Stepping Back in Time

Last year on April 22, I hit the big 60, and my wife planned a big family reunion over here on the west side of the state. As you can see from this picture of me and my four siblings taken that day, it was fun. Left to right and horizontal is Kathy, then me, Dave, Paul, and Jim.

This year, Julie planned little get-away to my home town of Port Huron on the east side of the state where all of my siblings live. It was especially nice to be together in Port Huron.  Below is the view from our room at the Double Tree (formerly the Thomas Edison Inn).

On Saturday afternoon, my brother Dave and I did a little sight-seeing. Not of the well-know sites like the Fort Gratiot Lighthouse or the Blue Water Bridge. No, we went to look at a handful of places where our parents and family lived a half-century ago. 

As we passed by the house Dad built and our family lived in from 1959 to 1961, we noticed the current owners working on an addition in the back yard. At first, we just stopped and looked, 

“Let’s go talk to them,” I suggested, and Dave was already opening the car door.

What do two strangers say as they’re walking across an open yard toward the folks who own it? It could have been awkward, but it wasn't. Dave was the first to speak.

“Hi, don’t mind us. We just wanted to say ‘Hi’ and say that our dad built this house. We lived here when we were little kids and  just came by to reminisce a little.”

There was no ice to break. The conversation was immediate and free-flowing. Within moments, the lady of the house invited us inside.

“Excuse the mess. I’m painting,” she laughed.

“Not a problem,” I assured her, “When we lived here the drywall was not yet painted and there was no carpet. It was all new construction and a work in progress in all of Dad's spare time.”

She was so kind to give us a full tour and to listen to our memories. The brick wall was nearly identical to the wall Dad and I built in the house on Sass Road in New Baltimore.

I stepped into what was once my bedroom--the very room from which I stepped in my story about May Day. It is also the room that was the starting point of the piece called “Kept.”  We spent about a half-hour with the most recent owner sharing stories, and I briefly told her about Mister Pete whose little house has been gone for about ten years. I looked out the window that used to frame his little place across the road. It felt strange to be standing there, but she made us feel very much at home.

So to our kind hostess from last Saturday, April 22, 2017 (whose name I’ll not post here): Thank you very much for listening to two strangers talking about a place they once called home.

I told our new friends that I would re-post the following story for May Day. It took place in 1961 in their house and in the side yard where we met them Saturday.

May Day, My Dear. Part I

Originally posted: May, 2010

It was that very time of year

when open meadows hold the hue

of tiny flowers in the grass,

and all along the woodland near

the bloodroot glistens with the dew

as trumpet daffs call all who pass...

to spring.

It was, in fact, the very first day of May, a month the little boy did not yet know by name.

What use has a boy of four in corduroy bib-overalls for names of months or numbered squares upon a page? To children it is only the rhythm of remembered days that mark the passing of time. This day would never be forgotten, but the little boy did not yet know it had a name and number.

Waking to his silent sun-lit room, the little boy rolled from bed and carefully stepped into the crumpled leg holes of the same corduroy overalls he had stepped from at bedtime. His head popped through the same striped shirt he had worn the day before. He did have other pants and shirts, of course, but barring a slip in the mud or jelly spills or wind-shifts in the weather, it was a time when little boys, not yet in school, saw no need for different clothes on different days, and no one seemed to notice until Sunday.

Thinking none of this, the little boy struggled to reach the second shoulder strap of his overalls. It had dropped behind his back until with a grunt and a swing of his shoulders the buckle came within reach. "Gotcha!" he laughed, pulling the wire clip to the slide-snap on the bib.

Getting dressed by himself was so new an achievement that it still made him smile to look at his legs as he double-stepped each tread down the stairs.  Turning into the kitchen, he saw his mother alone and drying dishes from a rack beside the sink.

“There you are. I was just about to come upstairs and say, 'Happy May Day!'”

“Happy what?” he said, rubbing sleep from the corner of his eye.

“Happy May Day! It's May Day, my dear. Today is the first day of May. Yesterday it was April, but starting today it's May. Here, I’ll show you.”

She went to the calendar on the wall beside the refrigerator, pulled out the tack that held it there, and flipped a page over the one of Easter lilies and a cross.

The new picture was a quaint stone house with flowers all along a garden path. Below the picture was a small word above a page of numbers. There were three letters in the word, but they meant nothing to the little boy.

Mothers relish "teachable moments" when they take the time to unveil a simple new fact in hopes that someday a teacher at school will be amazed by how swiftly displays of brilliance follow their child's raised hand. Subconsciously, this hope prompted the boy's mother to take a wooden ruler from the junk drawer and begin a lesson.

“M-A-Y,” his mother spelled, pointing at each letter. “This month is May.”

“So who makes it May? You? You just turn the page and then…”

“No, Honey, I didn’t make it May. I turned the page because today’s the day to do it. It was May before I turned the page.”

“Well, then who makes it May?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“God?” asked the little boy.

“I don't think so. Well, maybe. God made days and nights and the moon, and I think the moon has something to do with months. Maybe not." Her confidence began to fade.  "I'm not sure why we call it May."

"Well, if God didn't make it May, who did?"

May is just a name the whole world calls this month. May is a month. Let's start with that. There are thirty days in each month—except some have thirty-one days and February has only twenty-eight... except in Leap Year when it has twenty-nine.”

The little boy looked lost. "How many years are there?" he asked.

"You're making this harder than it is," she said, wiping crumbs from the table into her hand. "Years are a whole different thing. There are too many years to count. There's all the years that passed and all the years to come. This year is number 1,961, but there are lots more than that."

"How many more?" asked the boy.

"Thousands and thousands more. These pictures and numbers on the wall are called a calendar. Each calendar holds a year. We've  gone through four calendars since you were born. That's why we say you're four years old. When you turn five, you'll start going to school in a month called September, and they'll teach you a poem all about this. But right now, I'm just trying to explain why today is May Day. Let's just stick to months. There are twelve months in a year—like inches on this ruler. See? Twelve months and twelve inches.  May is just one of the inches—except it doesn't measure anything...well, time I guess. It measures time. So... there are thirty days in each month—except, like I said, for the ones with more or less."

The little boy looked more lost than ever.

Weary from one minute of teaching, his mother retired the ruler to the drawer and retied her apron strings. “There's a poem about it," she sighed. "It’ll all make sense to you someday. Just trust me for now. It’s May. Today's May first, and that's why I said, 'Happy May Day.'"

Ready to change the subject, she paused and squinted toward the picture on the calendar. "Isn’t that a pretty cottage? Look at those flowers. I think those are tulips by the path to the porch. So pretty...."

“It’s a very small house," the little boy said, "Too small for a family.”

“Maybe a grandma and grandpa live there.”

“Maybe somebody like Ol’ Pete,” the boy smiled.

“That’s Mister Pete to you, young man, and his house is even smaller than this one.” Then she added without thinking, “...and compared to this cottage, Mister Pete’s place looks more like a shack.”

She turned to look through the far window of the room at a small shape in the distance. It was Mister Pete's little house, which looked completely out of place among the new houses being build around it. She shook her head, and smiled down at her boy. Taking the damp dishrag from the sink, she pressed down a cowlick in his hair and combed it into place as best she could with her fingers.

“There. That looks better. Now let me fix that twist in your strap,” she said, undoing the wire clip he’d worked so hard to fasten.

“Do you want breakfast or lunch?” she asked, and her son looked blankly back at her. “You slept in. The kids have been gone to school for hours. It’s past eleven o’clock— kind of late for breakfast.”

The boy was only slightly more familiar with clocks than calendars, but still he wondered where time went when he slept. He liked to wake up with his family for breakfast, but sometimes they were all gone by the time he came downstairs. The same thing happened when he took naps in the afternoon. Sometimes he was not tired at all and just stared up at the ceiling until he heard his siblings come home from school, but other times he drifted off so deep in sleep that his big sister, a nurturing third grader, had to wake him just in time for supper. Sometimes he fell asleep in the car but woke up in his bed. He never remembered being moved, but often spoke of flying in his dreams. He did not know that his dreams of soaring came when his father carried him to bed. It is a strange feeling to wake up and wonder where you are or what time it is, and had that feeling when his mother said, “…kind of late for breakfast.”

With a puzzled shake of his head he said, “I’ll have a peanut butter and jelly sammich.”

“A sammich?” she mimicked with a smile, grabbing the jars from the cupboard.

The little boy nodded, not knowing he’d left out the “w” in the word. His mother made the sandwich and cut it from corner to corner because she had learned that biting into triangle-shaped halves helped keep the jelly off her children’s cheeks. She took the knife, pressed off a corner of the oozing bread, and popped it in her mouth. This was her trademark on sandwiches, her meager reward for being “chief cook and bottle washer” for a brood of four children born roughly one year apart.

“There’s your sammich,” she said, pouring him a half glass of milk. “Your father called and said he’d be home by noon to work in the garage. Why don’t you play outside until he gets here. I have something you can do for me when you go out."

She ripped open a bag of sugar and poured some in cup. "Take this cup of sugar over to Mrs. Palmer for me. I borrowed it last week. Don’t bring back the cup because that is hers, too. Okay? Can you do that for me?”

"Okay," said the little boy. He drank the milk, and when his mother turned toward the sink, he wiped the white mustache on the inside of his T-shirt. Picking up the second half of sandwich in his right hand, he took the cup of sugar in his left and stepped out the back door.

His mother watched him from the kitchen window as he stopped, pressed the last bit of sandwich in his mouth, put the cup in his right hand, and carefully plodded along.

Through the screen, his mother said, "When you give it to her, be sure to say ‘Happy May Day.’ She’ll like that."

It may have been a cup of sugar in quantity, but what carried it was actually a plastic thermal mug, the inside of which had been pink before it turned a shade of brown from years of holding coffee 'til it cooled. The outside of the mug was clear plastic over burlap. The boy had seen the set of mugs at the Palmer's house when the grown-ups sat around the table talking.He could almost smell the coffee in the air as he stared at the sugar in the cup.

He passed the oak that held the tire swing and held the cup in both hands as he approached the ditch of the road between their house and the Palmer place. It had been a dry warm spring, and the ditches had no water he could see, but he had learned not to step in the soggy bottom that would sometimes wet his shoes, and with a small leap, he was half-way up the other side. He glanced both ways at the paved road, and then crossed the ditch on the other side. Standing there, he remembered something else he had to pass...

... Ol’ Pete’s little shack-of-a-house that sat on a sliver of land along the ditch on the other side. As he walked across the narrow un-mowed yard, the little boy stood to look at the house as if for the first time.
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Continued in Part II below:

© Copyright 2010, Tom Kapanka, Patterns of Ink
"Four in Corduroy" is a short story in three parts. It has been in various draft forms for years. It is based on a true story that happened more than fifty years ago. This is not a picture of Pete's house. His was not so overgrown in the front (as we will see), and his roof was shingled not tin, but it was about this size and looked very much out of place once larger homes were built in the area. About a decade ago, when I was visiting Port Huron, I drove by to take a picture of Pete's house on Atkins Road. It was gone, and a new house was being built behind where the little house stood facing Charmwood Road.

May Day, My Dear: Part II

Continued from Part I...

Only once had the little boy seen Mister Pete up close. Several months before, in the flannel days of fall, he stood beside his father while the two men talked in the very spot where he now stood. It was then he studied the man’s face and knew why the grown-ups called him Ol’ Pete. Most of his hair was gone, and what had not turned loose turned gray before its time. Even grayer were his whiskers. He didn’t have a beard as such but never shaved without a reason. Sparse gray stubble circled his mouth and filled his hollow cheeks. He did not look as old as the little boy's great grandfather, but standing there beside the boy’s father, who was only thirty at the time, Ol’ Pete looked old enough for his name. His voice sounded old, too, like he needed to clear his throat but never bothered to do it.

Actually, Pete was not as old as he looked, but he was a little man whose trousers seemed synched a notch too tight and whose frame barely filled his worn shirts. His was a hard and lonely life, first in the Navy during the war and now as a deckhand in the Merchant Marines on one of the hundreds of freighters that coursed from port to port across the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence Seaway. All of this the father was learning while the little boy, oblivious to most of the conversation studied only details of their faces.

The little boy gently tugged at his father’s hand to remind him he was there, but the men continued to speak of places that had "port" in their name—not like Port Huron but Port of Duluth, Port of Milwaukee, Port of Thunder Bay...names like that. His father told Pete that he had also been in the Navy, but only the Reserves, and soon the conversation lost steam until it sputtered into talk about weather and how it was staying light longer each evening. Eventually, the two men sighed in awkward unison, said 'good night,' and parted ways. The boy's father slung him onto his back and carried his tired son home. 

The boy recalled that conversation as he stood staring at the door of Mister Pete's little house.

There were many things, however, that the boy, his father, and most others did not know about Mister Pete: To begin with, no one seemed to know his whole name. Pete was all the name they needed for a man so seldom seen. He spent about ten months a year on the Great Lakes in cycles of four-months-on-three weeks-off. The weeks off were spent alone there in that little house—no wife, no dog, no friends or guests that anyone had ever seen.

The house was a small one-room structure with a low-peaked roof. In the middle of the front wall was a door with a sash window at each side. To the boy, the drawn curtains of the windows were like sleeping eyes. Such a little place could only be home to a man accustomed to the tight quarters of ships who slept for months on a canvas bunk attached to a steel wall. Such a man has little need for extra space—what is space, after all, but emptiness? The smallness of the house helped hide the fact that it had so little to hold.

When Pete bought the place, ten years before, Atkins Road was just a gravel lane that ran along the southern ridge of the Black River, and the road now called Charmwood was a two-track path that disappeared into a horse pasture. Pete had chosen to live his on-land days in this rural part of Port Huron not for its solitude—though that suited him—but for the fact that he had grown up a few miles from the little house Those woods, and pastures, and the long rolling hill to the river felt as much like home to him as any place on earth.

Atkins Road was paved and wider now. Soon after, the pasture was parceled into lots, the two-track got a name, and one by one new homes changed all the scenery so much that Ol' Pete hardly recognized it each time he came home. But the two biggest changes came when houses sprang up on both sides of his little lot. Mr. Palmer and the boy’s father each purchased an acre of land on which to built their homes with every thought of being neighbors for life. Pete's house was so near the new Palmer place that, had it been made of matching brick, it may have looked like a guest house along side their driveway. But the little house did not match anything. It was out of place and in the way at the same time. So much so that the neighbors often treated the empty house as if  it weren't there. Not so for the little boy. He stared at the empty house whenever he walked past, much as one watches a sleeping dog when walking past the circle path that’s drawn by the compass of his chain.

The little boy resumed his walk with cup in hand and knocked on the side screen door of the Palmer house.

“Well, looky who’s here,” said Mrs. Palmer, followed by a gravelly laugh. “What have you got there?” she added.

“Your cup of sugar,” the boy said shyly, “Mom sent me.”

“She didn’t have to do that,” again came the gravel laugh. She opened and closed the door just long enough to grab the cup.

“Oh, and Happy May Day! That’s today. It’s not April anymore.”

“You are right. I’d let you in but the parakeet is out of the cage and I don't dare open the door. You run along and tell your mother ‘thanks.’”

And with that, Mrs. Palmer turned and bounded up the three steps to her kitchen. From an open screen window she said, “Oh, and Happy May Day to you, too. Say, why don’t you pick your mom some flowers and put ‘em in a May basket.”

The sun on the screen made it impossible to see her face, but the boy waved anyway, then turned and stepped from the driveway to Pete’s narrow yard. It was then the boy saw them for the first time.

The reason he had not seen them moments before was because the idea of picking flowers had not yet been planted in his head. But there they were. Just like in the picture above the word MAY on the wall. Tulips his mother called them. Right there in front of him in a row. He bent down, carefully picked a handful, and continued across Mister Pete's narrow yard.

It was true the tulips were in a row, but what the little boy chose not to see was that the row was in front of the little house on both sides of the door below the sleeping eyes of the windows.

He continued walking, down and up the ditch, across the road, down and up the other ditch, then walking faster as he neared the back door, crossed through the laundry room and up the steps to the kitchen.

“It's May Day, my dear!” the little boy said, holding the bobbling bouquet toward his mother's face.

“Oh, my! Those are beautiful. That was nice of Mrs. Palmer. Did you give her the sugar?”

“Yes but she couldn’t let me in ‘cuz the bird would get out.”

“Let me put these in a vase. Your father’s home—upstairs changing into his work clothes. Why don’t you go surprise him. He asked where you were when he came in.”

The boy sneaked up the stairs but his father was already walking toward him as he reached the top. He scooped his youngest son up in his arms.

“Happy May Day!” said the little boy.

“Happy May Day to you, too, kiddo. How’s yer ol’ straw hat?”

“I haven’t got a straw hat,” the little boy laughed.

It was an exchange the boy and father shared whenever his dad came home with nothing much on his mind. They stepped into the kitchen, just in time to see the flowers being placed on the center of the table.

“Where’dja get the tulips?” the father asked.

“Mrs. Palmer sent them,” she said.

“No she didn’t,” the little boy said, “I picked ‘em for you by myself. Happy May Day.”

“Picked them where?” his mother asked.

“I don’t know. Just picked ‘em.”

The father sat the boy on the edge of the table, still holding him in his outstretched arms and looking in his eyes. “Picked them where, young man?”

Strange how the entire mood of the room, the house and world could be changed so quickly by such a simple question. The boy of four could feel his heart beating behind the bib of his corduroy overalls.

“Picked them where?” his father asked again, standing him on the floor.

“Over by Mister Pete’s house.”

The father walked across the kitchen and dining room to the far window to look at the house, but he could not see the flowers.

“Where by Mister Pete’s house?”

“I don’t know. By the door I think.”

“Did you ask Mister Pete if you could pick 'em?”

The mother began, “He’s never there….”

“Well, he’s there right now,” said the father. “I just saw him step out and look over here. He’s probably wondering who stole his flowers.”

“He didn’t steal them,” whispered the mother in his ear.

“Well, what else do you call taking something from under a man’s nose without asking?”

“Young man, I want you to take these flowers right back to Mister Pete…”

“Honey, don’t,” the wife interrupted, “He’s only four. He didn’t…”

“He’s old enough to know he can’t just take things from someone else’s house.”

“He didn’t take them from a house. They were outside..."

"Outside...inside... It's still the man's house..."

"He didn't know…”

“Well, now he does,” said the father pulling the flowers from the vase and putting them in his son’s hand. The boy began to cry, but his father was unmoved. “Now take these flowers over there to Mister Pete, knock on the door, tell him what you did, and tell him you're sorry.”

“He’s four. I’ll do it,” insisted the mother who was now almost in tears herself.

“No. He picked ‘em, and he can return ‘em. Now go on, young man, I’ll be watching from the window.”

A mere sixty seconds had passed since the little boy said, “Happy May Day," and now there was not a happy eye in the house.

Here we must pause in this scene from more than half a century ago. There are, no doubt, as many different ways to handle moments like these as there are different parents in the world. A thoughtful response is more prudent than a visceral reaction, and many a father wishes he could apply the wisdom of age 60 to his actions at age 30. Readers from one point in history would be wise not to judge too harshly parents of a different time. In mid-century America, the father was considered the head of the home. It was a an era when the gap between right and wrong was never filled with fluff. Self esteem was not bestowed by sparing kids from guilt but by helping them not be guilty.  It was a time when the choice between right and wrong was sometimes as clear as knowing which was the harder thing to do. By that virtue alone right choices were often identified... and all that remained was the doing.

In a tearful daze, the little boy heard the door close behind him and walked slowly past the oak that held the silent swing like a gallows. Each breath he took between sobs sputtered and halted in his heaving chest, but his feet kept moving forward to the road. Down and up the ditch; a glance both ways through teary eyes before crossing; then down and up the ditch on the other side; a few slow steps and there the boy stood at Ol’ Pete’s door. With a half-dozen tulips in his right hand, the left hand reached up and knocked. The soft young knuckles barely made a sound. He changed the flowers to his left hand and knocked again, and this time the sound of his skin against the wood was heard inside the house.

3016-3056
Part III, the conclusion
© Copyright 2010, Tom Kapanka, Patterns of Ink

May Day, My Dear: Part III (conclusion)

Continued from Part II

The knocking at the door sounded first like a mouse in the warrens of the wall, and Pete made a mental note to put fresh cheese on the traps he had emptied the night before. Oddly, he didn't mind that mice continued to find new ways into his snug fortress. He considered it an ongoing game whenever he was there to play. But the second knocking sound, he could tell, was coming from the door, a fact that puzzled him much more than the thought of a mouse.

Opening the door, he saw the crying boy with tulips in his hand.

“Where did you come from?” Pete asked, as he tucked in his undershirt.

“From over there,” the little boy said, pointing with the tulips to his house across the road.

“I thought I’d seen you before. Did you bring me some flowers?”

“No. I didn't bring 'em—I took ‘em. See?” He pointed at the ground.

Pete stepped out his door for a better look at a flower bed he had not tended in years.

He had planted the tulip bulbs beneath both windows the first year he moved into the house, but since that time,  they typically bloomed and withered on the stem while he was out to sea. Seeing them now in the little boy’s hand was the first time he had paid attention to the tulips in years. Even so, his first thoughts about the boy pulling them from place were anything but kind.
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“Can we fix ‘em?” the little boy sniffled.

“Well, lemme see,” said Pete, taking one of the flowers from the little boy's hand. He bent down and tried to stand it up in the soil then caught it when it fell. “That's not gunna work.  I guess there’s no way to unpick a flower is there?”

“I’m sorry, Mister Pete,” the boy cried. “I picked ‘em for my mom, but then my dad got mad, and told me they were yours…”

“Ya say you picked ‘em for your mother?”

“Yes, for May Day. Mrs. Palmer told me to…”

“Mrs. Palmer told you to pick my tulips?” he said scratching his bald head.

“No. Not your tulips. Just flowers. I didn’t know these were…”

“So today’s May Day, eh?” Pete interrupted. “I forgot they even called it that.”

“Me, too,” the little boy agreed. "I didn't even know May was an inch until today, but Mom says this is the first day of it."

"May Day..." Mister Pete said softly. Then repeated it clearly, "May Day."

Mister Pete looked across the road at the boy's house, took a deep breath and said, “Your old man was right, you know?”

“What old man?” he asked.

“Did I say that? I meant… Your father was right. You really can’t go around taking people’s flowers without asking. Daisies in the ditch are one thing, but flowers by a house were likely put there by the folks inside.”

“Did you put these here?” the little boy asked.

“Not those flowers exactly, but yes. Years ago, I planted tulip bulbs there. I don’t know what I was thinking. I'm never here to see ‘em, but they keep coming back each year with or without me.”

“I didn't mean to steal 'em,” the boy sniffled.

Mister Pete winced at the word steal, then shook his head. "Do you know what 'may -day' means on a ship?" he asked. "It's actually French—looks like 'M'aider' with an 'r" at the end."

"My mom said 'May Day, my dear,'" he mumbled.

"Not that kind of 'my dear.' The 'r' is silent. It's pronounced just like May Day.  Know what it means in French? It means 'Help me!' We get the word maid from it. Know what a maid is?"

The boy shook his head "no."

"Well, never mind. Anyway, if we hear 'may-day' over and over on the ship radio, we know somebody's in big trouble and needs help. It's just like S-O-S. Did you know that?"

"No," the boy said again, "but I am in trouble...big trouble." He wiped his nose on the inside of his shirt.
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“Tell you what, boy. Hold these flowers.” Mister Pete dropped to his hands and knees and picked the remaining tulips from under the other window. “Now, step in here for a minute, and we’ll find somethin' to put 'em in.”

Pete looked toward the boy’s house and gave a thumbs up to a vacant window.

The little boy stood with his back against the door jamb and looked around the curious room. To his left was a hat rack draped in shirts and sweaters and a housecoat but no hat. To the right was an old iron bed neatly made. At the foot of the bed was a flat-top trunk that served as a coffee table for a small couch covered in a blanket. In the far corner was an open closet beside a door that blocked the only space not open to the room. The boy assumed that was the bathroom.

In front of the closet was a chair beside a small table, a stove, and an old-timey sink in a white metal cabinet. Above the sink were two cupboards—not cupboards in the modern sense but in the literal sense: they were boards with cups and bowls and plates stacked in plain sight.
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On the top shelf, were empty jelly jars that had been collected one-by-one to serve as drinking glasses. From the far end of the shelf, Mister Pete grabbed an empty coffee can for the tulips, added some water at the sink, and brought them to the boy.

“Now let me put the ones you have with these, and then you can take them all to your mother.”

“I can’t,” said the little boy, “My dad told me to bring these back to you.”

“Tell your dad he was right, boy. These flowers weren’t yours to take... but they are mine to give. I'm giving 'em to you. That's different. I want you to have 'em. Tell him that. Can you see where you're goin'?” he asked, letting the boy out the door.

“I think so,” he said from behind the blooms.“But what if my dad says no?”

“You just tell him ‘Ol’ Pete said..." his voice cracked, "Tell him I said I wish I had a mother to give ‘em to." His voice cracked again. "Tell him that, and he’ll know I mean it. I mean for you to keep 'em.”

The old man gently turned the little boy toward home, and started him on his way. The boy went down and up the ditch, glanced both ways, then crossed to go down and up on the other side. Then he turned back to see Mister Pete still standing by his door.

"Thank you," The boy said. not knowing which grown-up would win.

Mister Pete just waived him on, then nodded again toward the window of the boy's  house, somehow certain this whole scene had been watched from afar.

A few minutes later, a vase of opening tulips graced the kitchen table. The boy's father listened to his son, swallowed hard, and tousled the boy's hair with approval. He glanced at his wife but was at a loss for words. "I'll be in the garage," he said knowing he needed time to think. Things were quiet in the house.

Alone with his mother, the little boy said, "Mom, did you know May Day means you're in trouble? Mister Pete told me that"

"I guess I've heard that in the movies, but I don't think the May 1st  May Day means that."

"I do," said the little boy. "Mr. Pete told me..." he mumbled, staring at the flowers in the vase.

The boy didn't know it at the time, in fact, he did not know it until he was grown, but that day his father slipped out from the garage to return the empty coffee can to his neighbor, who of course, did not expect it back. It was an excuse, really, to go and thank a man he barely knew for adding thoughtfulness to a situation he had handled without a second thought. After all, he reminded Pete, "Doing the wrong thing for the right reason is still wrong."

"True...” the old sailor agreed, “but sometimes it's nice to find a right way to fix a wrong. You did what a Dad's gotta do, and I did what I had to do once I heard your boy say 'May Day.'  Kind of funny ain't it?"

"What the May Day thing?" the father asked.

"No," laughed Pete, "Two Navy guys talking 'bout tulips."



Some time later, a yellow school bus stopped in front of the little boy's house; the double door split open, and his two brothers and sister came running up the gravel driveway. They stopped to talk to their father in the garage, then passed through the kitchen to go upstairs. When they came down in their play clothes, their mother was starting supper on the stove, and their little brother was sitting at the table.

"Can we go outside to play?" asked his brother.

"For an hour or so," the mother replied.

The little boy did not join them. He had not taken his afternoon nap, and his drowsy eyes seemed fixed on the tulips in front of him. He was actually staring past the flowers  to the calendar on the wall. It was not the notion of time he pondered, not the numbers of days in a row, not the letters spelling M-A-Y, and not even the tulips standing tall along the path. What caught his eye was at the end of the path beyond the stone steps. It seemed to him that the cottage door was not closed tight, as if to say "come in," and he wondered again who lived inside.

To a boy of four in corduroy,
it is the rhythms of life that measure time:
the rhythm of lying down and waking up,
of tables being set and cleared,
of Saturday baths and clean-pressedSunday shirts,
and all the down and up of ditches in between..
To a child it is the rhythms
of long-remembered days,
dropping one-by-one
like petals from a vase,
that mark the passing of time.
This had been one such day.

3136-75

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.© Copyright 2010, Tom Kapanka, Patterns of Ink
(The details and dialogue of "Four in Corduroy" are based on a very true story. It was an hour of my life that I would never forget with a character (Mister Pete) whose kindness turned a childhood blunder into a gracious gesture and a vivid contrast between justice and mercy for my father and me. I have no doubt that the next May, Pete and I could have picked Mom another bouquet (had he been home), but four months after this incident, we moved from our new house on Atkins Road in Port Huron to our little house in the suburbs of Detroit. Several years ago, I took my daughters down Atkins Road to show them the first "dream house" my Dad built. I also wanted to show them Ol' Pete's place (and see if it was as I remembered), but the little house was gone. Mrs. Palmer still lived next door, after fifty years. We visited a while, and then I asked her about Mister Pete. She told me he lived there alone and was just as enigmatic the rest of his life. He had passed away a few years before, but the house had just been torn down about a year before we stopped by. I told her this story. She assured me it was as I remembered. (The title phrase "Four in Corduroy" was a descriptive term my mother sometimes used of me when she spoke of the year-and-a-half we lived on Atkins Road I was actually five when we moved, and I began kindergarten at Huron Park Grammar School in Roseville, Michigan.)