.

There is something about holding that softball in your hand and focusing in on the red, white, and blue target extending from the water tank by its metal arm. Everyone who stood in line wanted to be the first one to dunk the newbie. A few years back, I had the privilege of being the first to send Mrs. Stevenson, our mayor, to her watery doom.

I took a shower and grabbed my University of Iowa tee shirt and a pair of jean shorts. I decided to wear my general-purpose tennis shoes, just in case I needed to participate in any of the games. They always had some old hokey games, and then there were the more challenging games like the “Flour-baggy war.” The game was set up in a fenced-in area within the park. It was complete with hay bales and cardboard cutouts to hide behind. They would divide the players into two teams of five. Each team member would get three sandwich baggies stuffed with colored flour in them. The simple purpose…don’t get hit and hit the other team’s players. There was a referee of sorts who made the final decision when the outcome was in doubt. When all of the bags were thrown, the winning team was determined by the number of players who were still clean or, in some cases, the least covered in colored flour. You didn’t win any prizes, but it was fun to blast someone in the back of the head and watch the flour color them. The later in the day it was, and the hotter it was, the more the flour stuck to you. Then you headed over to the water slide or the water gun challenge to clean off. You never wanted to do them in reverse or you’d end up having to head home first and change clothes, which you almost always did anyway before attending the night’s dance. Matt, Nick, and I had been planning our strategy the last couple of days on how we were going to take out whom
ever we played against. It didn’t matter who the other two members of our team ended up being, they would more than likely be casualties of war.

The weather was expected to be in the upper eighties and with very little humidity, a perfect day for the Cedar Junction Celebration. It was about ten o’clock when I was heading out the door and met Grandma coming in. Normally, she would step sideways and let me cruise on past, reminding me to let her know when I’d be back; not today. In my world the words, “I need you to do me a favor,” usually meant doing something you really didn’t want to do but would have to anyway. What my grandma asked me to do would forever change my lot in life. My first thought was that she needed me to run an errand for her, which I had done many times, following the simple utterance of that phrase. When she wasn’t quickly forthcoming with her request, I had the sinking feeling I might not like what she was going to ask me to do. I was right and wrong in that regard; right that I originally didn’t want to do it and wrong because she ended up being the one who did me the greatest of favors.

“I had coffee with Stacy Dittmer this morning, and since they are so new in town, I offered to have you take Allison to the celebration and show her around. It would be neighborly and really nice of you to make sure she feels welcomed here,” were the words that Grandma Sarah spoke, and in the blink of an eye, life changed once more. I initially felt angered that Grandma would try to ruin my plans for the day with my friends. There are times I could have been judged as, “lost without a clue,” not grasping the situation in its entirety. Thank God, for once, I had been given the gift of clarity. Slowly seeping into my brain was a dawning awareness of whom I would be with. I wasn’t just going to be taking a girl, who just happened to have moved in next door, but someone who had already created a stir amongst many of the local boys, all in just the two days she’d been here. My face turned red and my stomach did a flip-flop, realizing I had been handed the perfect opportunity to be first in line to break the ice with the new girl.

One word left my mouth, “crap,” was all I could say. Grandma Sarah narrowed her eyes and prepared to give me the “what fors,” when I think she realized my statement was not necessarily one of dismay, but one of shear terror. Her eyes softened, and she asked me as kindly as possible if this was going to be a problem. I almost said yes, but something inside me knew this was an opportunity not to pass up. I was firmly rooted to the entryway floor. I know Grandma was having serious second thoughts about what she had just done. In a way, I wouldn’t have put it past her to have orchestrated the whole thing, thinking she was putting a young couple together and seizing on a golden opportunity. What she didn’t know was that I’d already been hooked the first day I saw Allison…or maybe she did. I was already walking the magical tightrope, which always appears when a boy first starts liking a girl. One false step and down you fall into the endless abyss. Grandma had inadvertently nudged me out onto the tightrope, except she forgot to give me the long pole to help me keep my balance.

Time really does seem to move in slow motion and at other times to speed up and pass by us at accelerating rates. This was neither; time had ceased to exist. I could hear my heartbeat and nothing else. If Grandma was still talking, I was totally unaware of it. For this brief, frozen moment, my mind became wrapped around the idea of Allison and the endless possibilities of what was potentially going to be a very, very long day. I only saw shoulder-length, auburn hair in my mind, gently falling and then swirling from side to side as Allison shook her head. My vision ended with one delicate arm rising slowly and a hand tentatively waving hello. This time I said, “Oh crap!”

From behind me Grandpa Jake put his hand on my shoulder, I swear I hit the entry way ceiling with my head. I startled him as much as he did me. After he took one look at my terrified eyes, as I bolted back up the stairs, I could hear him say, “Holy crap.” I was back in my room and temporarily safe, once again.

I almost lost it sitting there on the edge of the bed, my mind was running in high speed, but getting nowhere. I could hear footsteps coming up the stairs, and I knew it was Grandma by the sound they made. She politely knocked on the door and asked to come in. She waited for me to answer, and I knew it meant she was concerned. I told her to come in. She took one look at my troubled face
and a
n eyebrow arched
, which only made it worse. My stomach was now doing cartwheels and my leg was bouncing up and down with the anxiety of an extremely nervous boy, which at this moment, I very much was. Grandma moved across the floor as tentatively as she could. I guess she thought I might explode, up and through the ceiling this time, which I think I was more than capable of doing. She sat down on the end of the bed and put her arm around my shoulders; by this time I was puffing air in short little bursts. She gently laid her free hand on my quivering knee and I slowly let it come to a stop. She told me to breathe deeply, and I slowly began to feel the tension ease, and my heart once again moved to its rightful place and out of my throat.

“I’m sorry,” was all she managed to say, and I responded with, “it’s ok.” We sat there for a few minutes, neither of us speaking. I finally got up the courage and asked her what time I was supposed to meet Allison and where. Grandma told me that I should go next-door anytime between eleven and eleven-thirty to get Allison and, if I preferred, she could always call Mrs. Dittmer and tell her I already had other plans. It was nice Grandma said that, but we both knew it wasn’t even an option. I looked over at my alarm clock; it was already nearly ten thirty. I fought back a new wave of panic and began to mentally strategize my game plan. First and foremost, I needed to clean up better than I was. I took one last big breath and leapt up off the bed. Grandma could see the thoughts rolling around in my head, and she took her cue to leave me alone, but not before she gave me one last glance and one of her, “melt you with honey,” smiles. I blushed, and she smiled even deeper. As she closed the door, I heard her state she was going to leave forty dollars on the entryway table for me to use when I took Allison to the celebration.