Miracles,
Marvels, Memories, and Me
By Donald K. Goodpaster
Miracles, Marvels, Memories, and Me
Published by Donald Goodpaster at Smashwords
Copyright 2012 Donald Goodpaster
Cover Illustration by Norbert McNulty
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Introduction
EVERYONE should write a book like this to give yourself a second chance to relive the magnificent wonders that God has given especially to you.
I believe that each of us have experienced in our lives many wonderful and sometimes unusual events. Events we cannot fully comprehend or sometimes explain, but should try to express to others in the best way we know how. I sincerely hope that I have accomplished something like that with the writing of my own personal experiences within the following pages.
That said; I would like to share with you now a few of the wonderful, and on occasion, unusual events that have occurred in my life. These are true occurrences as I remember them happening with some minor embellishments added to attract and hold your attention. These embellishments in no way alter the fact that they happened, and I hope you can easily sense, and vicariously share in the imbued pulses of my life that I’ve tried my best to express here.
Lastly, I wish I could say that this is a perfectly written book… but alas I cannot, because it is not. I have now, just as I have had in the past, a great and generous proclivity for run-on sentences. My usage of commas and semicolons is probably going to seem feral and positively atrocious to some of you throughout; and my diphthong, well I hardly remember what that part of speech is anymore, that sort of stuff, and don’t even get me started on my usage of ellipses… (As you’ll find out if you dare to read on from here). If those glitches of the English language don’t bother you then be my guest and read on now and gather for yourself a minute glimpse of my very heart, soul and life, you are welcome to sojourn there now with my express permission.
Chapter One - The blackberry patch
When I was a young boy in the late forties and early fifties in southeastern Indiana my dear mother would often bake the best tasting cobblers there ever was. Mother could work miracles with a gallon of freshly picked raspberries or blackberries. With just a little store-bought sifted flour and sugar and a small dollop of lard she would whip up a tasty mouth-watering treat we’d all enjoy with the evening meal. More times than not those meals consisted of cornbread and navy beans, or cornbread and wild rabbit shot by my dad a day or two earlier, or cornbread and collard-greens and onions, or cornbread and…well, I guess you get the picture. Our family, ‘et a lot of cornbread, we surely did.
One day…and it was one especially hot day I recall, mom called me in from a very important, “Super Whiffle Ball” game that I was playing with my friends in my side yard. (My yard and you can ask anybody who ever played the game up our cozy little valley was the best whiffle ball yard up the creek). Anyway, mom called me in and the game of the century, as they all were to me back then is immediately postponed to a later time and date.
“Donnie Keith!” my mother instructed me. “Go up the hill there, and get me a gallon or so of berries for a cobbler.”
Now, mom…always instructed…she never ordered, but believe you me I know an order when I hear one, especially when the sentence begins with my first name and ends with my middle one. Donnie Keith do this, or Donnie Keith do that, whenever I heard that unmistakable tone in moms voice I would know right then and there deep down in my heart that it was time for me to move it and to move it quickly, which I almost always never failed to do.
“And watch out for Mr. Hall’s bull.” She added sometimes with tender motherly care.
Trust me on this one, folks, mom needn’t have thrown that warning in, I was scared stiff of that bull and totally avoided any pasture I thought he might be lurking in. What was really scary to me though was… not knowing where he was at any particular moment in time, and having to guess.
I went out to our little tack room in the garage behind the house and grabbed up the white metal bucket we kids used for berry picking and headed up the narrow creek in front of our house to a place I knew had a large patch of blackberries just waiting for the pick’n… big, juicy plump ones. Once there I crawled under the barbed-wire fence that ran along the edge of the creek and the neighbor, Mr. Hall’s old red barn. I was going to take a shortcut I knew of and go to one of my favorite swimming holes for a quick dip before I got down to some serious berry pick’n. I had gone about forty yards or so in that field when that coal black demon of theirs’ named, Charlie, came charging around the corner of the barn on the upper level and headed straight down the earthen ramp heading straight at me.
At first I froze solid to the ground there at my feet, and then I actually felt the earth move beneath my black canvass tennis shoes as the bull thundered toward me snorting loudly through his nose as he attacked. Now, I’ve never been accused of being a quick thinker, but I thought pretty fast just then when I thought, ‘Boy! Yer about to die’ and I was only eight years old.
Quickly I spun around like a cat and ran as fast as I could for the fence line, dodging the bulrushes the best I could because the wetness from the natural springs all through there would only slow me down the more. I could easily hear now the tall green and yellow horse-weeds being crushed down by the bull’s chest closing in behind me; he was shortening the distance between us with every single stride he took. His nose was throwing globs of clear wet snot. (I may have only just imagined that picture though in my mind as I ran, because I wasn’t about to turn around and look. I have seen it do exactly that before, and with this same bull, and that was when he was only playing around chasing butterflies in that same field.) I wasn’t going to make it to the fence line unless I did something the bull wouldn’t or couldn’t expect me to do, he had me targeted dead in his sights, that much I was sure of.
Suddenly I cut straight to my left at almost a 90 degree angle forcing him to shift his weight at the same time which caused his legs to slip out from under him and he fell over sideways on his back, sliding for several feet. To this day I believe my dodging away like that at that exact moment was what had saved my life. I ran straight toward the fence line while the bull quickly scurried to his feet and continued the chase again, gaining on me with every stride, once there I saw, and ran up a two by ten plank of wood that someone had recently placed there to hold up a broken section of fence… and I jumped over the fence landing in a patch of blackberries that I didn’t even know were there. Even with the bull falling down like he did he still almost got me he was that quick. I had to go up and over the fence that day because there wasn’t enough time to stoop down and pull the barbed wire strands up and out of the way to go under.
What was interesting to me about that event was that there was only one bracing pole in that entire seventy or so stretch of fence line and I thanked God that it was there exactly when and where I needed it to be.
I picked mom’s wild berries under the hot sun that day and thought about that hateful bull, Charlie for many years…Matter of fact, I still do occasionally.
Deuteronomy 32 vs. 12; So the Lord alone did lead him, and there was no strange god with him.
# # #
When I was nine or maybe ten years old, mom asked me again to pick her some berries for a cobbler. I remember never wearing a shirt when I went picking even though the chiggers were bad to awful most times and would itch me something fierce until I bathed.
In the summertime I was as tanned dark as some of the berries I picked… and the salty sweat off of my shoulders and skinny little neck would river down my childlike back and channel into my blue-jean trousers, and sometimes the sweat would temporarily blind me when it got into my eyes (not that my eyes were in my pants, those were just two separate statements of fact about my propensity to sweat out there in the sun).
“I like eatin’ this stuff.” I’d say to myself out loud after picking a gallon or so (while picking a tick off of me that was crawling up my leg heading for God only knows where.) ‘But I sure do hate pick’n ‘em’.
One day when I got home and mom was just finishing sorting the berries I picked the day before, she says to me, “Donnie… take these extra berries over to Mid (Mid was our neighbor). Tell her I’ve got more ‘an’ ah’ plenty for a cobbler and she’s sure welcome to ‘em if she wants ‘em. I know she likes them on her cereal each morning.”
“Mom says to give you these, Mid. She knows you like them on your cereal.” I said to Mid handing her a heaping quart of the delicious fruits I personally picked by hand but dared not think of eating one of because mom probably has them counted down to the last one.
“Tell your mom thanks for me Donnie… and here’s a quarter for your trouble and hard work picking them.” She said reaching into her purse and handing me the silver colored treasure.
Twenty-five whole cents, was this woman crazy or what? Twenty-five cents for something that is free up on the hills. Shoot! All you gotta do is go pick’em.
Twenty-five cents, why that’s like a million bucks to a ten year old boy from Stony Lonesome Road, back in 1956, maybe even a Zillion!
Immediately I ran back to my house and got two, two gallon white metal buckets and headed for them thar’ hills and their plump, juicy, purple-black treasures.
After just a little while in a major patch that I had been saving (for what reason I can’t possibly remember now) I had picked one full bucket and about a quarter of the other when the excitement of selling them took complete control over me. I stopped picking and went home and cleaned them up and began my new career as a blackberry picker. This was a totally new experience for me, this wonderful entrepreneurial spirit that was dwelling up inside of me… and I loved it.
I crammed six heaping quarts of freshly picked berries into my little red wagon and headed straight to town. The first house I stopped at on Indiana Avenue bought four quarts and paid me a dollar….
A whole American dollar, I was definitely in business now.
Then the lady of the house (Mary) called over from her front porch to the lady next door, that lady bought the rest that I had and gave me a full fifty cents more. Now I had a dollar and fifty cents in my worn out pockets from this day’s pickins and twenty-five cents from the pickins the day before… for a grand total of one dollar and seventy-five cents cash money! I’m rich!
Ah! Sweet success…I could taste it and it tasted good… just like blackberries.
I had planned to go back up the hill the next day and pick some more but first I had to spend some of the enormous booty that was burning a hole in my pockets needing to be spent. I took my little empty wagon home and got out my ‘Western Flyer’ bike from the garage and pedaled hard for the local grocery store called, ‘Baker’s, Baker’s grocery store.
Mr. Baker ran a wonderfully delicious smelling country style store. Penny bubble gum smells welcomed you as a guest at the front door followed closely by the aromas of freshly cut bologna and yellow rounds of Colby cheese somewhere there in the back aisles along the wall next to the side door. The bread here at Bakers was always the freshest around and he and Mrs. Baker were always kind to us kids who rarely, if ever, had any money to spend.
The floor of the store was made of well-worn brown wooden slats and I sometimes can still hear the distant footsteps of the people who walked there. I remember well too the special squeak the two screen-doors with the metal ‘Butternut Bread’ sign at the front made whenever anyone entered or departed.
There was a whopping two cent reward for every pop bottle we kids brought in which was how the majority of us kids up our valley bought our candy and other treats we just had to have.
Now that I had established a solid career in the ‘berry pick’n business’ I had to be wise and protect it, and I soon got just the opportunity.
“Give me a candy bar!” a local tough guy demanded of me as I left Baker’s store one day with three or four ‘Mr. Goodbars’ held tightly in my hand. Back then, ‘Mr. Goodbars’ were only three cents apiece which hardly made a nick in my dollar and seventy-five cent berry picking bankroll.
“Make you a deal.” I said to the bully waiting to get knocked off of my bike and mugged for at least one of my chocolate delights.
“What kind ah’ deal?” the thug asked, to my great surprise.
“I’ll give you one of these candy bars I have here in my hand…and… a soda-pop of your choice, if you’ll pick me a gallon of blackberries and bring them to my home.” I promised.
“Why would you do that?” he asked sort of stupefied by my request. He’s thinking, I know he is, that I have gone and lost my mind for making him such an outrageous offer as that, especially since blackberries are free for the taking to anyone who wants to brave thorny bushes and prickly things and pick them. Then he says to me something I find extremely incredible.
“But what if I get you two gallons of berries, Donnie? What will you give me then?” he asks.
“Then I’ll get you two ‘Mr. Goodbars’ and two soda-pops.” I replied evenly and very businesslike I thought, although I know I was sweating through my shirt and shorts ‘cause I didn’t want to get beaten up by this guy again.
Then he says to me showing me both of his meaty fists at the same time right under my nose… as if I hadn’t seen both of those ham-hocks before. “You better not be lying to me, Donnie. You know I’ll knock your head off of your shoulders if you’re lying to me.”
Now I don’t know just why that particular threat from him worried me so much at the time because he had knocked my head off my shoulders so many times before that it was on the ground more than it was on my shoulders. Really now, think about it, what difference would one more time make in the whole scheme of things up our little green valley? But somehow…it did.
“You do it!” I says to him. “You go pick ‘em, Doody Bug, and I’ll prove it to you.”
But I was only talking now to his fast moving and distantly fading backside because Doody was already on his way home to get his ‘berry pickin’ buckets and then head for the hills.
What I didn’t know until much later that afternoon was that Doody had stopped off at several of our mutual friends houses on the way and had enticed them with my offer too, telling them what I would give for a gallon of freshly picked blackberries.
About three hours later the tough guy and three of his cronies showed up on my front porch with near-about eight gallons of blackberries in their cheaper silver colored metal buckets hanging heavily down from their belts.
“I’ll see you later, mom!” I shouted inside the house to mom who was already in the process of making our evening dinner. “I gotta go out for a while.” I says.
“You be back in time for dinner, young man. And don’t you be late this time I mean it. Your dad will be home any time now and he’ll need you to help him in the garage before supper.” She says something to that effect.
I ran off the porch and quickly jumped on my ‘Western Flyer’ I almost always had leaning on the tree by the house and led this itchy pack of chigger, tick infested, sweaty berry pickers straight down to Mr. Baker’s store for their hard earned rewards.
“Eight soda pops for these guys, Mr. Baker,” I said to the proprietor when all five of us stinky, sweaty boys entered his shop (I was only stinky and sweaty because I had rubbed up against them trying to get off my porch in such a hurry). “And give em’ eight ‘Mr. Goodbars’ too if you don’t mind, Sir. These hard work’n guys here deserve every bit of it, and I’m the one that gonna be pay’n for everything. No credit either, cash on the barrelhead.”
I said this whole little speach while slowly fishing out of my pocket a whopping eighty-eight cents and plopping it down hard on the linoleum covered counter top in-between the round red cans of chewing tobacco and the slick green and white packages of tasty but fake beef-jerky.
Soda-pops were eight cents each back then and ‘Mr. Goodbars’ I recall were only three cents apiece for a grand total of eighty-eight cents…darn that inflation stuff.
Now I don’t know if I’m making this part up right here or not but I think I recollect that Mr. Baker eyes looked down at me with a different look than he had ever given me before when I paid him the money, and I think it was a look of respect that I saw shining in his eyes.
“Wanna go over to Butchs’ house now and play baseball with us, Donnie? We’re go’n when we finish up with the candy bars and the soda-pops?” The tough guy asks me very friendly like now that he’s had his candy fix for the day.
“Can’t now, Doody Bug,” I say to him. “But thanks anyway. You heard mom tell’n me to get home for dinner or I’ll catch ‘what’s for’ from Dad, and I sure don’t want that. I’ll catch up with you guys sometime tomorrow maybe down at Butch’s or Pete’s or Bobby’s or wherever the game is. Don’t worry though, I’ll be there.”
There was always a tomorrow up our valley to play baseball.
Well, I hate to say it… because it was such a lucrative idea that I had… but those boys only fell for that scheme of mine that one time… but what did I care? Noth’n, that’s what. After washing and cleaning up the berries and selling them to the locals I ended up with a whopping clear profit of seven dollars and twenty-five cents and I never got a chigger a tick or even so much as a scratch. Now I’m a bizzillionaire in the neighborhood and there would be no looking back.
Thank God for the wisdom of Solomon with a little bitty smidge of Huckleberry Finn thrown in for good measure.
Chapter Two - The Manure and Snake Hole Incidents
Easter was always a special time of the year in my family, we would all gather together in the kitchen of our small home and color eggs the night before the holiday. We’d color them and mark them with some kind of paraffin marker mom had recently purchased from Mr. Baker’s store for the occasion. That was ours, and almost everyone else’s who lived up our valley, special routine.
I can still see just as plainly as if it were yesterday the eggs that I colored, even after all these many years, they were half red and half blue with “Donnie” scribbled awkwardly on the side. And, I’ll also never forget the smell of the white vinegar that permeated our tiny kitchen. This (the vinegar) mom used to make the eggs tougher to break during the Easter egg hunt we would always have out in the yard.
Each Easter morning we’d get up early with dad and search the yard from top to bottom even down to the edge of the shallow creek that ran directly in front of our house. Dad loved to hide the eggs on the steepest part of the hill directly in the front of the house. I think that was his favorite place, maybe he just liked to watch us run up as fast as we could go, then slip and roll all the way back to the bottom. Dad was also very good at giving helpful hints as to where the eggs were hidden each year; especially he was to our baby sister, Diana Kay, more than to me or our older sister, Elaine. Elaine and I didn’t care much about that though, Diana was just a baby.
At this time of the year all of us kids got a new set of clothes no matter what kind of financial fix or pinch our parents were in at the time, and they were pinched a lot I can tell you that, but we kids never knew it or felt it at all thanks to both of them. They were very loving and protective of us to a fault, thank God.
Elaine, my older sister and Diana the baby might get a new dress each if they were lucky, maybe even a pair of new shoes with silver or gold buckles to latch them with. I thought they both looked very pretty in their new outfits but no way was I going to tell them that. It was a boy, girl thing you know.
Me, I would usually get a new horizontally stripped shirt to wear (shirts which I still today can’t stand. Give me a plain shirt to wear anytime and I’m happy). Sometimes back then I would also get a new pair of pants and some shoes…though rarely all at the same time, but one year when I was about six years old I hit the mother-load in the clothing department. That year I received the entire enchilada; I got a whole new suit. I got the pants, the shirt, the shoes (two of them) and socks, the whole ball of wax, nothing could be better than that, and best of all that year we were going to grandma’s house for a “second” Easter egg hunt of the day.
Sugar rush here I come.
On the way down to grandma’s house we passed the ‘Easter Egg’ hunting field alongside the highway. I tried very hard to see where some of the eggs were being hidden but my dad was driving too fast and all I could see was a colorful blur and a bunch of adults walking around in a big cow pasture.
First thing we did right off when we got to granny’s house was go to church to hear the Lord’s word, and from there they packed us into a small blue bus with the words, ‘Church of the Nazarene’ printed in big bold letters on the side. That bus took us to the hunting field.
When we got to our destination I quickly checked out the competition in my age group and found them to be wanting. Mostly they were girls… and what six year old boy worth his salt as the preacher would say, couldn’t outrun a girl? I knew I could anyway, especially if I get a sneak head start away from the pack at the starting line and run before the gun sounded, which I planned to do… and did.
Quickly, before the starters gun was shot to let is go, I took about five steps straight ahead to the hilltop and was starting down the steep slope all by myself, when I stepped in what was probably the largest and freshest cow patty in the entire field, maybe even in the world. Those were supposed to have been picked up or destroyed or something, before the hunt began, but of course, with my luck, I found the one they accidently overlooked. Wouldn’t you know it?
Automatically, just after stepping in the muck my right arm went up in a desperate but futile attempt to rectify the situation. But now the law of gravity, or should I say here, the law of slippery took control. That awful cow slop slipped up and over and into my new right shoe, traveled at warp speed or better up the right pant leg of my new trousers and up from there it went to the sleeve of my new jacket and on to my new shirt and from there to fill in the gaps between all the fingers of my right hand. The only thing good that happened to me that day in the field, where to this day I’m still ashamed to say that I cheated, was that this all happened only to my right side, I was as fresh as a daisy on my left side, which was the side the mayor of the city insisted I turn to in his car as he drove me back to my grandmother’s house and hurriedly dropped me off with some scant explanation as to what had happened to me. I’m almost positive though after all these years that I saw him laughing hysterically and pounding his fists on the steering wheel as he drove away to go back to the hunt with a new cow manure story to tell the guys down at the local barber shop and gossip parlor.
Later that same day after my mom cleaned me up the best that she could (I remember my right pant leg being stiff as a board for the rest of the day), my favorite cousin, Tony came down to grandma’s house to play from the top of the hill where he lived along with eight other brothers and one sister. A baseball team of boys and a cheerleader in the same house, that’s exactly what it was.
“My gosh!” Tony cried out while looking down a small hole in the back yard of granny’s house. “Those things are gonna get, Granny.” He said.
“What things?” I asked, totally in awe of Tony who wasn’t afraid of anything on the planet as far as I was concerned, but now obviously he was afraid of something, and if he was afraid… it was probably gonna scare the liven beggibies out of a ‘fraidy cat’ like me.
“Snakes…!” Tony cried out letting me know what those things were. “Millions of ‘em, Donnie! Crawl’n around on top of each other. We gotta kill’em!” he says. “You gots any money on ya?” he asks me.
“I gots a quarter… anna penny. You got any?”
“Nope, noth’n! Gotta use your’n I guess. Let’s go up to ‘Daddy Whithams’ gas station and get some gasoline. That’ll do it I recon.”
So off we went just the two of us six year old boys to the garage up the street where I bought with my quarter a dime’s worth of Ethel (that was a grade of gasoline back then), that they put in a glass jug for us to carry and they didn’t care to where either once they got hold of my money.
“I’ll soak’em.” I says to Tony standing there gazing totally fascinated down the hole.
“No you won’t.” he says back. “I saw ‘em first! I’ll do it. I’ll save grandma.”
“But it was my dime.” I whined in my usual obnoxious way setting the jug down. The fumes making me dizzy.
“Back off, Donnie.” He ordered pushing me away from the jug causing me to fall down backward.
Tony then reached down and picked the jug up and poured the entire ten cents worth of gasoline down the small hole and stood there grinning.
“I’ll light the match then.” I said getting up to my knees.
Again Tony pushed me down, but playfully this time. Then he turned and looked down the hole once more at the gasoline soaked squirming mass.
Quickly before I could get up he struck a match we had brought with us from the station and dropped it directly into that little tiny hole…but it wouldn’t remain that way, I promise. The explosion that immediately followed was so horrendously loud that everyone in the house came running out to see what the heck was going on. Tony was just standing there right where he was, still bent over the hole in the same position he was in before the blast… but now is eyebrows (both of them) are totally burnt off his face, and every reddish-brown hair on his entire head, at least the ones from my superb vantage point flat on the ground… seemed to be smoking profusely, although I must admit here, quite a bit less than a few moments before. There was now snake meat, blood and guts hanging from both of Tony’s ear lobes and nose and the place where his eyebrows used to be.
I wasn’t hurt a lick, not a bit. I remember, was knocked flat on the ground by my hero cousin just a few moments before the blast. Thankfully Tony wasn’t hurt too much either. The blood and guts we were all looking at belonged to the snakes, which we found out a little later that day were a harmless lot of garden snakes, but they weren’t harmless that day to two six year old boys who wanted to protect their granny, they sure weren’t.
Psalm 18: vs. 8, There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth devoured: coals were kindled by it.
Chapter Three - God First Spoke To Me
I loved the outdoors when I was a kid and southern Indiana was the ideal place for all the activities I so thoroughly enjoyed doing.
I loved to go swimming especially at ‘Number 11’ railroad-bridge where the water was so cool and deep that even when you carried a large rock cradled in the pocket of your arm and tried to reach bottom you never could (at least none of us eleven, twelve and thirteen year olds could). To this day I have no idea how deep that wonderful swimming hole was.
Once, the whole gang from Cochran (boys from Cochran, the west side of town), went there to Number 11 bridge to swim and were swimming around naked as jay-birds as we almost always did, when one of the twins in the gang, and I don’t remember which one it was, decided that everyone of us would have to dive headfirst from the top of the bridge into the water, and I mean from the very top of the bridge. Brilliant!
To do that that meant that each of us would have to shimmy up the side of the almost vertical incline at the end of the bridge, (a monumental Kodak moment if there ever was one, thirteen naked little boys climbing up one after the other).
I couldn’t believe that I was doing this because I’ve always been terribly afraid of heights as far back as I can remember. Well, let me be a little clearer here on this point. It isn’t the heights that frightened me so much as it is the falling from those heights and the splattering and breaking of one’s body and bones that would surely take place immediately upon arrival thereafter… that frightens me so much.
The ‘twins’ the oldest guys in our tight-knit little group dove first and together, and they should have too, since this was one of em’s dumb idea in the first place.
Almost in the sacred, benevolent order of age we dove from there chronologically one by one, everyone, everyone making the thirty foot headfirst plunge into the muddy water below. Everyone that is…’cept’n me.
When it was my turn to dive from this fantastic height… my toes, all ten of ‘em elongated somehow and wrapped themselves around the sharp edge of the hot, black painted steel girder of the bridge beneath my feet with an ultra-extreme vice like grip and weren’t about to let go… this ol’ boy wasn’t going anywhere, especially downward. And to be truthful here I didn’t have a clue as to how I was going to get myself down from way up there. I thought… this is going to be very embarrassing if they have to call the volunteer fire department from all the way over in Cochran to come and rescue me, and I knew already for a fact that none of those fellas down there in the water would throw me my pants.
“Dive, Donnie, dive!” Came the first challenge or chant or whatever you want to call it from one of the twelve heads way down there in the murky, brown water. Then… it came… just as I expected it would from these guys. “Dive! Chicken! Dive!” Followed closely after that.
Well! There it is Redleg fans. The great “C” word was thrown in my direction. The undeniable, “chicken” word, and I have to live in the same neighborhood with these guys for who knows how many more years to come?
“Please, Dear God!” I prayed under my breath, still way up there on top of the bridge. “Please don’t let me be the only one not to dive from up here today, I’ll never be able to live it down.”
Somehow just then I got a little courage or spunk or something and I squatted down as far as I could go on the hot metal beam that was still gripping tightly to both of my feet (as if that one and a half foot in reduced height was going to make any significant difference in this monstrous thirty foot or so fall) which it didn’t I assure you.
Finally, after a lot more hollering, berating and shouted obscenities at me, I pushed off the beam and I’m proud to say here in a vertical position. I fell through the air for approximately…an hour…hour and a half maybe. At least it seemed to me that way at the time. Where the blazes did the water go to? Had I missed it and dove into a worm-hole or something? Just then my entire life passed before my eyes, and as you would probably expect there wasn’t too much to see, I was only eleven. I needed to know, so I tilted my head back a little to see where I was… and splat the water hit me in the face so hard it nearly snapped my neck.
But I did it! I was one of the boys now, now and forever. I had dived headfirst off of old Number 11bridge and no one could ever take that great accomplishment away from me…not ever.
# # #
I loved playing the game of baseball even more than eating back in my younger days I promise, so if you ever wanted to find me all you had to do was look for the eternal baseball game going on somewhere in our neighborhood.
One time I overslept on the day of an organized game against a team from Cleves, Ohio and that’s when Murphy’s Law came into play as it usually does in my life.
These guys from Cleves were some of the best athletes I had up to this point in my life had the opportunity to play against and I was so looking forward to it. Looked forward to kicking their young behinds is what I was really looking forward to, truth be known. They were good athletes all right, but also I thought at the time, they were a bunch of very poor sports on the field of play. These guys would spike you hard with their sharp cleats in a New York minute if you were slow to get out of their way… or they’d slap the ball out of your mitt while stealing a base, or attempt various other forms of dirty play to win the game. So that’s the reason why I really wanted to beat the socks off of ‘em.
This year we had a guy pitching for our team named, “Rusty”, and with Rusty on the mound we really had a better than even chance of winning against these guys. Ol’ Rusty could throw a knuckle ball that was right out of this world. He could make it drop right off the table, is what we said about a ball thrown like that. And his curve ball, well, that was magic to the eyes. Rusty’s curve-ball would look to the batter like it was going to be behind him and that would force you to move in and over the plate to avoid getting hit in the back with it, but midway to the plate, his curveball would change direction so fast and so much that it would slide across the plate for a beautiful strike. Sometimes it looked like his curve defied the laws of physics, it curved that much.
One day while I was standing behind the backstop watching Rusty’s awesome talent with the ball he threw just such a pitch. The batter, like any batter would have done faced with the same situation, ducked inside over the plate. Rusty’s curve ball did exactly what I said it would do and ducked in there too at about seventy miles an hour, right in the middle of the strike zone. Only problem here was the batters nose was in there too at the same time and it got moved temporarily to a new position just below his right eye. I know that had to hurt! The batters nose was broken in three places that day and that boy switched sports to wrestling which he became very good at I remember… but it wasn’t baseball, so who cared.
I don’t know what woke me up on the morning of the Cleves/Taylor showdown day but I knew I was very late ‘cause the sun was already shining brightly in my room when it should have been just at the crack of dawn I was to get up. I also got myself in a panic because I knew I was going to let the team down if I didn’t make it to the game. I quickly grabbed my spikes from the closet and my glove from the shelf and did my best imitation of dressing myself on the run to the meeting place for the long ride into Ohio. I’ve got to get there! I can’t miss my ride. Hurry, Don, hurry!
Too late! The caravan had already left without me. But what the heck… I had a thumb didn’t I? Sure I did. As a matter of fact I had two thumbs but you never hitch-hiked using your left thumb because that would make you look extremely weird, now wouldn’t it?
Finally after a long, long time, I caught a ride with a nice couple from town who recognized me and were heading my way and they took me all the way to the ballpark just across the Ohio, Indiana State Line.
The game was in the last inning when I got there and the score was tied something like seven to seven. Coach Fleming saw me get out of the car down by the highway and head in his direction as fast as I could.
“Time out, ump!” Coach Fleming called to the home-plate umpire. “Time out!”
“Made it coach!” I said, almost out of breath. “Sorry about that, I overslept.”
“Goodpaster hitting for Chase.” Coach tells the umpire behind the plate while slapping me hard on the head with his ball cap, obviously a sign that he was glad to see me. (but come to think about it, maybe he just wanted to rap me one…Now, I’m confused, I really don’t know which it was.) Anyway, on with the story.
“I smiled at the guys on the bench and most of them were giving me the “thumbs up” sign, the sign that we’re gonna win for sure now.
I stepped into the “on deck circle” and swung three bats to warm up a little before standing in to face their pitcher. Then I moved up to the batter’s box at the plate. There was already one out I could see on the scoreboard in center field.
The pitcher glares at me. Why’s he glaring! I didn’t do nothing to him…but I’m about too, I just know it. I feel it.
I waited for the pitch.
The pitch. I was gonna take it no matter what, I needed to see what this guy had in his bag of tricks. Oh, boy! Did he have some stuff! No! Let me rephrase that. He had some real good stuff. I don’t think I ever saw a baseball thrown with that much velocity before, I don’t think I could have hit it with two bats… and for toppers it was right down the middle of the plate.
“Strike one.” I say to myself.
“Ball!” the umpire called out a wee bit louder than need be.
Well now, where was this guy looking when the pitch crossed the plate at about mach one speed? It sure couldn’t have been the strike zone. Duh! That was a strike!
I swing the bat mightily giving thanks for that small gift from the ump but now I’m really ready and I’m gonna take this guy downtown with the next pitch, just you wait and see.
Pitcher ready.
Batter ready.
The pitch.
Blam! I should have swung at that sweet beauty it was right down the middle of the plate… again. Strike, I said to myself.
“Ball two!” the umpire shouts.
Secretly I tried to get a look behind the mask of my new benefactor, my mentor, my proctor, thinking somehow my dad had gotten off work early and had taken a second job as an American Legion Umpire, or maybe it was my mom dressed up to look like a man. Anyway, every pitch this pitcher threw was a picture perfect strike in my book, this guy behind the plate (I find out later was mad at the pitcher for some reason or another) was going to call the next four pitches balls no matter where they were in proximity to the plate and the lucky guy up there at the time was going to reap an unearned reward of a base on balls… and I just happened to be that guy.
I’m on first base now with a very short lead toward second, and as I said the score is tied.
Everyone there knows that I’m the slowest runner on our team, even the guys from Cleves/Taylor know that.
Next batter comes up to the plate, first pitch… “Steee..riiikeee!” crys the ump.
I head for second base.
I amazed myself here, I didn’t even know I was going on the first pitch, I just did.
“Safe!” the field umpire called as I slid headfirst into the rough brown canvass bag.
From the sidelines down third base side I see coach Flemming picking up his hat from the ground where he threw it when he saw slow, old me, take off for second. Anyway, I was safe and that was all that mattered to me. Coach will just have to learn to live with it.
Same batter, second pitch. “Strike two!” I heard the ump call out.
I was gone…again.
The throw down to third base. The throw was high, the third baseman had to leap for it to keep it from going out into left field which would have I’m sure… allowed me to score even as slow as I was.
“Safe!”
I was all smiles from ear to ear. I had just done the impossible, back to back steals against Cleves/Taylor. Someday someone may even write a song or maybe a sonnet about my daring do. I felt great!
“Time out!” Coach Flemming cried out totally beside himself with anger. “Metcalf for Goodpaster!”
What!... This can’t be happening, I’m the one that’s gonna win this game for us, not Metcalf.
“Sit down hot dog, you’re done for today.” Coach Flemming says hotly to me. “I’m not gonna let you lose this game by trying to steal home. Now sit down over there on the bench and be quiet.”
I walked to the bench like a whipped puppy. I got us here to the point where we can win this game but now I’m sitting on the bench and the rules state that I can’t even go back onto the field again once I’ve been taken out.
Next pitch to the batter.
What! …What’s this? What do I see; Bobby, the kid who just took my place is running with the pitch. He’s trying to steal home!
Will he make it to home-base and become the hero that I was planning on being?
Blame, no!
The batter struck out, the catcher see’s Bobby coming home and tags him out five feet from the plate for a double play. End of inning. The first batter up for the Cleves team in the last inning was their tall, lanky pitcher who was obviously a good hitter too when he takes Rusty’s second pitch deep into the parking lot across the highway for a major-league type home run.
We lose, Cleves/Taylor wins.
I should’a stood in bed.
# # #
When not playing ball I loved working on the neighbors’ farm, any neighbors farm.
One day the farmer that lived in the big white house across the creek from me called my home long before daybreak, (two longs and short was our phone number back then believe it or not). Why he’s calling is to ask me to come to work for him to cut up and haul corn for silage today with him and a bunch of other farmers, this meant that I could go to the tack room of one of his many barns and pick out a machete to my liking and join all those others gathered there in the fog below the large oak tree in front of his house… which I did. When everyone that was coming had gathered there under the big oak tree we rode the double team wagons to the cornfields.
I was in high cotton to be with these guys, these farmers.
Row after row of corn was cut and hauled off to the silo at the end of our road where we off-loaded it onto a mechanical conveyor belt that led to a loud shredder and from there into the huge silo for storage. The corn stalks were at least four feet over my head and I worked right alongside everybody doing everything they did. Then the magic words we all were listening for were finally shouted out about midday, “Dinner time!”
I rode back to my neighbor’s house on an almost full wagon of freshly cut corn with a farmer I didn’t even know existed until that morning. There wasn’t much conversation spoken between us for he didn’t know me either, but I do remember he was nice and had eight kids of his own…the youngest he told me had disease I never heard of before, called polio.
He told me his little boy may never walk again. I remember almost crying when he said that, but couldn’t because we were coming into the yard just then where everyone was and I didn’t want them to see me cry.
I washed up right alongside these men washing the powdery, overworked, light chocolate soil from my hands and arms just like they all did and prepared to feast alongside of them from the two long picnic tables their wives had so beautifully prepared.
What a feast they had made for their men! Unbelievable! There were countless bowls of green beans and yellow and green squash, whipped potatoes and dark brown gravy to top them off with and every color and kind of tomato there ever was. There were several large ceramic platters of pan fried chicken and squab, pork chops and a chilled down wash tub of cantaloupe and blood-red watermelon sections. There were several pitchers of sun brewed ice tea and freshly squeezed lemonade in iced down glasses, and much much more. I won’t even get into the breads and the scrumptious desserts that were there.
“Donnie, come here, son.” The host farmer, my neighbor across the valley in the big white house called after me, taking me quietly to the side with his hand on my shoulder. “Its dinner time now, boy.” he said. “You go on home now and grab a bite to eat and we’ll pick you up by the bridge when we’re through.” He said… and I did.
The next summer I had all but forgotten the slight I had received from my old, stingy neighbor farmer and was once again working by his side in one of his many fields.
“Giddy up, old mule!” the farmer would always holler to his ‘brindle colored’ mules. I never did know or figure out which one of the two he always called, ‘Old mule’, I guess it wasn’t any of my business anyway.
We had just finished off loading a wagon load of hay into the barn and was heading back to the field for another load when I got the notion to wash off the chaff I had collected in the largest pond on his property. I jumped off the wagon and began running down the gently sloping hill heading toward the pond as fast as I could go with the best intention today of diving as far out from the edge as I could… when in my left ear a voice said to me as plain as day, plain as anything…“you will write chains of words everyone will want to read.” Upon hearing that fantastic pronouncement I slid sideways coming to a full stop on the hillside and called back up the hill to the farmer.
“Louie!” I shouted. “Did you hear that? I’m going to write a chain of words that everyone will want to read.” Louie stopped the mules and looked strangely at me then as if I had just grown a second head or something. I turned away from him and walked slowly into the pond thinking to myself as I walked, “that was the dumbest thing I have ever said in my entire life.”
(The voice I heard that day in the field with Louie and the mules said, ‘chains of words’ I believe, meaning plural, but I remember distinctly saying to Louie, ‘a chain of words’, thinking singular.
When I write a poem (and I’ve written over forty that have I’ve published and sold over the years) they are ‘chains’ of words like the voice said… aren’t they?
Thirty one years later my wife Pat our son Steven and I are living in Orange Park, Florida where we spent the day at Vero Beach and were all extremely tired and sunburned. So tired I was that night I believe I went to bed before little Steven did, about ten o’clock.
At exactly midnight I rolled over and faced the digital clock on the dresser, its bold red numerals easily lit a small portion of the room on my side of the bed. My eyes were wide open as if I had slept for many hours. I tried to go back to sleep but sleep wouldn’t come, it was useless. I tossed and turned and turned and tossed but still I couldn’t sleep. I got up and went to the kitchen for a bite (sounds like a lyric from an old rock and roll song here doesn’t it?). I cut up an apple and a chunk of sharp cheddar cheese and placed this snack on a paper plate and went into the living room to quietly watch some television thinking maybe that that would lull me back into a sleeping mode. I needed to sleep and soon because I had to go to work in just a few short hours, com’n.
I laid down on the floor in front of the television and scooched up real close to the set to keep the volume down so as to not disturb my wife or son’s sleep, and then I got heavily interested in the black and white movie that was playing. Black and whites are my favorite kind to watch.
“I Am the thunder in your footsteps.” I heard a voice say in my left ear. Immediately I pulled down from the top of the TV were I had put it the paper plate I had the cheese and apple on a bit earlier.
“Uh, oh!” I thought. “I’m getting another poem. (I was making my living as a writer at the time and thoughts like this were continually bouncing around inside my head.)
I got up to get a pencil or pen and immediately notice that when I got up I couldn’t remember the reason that I had gotten up. That’s weird I thought standing there, but not for me I guess. I did notice though when I got up two ball-point pens scattered there on the coffee table. Back in front of the television once more, I went back to my movie.
“I Am the thunder in your footsteps.” The voice returned saying the same thing I heard before. This time though I pushed off the floor and got as far as my knees when it stopped again. The voice stopped I noticed as I rose higher. This time I grabbed one of the ink pens from the table and the paper plate from the top of the television and laid down flat on my stomach and prepared to write if the voice should start speaking to me for the third time. I was ready for it this time, but guess what? The pen… that miserable pen of mine wouldn’t remain clicked into position so I tossed it over my shoulder and grabbed up the second one I saw, and guess what, it was the same story with this one as well. It wouldn’t stay clicked into position either. Then I remembered that my little son, Steven had been playing with both of these pens before bedtime last night taking the springs out to see what a pen was made of and he forgot,( or more likely just didn’t want too) didn’t replace the springs in either one of them.
I couldn’t throw the second pen away like I had already done with the first one so I gripped it tightly with a closed fist just as the voice returned to me and said;
“I Am the thunder
in your footsteps,
the lightning in your eyes.
I Am the flash
of your mettle,
the Creator of your skies.
I Am who mends
you,
through your sorrows and pain.
I Am the Maker of your
dreams,
the Creator of the rain.
I Am your heartbeat, your
river, your flow,
I Am your God, Jehovah, who loves you so.”
The poem was written in less than a minute and I asked the voice to slow down twice, but of course it didn’t listen to me. The voice I heard so clearly in the field all those years before had returned and fulfilled His promise to the little boy that was me. This was one of the “chains” of words that He said I would write, and the only one of forty I have written that I know in my heart I heard spoken into my left ear.
I thank God I had my ears on to hear His words, not mine.
Acts 9 verse 7; and the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man.
# # #
Chapter Four - Somebody Pushed Me
After a four year stint in the United States Air Force from 1964 to 1968, I got a job in a coal fired power plant called Indiana and Michigan Electric Company.
On my first day at this job I was assigned to go with another worker and grease the fittings of the conveyor belts coming up from the main hopper next to the Ohio River. Just as we arrived at the job site, two local police cars, two Indiana State Police cars and an ambulance roared up to our location and skidded to a stop in the coal. The body of a man missing from Louisville, Kentucky had been found attached by his clothing to one of our company barges. Why they felt they had to skid to a stop the way they did still eludes me today, the man that had been found had been presumed dead for several weeks since that’s when they found his brother who was with him fishing when their little boat capsized. Fortunately one of them had a son with him who made it to shore to tell what happened.
“Welcome to I&M,” my co-worker proclaimed. “It only gets better from here.” That’s when I realized this could be a dangerous place to work and that I had better be on the alert more than I usually am.
Things went along fine for a long while after that inauspicious welcome that day, but several minor incidents of a humorous nature might be worth mentioning here, I believe.
“Follow me,” my co-worker instructed me early that same afternoon just after lunch.
“Where we go’n?” I asked.
“You’ll see, but you gotta keep it a secret. No one’s to know.” Was his reply to me.
I followed my new friend and companion to the elevator shaft of unit four, the newest addition to the large plant, and he pushed the button inside the elevator taking us down to the lowest level.