|
Robert Frost once wrote a poem about it - titled, as I recall, "The Road Not Taken."
All of us have what-ifs to remember. At the time, seeming foreordained. Later, when thinking back, we might believe we took the wrong road, but since it led to yet another fork we wouldn't otherwise have reached, how could we ever be sure?
A couple of weeks ago I went shopping for some paperback books (humorous variety) to send to a daughter-in-law who had broken several foot bones and was worrying about how to manage Christmas with a cumbersome cast and on crutches. She needed to laugh, and I'm not much good at joke-telling by long-distance phone.
When I explained what I wanted to a book-shop friend, she said yes, they bad a section of that kind but it was upstairs. Because she knew I could not make the steps easily, she offered to bring a few books down for me to examine. I sat in comfort, with a movable table beside me, to cull her selections. And bought several.
There was one I just could not send on until I bad read it. The author: Jean Shepherd. The book:
"In God We Trust ... all others pay cash."
So the book went with me to Ohio for Thanksgiving, where my other (unbroken) daughter-in-law presided over the stove from which some marvelous food came to the table graced by the white linen cloth she had ironed. Just for me, presumably, and for her children, for whom I set the precedent once upon a time.
While the sound and fury of young people and televised football surged around me, I read. And once, when I laughed a loud, my son became curious about the book.
When I named the author, there was immediate recognition. Sure, when Mike was only 14 years old he had talked to Jean Shepherd - on the radio, as one ham to another. He bad read Shepherd in college. He had heard him on public radio broadcasts. He taped a couple of shows from public television stations. And had taken his wife to a national hamfest dinner 3 years ago especially to hear the speaker - Jean Shepherd.
We watched one of the video tapes, so I could see what Shepherd looks like - but not until I described how I imagined the writer. Since I bad known only one other man spelling Gene with a J, I had been picturing Dr. Morris, who saw me through bifocals. How wrong I was.
Shepherd is not tall, but he is square - of both figure and face. His chin has a row of black beard, matching the generous mustache beneath his generous nose. He is grave of demeanor. His humor droll, or wry.
And he is very, very funny. Soon after getting home, I bad a phone call from my other son and his wife - the broken one, to whom I'd sent the books. I told them about the book missing from my shipment, and what bad resulted from my keeping it. His immediate response was, "Oh sure. I read him in college."
Howcum, then, I had to get older than Moses before anyone told me about him?
One of his stories is about a lamp his father won in a newspaper contest sponsored by a bottler of soda pop named with a lower extremity connection." Nehi, obviously, for the lamp base was a shapely, and definitely feminine, leg. When I told Tim I thought it was one of the funniest tales, he promised to send me a tape they play regularly, every Christmas, with this anecdote on it.
You won't believe this, but before I bad left town I had set the VCR to record Norman Rockwell: Portrait of America. I watched it when I got home. And who do you think was one of the commentators? Yep -Shepherd.
He's from Hammond, Ind., and 60•ish. His father was a factory worker in the steel mills. His memories of his childhood are, as Miles Smith of the Associated Press says in review, "... genuinely funny. No black humor, no alienation, no dirty words, no nasty sewer-type satire. Not funny bitter; just funny ha-ha ."
And to think I would never have met him if I'd been able to do stairs.
|
