Forever

Our house was small by today’s standards. Single car garage, two bedrooms, one bathroom. The long, narrow living room and dining room combination left little walking room. The couch, easy chair, and obligatory coffee table filled one end; a scarred dining table slouched in the other end.

This doubled as the third bedroom when the sleeper sofa unfurled across the pinch of open floor. We moved into 741 N. E. 35^th as I entered the third grade. It was a short walk across the street to Dewey Elementary.

Both parents found jobs at the State Capital. I was an early latch-key kid. I had two hours between ‘school’s out’ and my parent’s ‘quittn’ time.’ I used them riding bikes with my buddies or playing in my back yard. We didn’t have much, but I didn’t want much. Life was remarkably good.

Mom believed in helping at school. She volunteered as Homeroom Mother. She also served as Den Mother when I joined the Boy Scouts. The folks were old fashioned farm stock, traditional in most ways. They invited my school friends’ parents to dinner often, took weekend trips to their hometown three hours away, and made popcorn for TV nights.

They found a church in the neighborhood. I was surprised when we joined the following Sunday. A strict Nazarene raised my dad. Some of Mom’s family were Jehovah’s Witnesses. My parents had not been inside a church since I was born eight years before. Now we were Southern Baptists.

My expectations focused on the promise of more friends. Sadly, those expectations weren’t met. The Sunday School classes for my age were mostly empty. The guy teaching it seemed uninterested and uninformed. He read the lesson from a little book, never asked questions, and dumped me out in the hall so I could run around before Sunday Service.

The life of a third grader in the Capital City of a cattle-and-oilwell state held little excitement outside of model airplanes and firecrackers. The problem began when I started listening to the preacher’s sermons. New to the whole religion thing, I found the Baptist version of “God’s Plan” left more questions than answers. It never occurred to me that there may be some other version. By the time I thought about that possibility, I was ass-deep in the concept of eternal life or eternal damnation.

Having experienced the death of a pet and the death of my grandparents on Mom’s side, I had some imperfect, child-like concept of the duration of life and the permanence of death.

Riding home after church one Sunday, I asked my mom a question about the sermon we had just heard.

“Mom, what does eternal life mean? Does it mean we will never die?”

The only way my mom could answer was the simplest answer.

“Yes, honey. It means we will live forever. We will never die.”

Most kids grow up with some awful memories from their younger years. I had one of those all right, more a reoccurring fear than a specific, awful memory. Those of us born in the post-World War II era, Baby Boomers, came of age in a different world, a kinder world. Certainly, there were dangerous things, and dangerous people, but we just didn’t hear about them as much. We didn’t think about the dangers all the time.

My early reoccurring fear was being left alone for all eternity. I still recall those few times my dad left me in the front seat of the car when he ran into a store or a bank. Looking back my logical adult mind recognizes the reasonableness of his actions. Dad parked in front of the door. After he walked through the door, he could always see me through the front glass. But I couldn't see him.

My overly fertile little-kid’s mind imagined a catastrophic event taking place and my dad never returning to get me. Looking back, I guess I worried I would spend the rest of my days alone in that Roadmaster Buick watching people stroll the sidewalk, shopping, talking, ignoring my cries.

However funny that sounds, it translated into a serious, long-term fear that as an only child, I would be all alone in the big, wide, scary, lonesome world if my parents died. At the time, I couldn’t imagine the various big-kid options that would open for me. I couldn’t conceive of marriage, a loving spouse, happy kids, faithful friends. I went to sleep many nights worried about being alone forever in the world.

But most kids also look back on some great memories. I had those good memories in spades. I had wonderful, loving aunts and uncles, a remarkable grandmother.

Most of them still lived near the old hometown. Several owned farms with horses and cows and farm ponds full of fish. I knew every Friday evening as soon as my folks got off work, we would throw the suitcases in the Buick and start south to Madill. Three hours in the back seat was a small price to pay for a whole Saturday in the saddle riding horses with Uncle Al as we checked the fences on his cattle ranch.

Aunt Bea doted on me since she and Uncle Al had no kids. I always found my favorite breakfast items on the table. Biscuits, gravy, scrambled eggs, and a platter of crisp bacon with orange juice held me until noon most Saturdays. Bea loved a good hamburger on the grill, too so lunch was mostly like a picnic with burgers and chips and gleaming pitchers of iced tea.

Uncle Al didn’t spoil me much, but he did let me drive his tractor around the pasture after we got the horses brushed and the saddles in the tack room. I was a few years away from driving a car, but I could wheel that Farmall around the pasture and dream. That’s what summers are supposed to be for kids. Dreams, played out on the big stage of their imaginations, but imaginations mature, and life teaches lessons.

Some of those lessons are painful. Al and Bea would always be my uncle and aunt, but after Donnie came along, I would no longer be their favorite little boy. Childless for whatever reason, they could only stand a surrogate for so long. So, they adopted a young boy about three years younger than me. At first, I just accepted him as a new playmate, a new friend. By the second summer, I came to realize he had replaced me completely.

We still visited Al and Bea, but it was different. Looking back, I understand why it needed to be different. But that doesn’t erase the feeling of abandonment at the time. Now, Donnie got the best saddle. Donnie got the best horse. Donnie’s favorite breakfast was on the table. Across the big stage of my imagination, my replacement entered stage left. I became a bit player for all time.

I grew up in the infancy of television, the formative years when small black and white screens, sitting on sideboards and ironing boards in small living rooms and dining rooms, brought us crooners and comedians, athletes and actors. Brought us the wide, wide, world of bigger places. Farm communities saw this big world. Men and women, living on the dirt their grandfathers plowed watched parades in New York City and Pasadena, watched Presidents and Prime Ministers make speeches. It was the best of times to grow up and the worst of times to be a kid. Jerry Lee Lewis had one foot on the keyboard. Elvis had the camera pointed above his waist. The times, they were a changin’.

In the overgrown Cowtown of Oklahoma City, I was listening to rock and roll and worrying about the Baptist version of the Almighty. But the more immediate fear was out in the Caribbean Ocean. Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolt was aligning with the scourge of a Communist Eastern Block. The nascent nightly news, delivered by Cronkite, or Huntly and Brinkley, frightened the bejesus out of us.

I had crossed my mom, I had sassed my dad, I had snuck a dreaded “firecracker” into my 5^th grade classroom. All these with the predictable result. Swift and violent in those days of corporal punishment. But I had never been so scared as the day I walked into the dining room where the Daily Oklahoman lay folded on the arm of dad’s chair. Emblazoned across the top half of the front page, in huge, dense black typeface, the morning headline declared, “Nuclear War Is Imminent.”

My young heart froze. I looked around for Dad’s or Mom’s reassurance. I needed their calm smiles or knowing words of wisdom, they were nowhere in sight. I braved this international crisis alone in the glaring sunshine of that morning. But the larger fear, the dread growing in my midnight mind, loomed so much larger than worldwide nuclear war.

My nights were consumed by Baptist theology. Not the prospects of a burning fire and brimstone ‘hell’ for those who transgressed. Nor was I comforted by the streets of gold in my heavenly father’s many mansions. In my pre-pubescent brain, my highly susceptible Id didn’t find guidance in the shall nots  nor comfort in the shalls. I found stark, gripping, mind-numbing terror in the forevers.

For years I lay in my bed and shook long after the TV dissolved into a round target labeled as a ‘Test Pattern” that never informed us of what it was testing. I contemplated eternity. I suffered long, dark nights when I didn’t sleep. Long, dark nights imagining eternity. Time without end.

In grade school still, I had no basis for understanding the idea of time. I darn sure had no basis for understanding the concept of forever. My imagination spent years completely off the rails. For most of those years my nightmares featured me on a tall spire. Not the mansions, not the mountains, not a spiraling stone tower with a windowed room at the pinnated top, but a needle of infinite height and penetrating point. A needle reaching the heavens, above the clouds, above the worlds of man and beast, with me balanced on one foot. With me balanced on a sharp needle point, balanced on eternity.

Looking back to those nights, seeing through the lens of an adequate education, the reading list of my inquisitive mind, the varied experiences of my seven decades, I cannot offer a single rational explanation for the needle other than my young mind had no significant cultural or scientific trappings upon which to anchor my imagined experience of forever. I couldn’t imagine what I would be doing for such an eternity, so I reduced all existence to the nothingness of a single point at the top of a single shaft. I had enough trouble putting me in that never-ending reality. I had no idea what I should bring with me.

Of course, time changes things. My understanding of where I will go, when I will go, if I will go has evolved in the fullness of time, as my parents and grandparents used to say.

The tall, sharp needle no longer scares me. My final destination no longer concerns me. For there is no destination. What I fear now is the lack of a destination. I’m not going anywhere.

Those mostly carefree days of youth, those imagined TV westerns in Uncle Al’s saddle, the exciting times on his tractor, those early teenage days are gone as are the adult years of marriage and parenting. I kept the illusion of not being alone in the world by modern touchstones of family, friends, possessions, activities.

But summer’s languishing warmth wanes. My hair and beard have gone to silver. My strength fails as does memory. All these invite resolve. I must not quit, never surrender to time. I desire eternity. The true nightmare not being at all forever.

Now I sit in the passenger seat of a Subaru and watch my wife cross the sidewalk, enter the front door of a shop. I sit alone watching for her to appear again. I’m transported back to that Roadmaster Buick on Main Street in a small town, watching, waiting, worrying.

Will she disappear leaving me alone in the world? Could this be my forever?

I watch anxiously through the windshield for my world to return, my everything to sit beside me again, to hear her voice, smell her perfume.

It’s the only forever I have now, the only forever I needed or wanted. She is my everything. Through her, I am. Without her, I am not.

Forever.