Chapter 27 "The Empty Spot at the Table"

Dad never told me about how he felt when he and Mom dropped Kathy off at college and began the 700-mile trip to Michigan… but Mom told me how it went. They drove in silence for over an hour. Mom would occasionally try to speak, but each time she had to grab another crumpled hanky from her purse. Then somewhere around Knoxville, before getting on I-75 north, Dad pulled off to the side of the road and just started bawling.

Mom always said she’d never seen him cry like that. I’m trying to think of a time when I saw Dad cry. I’m not saying he never did cry, just saying that I can’t recall a time when he cried openly in front of us kids. (Later on in life he’d get teary eyed when he talked about God and Christ and his faith or when we’d sing “The Old Rugged Cross.” I remember that.) So it was no stretch for Mom to say she’d never seen him cry like that time on the side of the road.

He just pulled out his handkerchief and wept. By then, Mom had two or three wet hankies wadded up in her hands. (This was not before the invention of Kleenex, but it was a time when Dad still considered Kleenex a waste of money. After all, handkerchiefs were reusable, and Kleenex were only good for one blow. For as long as I can remember, Dad had a folded handkerchief in his back pocket and mom had half a dozen crumpled hankies in her purse.)

After that good cry in the car, Mom says Dad didn’t cry again all the way home.

So there you have it: my brother Dave’s account of his tears in the classroom; my story of Jim and I crying under his blanket; and now Mom and Dad crying on the side of a road somewhere in Tennessee. (Who knows, maybe I’ll get Paul and Kathy to tell us their version sometime. I can assure you that both share the soft hearts of the rest of the family.)

Come September, we got back into our routine of getting up, eating breakfast together at the table, Dad reading out loud from “Our Daily Bread,” and heading off to school, learning stuff (I guess), and coming back around the table for supper. The biggest change was that empty spot at the table. There to my left, by the exploded spot Mom had burned into the Formica, was Kathy’s empty seat. We pulled Jimmy’s highchair up closer to help fill the gap.

Every Sunday morning before church, the phone would ring and the nasally voice of a telephone operator was on the other end:

“I have a collect call for a Mr. Jack K____. Do you accept the charges?”

“No, Jack is not here.” Dad would say, and politely hang up. He would then dial the number of the phone booth on Kathy’s dorm hallway. You see, this was way before cell phones and each dorm floor had only two pay phones in little wooden booths by the center stairway. Long distance during the week was about 30 cents a minute, but it was about half that on weekends. “Collect calls” were very expensive, but there is no charge if the call is denied. So each Sunday, Kathy would get in the same booth, attempt a collect call home for Jack, and we declined the call. It was our signal to dial the number in the phone booth.

You might be thinking that this was “cheating” Bell out of a collect call.

Not according to Dad. There really was a Jack K_____, it was his brother (my Uncle Jack), and had he been there when Kathy called, we would have gladly accepted the charges. But he lived in Bad Axe and was almost never with us on Sunday morning. In fact, strangely enough, not once was Uncle Jack ever there when Kathy called. Remember: Dad worked for Bell Telephone, Mom had been a Bell phone operator back in the fifties, they both assured us that “signal calling” was acceptable among the tight-knit world of telephone workers. It was all part of the true meaning of the "Bell System."

Getting Sunday morning calls from Kathy was one of the new patterns in our life.

Weekends were still spent working with Dad out at the property, but following that the unforgettable project of digging the well, I don't recall just what we did out there the rest of that fall and winter. I think Dad tinkered around with some more trees and excavated the rest of the basement for the house, but it would be spring before we poured the foundation.

Tom, you’ve gotta be kidding me. At this rate the house will never be finished. I know, I know… whoever heard of building a house over the course of years rather than months? There was a lot involved that I didn’t know at the time--things that never occurred to me.

As a family, we never talked about money or the lack thereof. I never knew how much my father "made" for a living. I never knew how much the used cars we owned cost. By this time, we all just lived frugally as a family, and I’m not sure that would have changed had Dad somehow become a wealthy man. But what I didn't know until much later in life was the fact that the house was being built at the pace Dad could afford to pay cash for the next phase. He had made it a goal not to borrow a dime for the house and not to use any “credit” for things along the way. Living on his Bell Telephone income alone, it’s a wonder the house got built at all, but it did, and I promise to retell the highlights in the weeks ahead.

Chapter 28, however, is a funny highlight of my 9th grade year that has nothing to do with the house. I'll try to post that next weekend.
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